Schools: Public: Rosehill / Rose Hill

The Rose Hill (or Rosehill) grammar school was the first public school located within the boundaries of present-day Edgewater.  It was located on the west side of Clark St between Elmdale/Peterson and Glenlake but closer to Elmdale/Peterson but not on the corner. (A permit for a renovation/expansion dated July 2, 1910, shows the address as 6020-6024.) The Chicago fire station presently occupies the site. (Click here to view an outline of the building on the 1905 Sanborn Fire Insurance map. It is in the lower right corner of the map.)

The Chicago Board of Education records indicate that the building was built in 1883 when the area was part of the Village of Lake View and the Township of Lake View.  (The area was annexed to the City of Chicago in July 1889, after which time the school came under the jurisdiction of the Chicago Board of Education.)  A. T. Andreas in his History of Cook County gives the year it was built as 1882 and indicates it was a brick building.

Another account, allegedly based on information apparently found on the cornerstone, indicates that the building was built in 1889, the architect was F. B.Townsend; the contractors were Peter Kinn and Mike Winandy (both local), and the school directors were L. Baer, N.H. Kransz, and N. Hansen (also local gentlemen).  However, the fact that the school appears on the 1887 Rascher fire insurance map contradicts the 1889 date.

The school operated until the opening of the Stephen K. Hayt school which was built to replace it because of considerable overcrowding. A 1905 Chicago Board of Education report on all schools indicated that the Rosehill School had 289 seats but 427 students, of which 182 were in rented rooms.  The Hayt School opened in 1906.  The Rose Hill school building remained vacant until September 2010 when it opened as a branch of Lake View High School.  To accommodate the high school students the building was given a partial rehab, and a one-story addition was built that housed two large classrooms.  The building continued to operate as high school until February 1913, when the students vacated the building and marched to the new Senn High School.

According to a 1927-1928 manuscript the school building was still standing at that time. A handwritten postscript to a document in the Chicago Board of Education Archives’ folder on Rosehill indicates that the building last use as a school was a "parental school for girls" and that it closed January 8,1929, and that after a fire damaged the building it was ordered demolished in 1931. A permit to wreck the building was issued June 25, 1932.

Unfortunately, no photos of the building have emerged. However, the school is shown faintly in the far background of a photo in the archives of the Edgewater Historical Society taken in 1925.

A T. Andreas indicates that the principal was a Mr. Williams (this in 1884); a Chicago Board of Education 1900 report indicates that the principal was E. L. Kletzing, who would become the first principal of the new Hayt School.