Despite its 1880s origin, Fifth Street School doesn’t qualify as the first school in San Pedro. Early settler Mary Sanford Lindskow was in charge of educating 19 students in her home at Fifth St. and Harbor Blvd. in the early 1880s. She was effectively the community’s first school principal as well as teacher.
For a 1938 special section of the San Pedro News Pilot, Lindskow’s son, George, presented a certificate of merit that he earned in 1883 from the school’s teacher, one “A. Wheeler,” after the school had moved to a larger one-room building at Timms Landing.
The San Pedro community grew quickly during the 1880s, and its residents knew that larger school facilities were a must. The then-local board of education (it would later merge with LAUSD) purchased a parcel of land at the corner of Fifth and Centre streets in the heart of the new town in September 1882 for the express purpose of building a new school.
A one-room school building was erected there in 1883. This “little red schoolhouse” structure became the first to be built specifically for use as a school in San Pedro. (Unfortunately, no pictures of the original one-room school seem to have survived.)
But the number of students continued to rise, so that building was moved to the rear of the lot, and work on a larger, more complete four-room building to replace it began in 1884. It opened to students in 1885. Its first four graduates: Ina Barton, George Simmie, May Culley and Harold MacDonald.
Fifth Street School would be enlarged over the years, and, by 1916, was accommodating about 280 students, according to Jessie Wickersham, who had been appointed its principal in 1907.
The time again had come for a larger school. A unique three-story structure was planned, to be built around a hill on the property. The brick building would be one story high on Fifth St., two stories along Centre St., and three stories on Sixth St.
The much larger school had more than sixty rooms, including an auditorium and a gymnasium in addition to many more classrooms. It cost $105,000 to construct. Architect Joseph Bell de Remer of Los Angeles designed it, with Howard E. Slack of the Cresmer Manufacturing Company in charge of construction.
The distinctive school was hailed as one of the area’s most modern and innovative, right down to the then-newfangled motion picture projector installed in its auditorium. The 500-seat room quickly became an important community meeting place.
Rapid growth in San Pedro’s downtown commercial area during the 1920s boom years would spell the demise of Fifth Street School after only a decade. Parents and education officials expressed concern that the rise in traffic in the community’s retail sector where the school was located posed a danger to its students, and street noise made teaching difficult.
The decision was made in 1927 to close the school, and transfer its students to the new Cabrillo Avenue School, which had just been built almost a mile away in a quieter residential neighborhood.
Principal Wickersham was named principal of the new school, and a possibly apocryphal story was recounted in the News Pilot about her leading some of her 644 students on a walk from the old Fifth Street School to the Cabrillo classrooms in the spring of 1927.
In any case, the one-time educational showplace had been declared obsolete. After more than a year of attempting to sell the empty building, the decision was made to raze it, and sell the land after dividing it into parcels. Demolition took place in September 1928.
The land passed through many hands over the ensuing decades, but, as far as we can tell, it remained vacant for the next 40 years.
During World War II, it was proposed as a military site but never used as such. In 1945, it was leased for the possible construction of a two-story military maritime office building, which never was built. In August 1945, after the war ended, a syndicate of businessmen purchased the property for $54,000 “for commercial development” according to the News Pilot. It never happened.
Finally, the County Board of Supervisors gave the go-ahead in 1964 for the construction of a county courts building on the site. Ground was broken for the two-story structure in July 1967, and it was dedicated on Feb. 28, 1969.
It operated for 45 years, until county budget cuts resulted in the closing of the courts building in June 2014. The building has sat vacant ever since.
In January 2021, the supervisors approved a proposal by development firm Genton Cockrum Partners to build an eight-story mixed housing-retail development on the parcel at 505 S. Centre St., where Fifth Street School had stood 100 years earlier.
The groundbreaking for San Pedro’s long-awaited plan to replace its shuttered courthouse with a 300-unit apartment building atop a ground-floor retail space is expected to take place early in 2022.
Sources:
Daily Breeze archives.
Los Angeles Times archives.
San Pedro: A Pictorial History, by Henry P. Silka, San Pedro Bay Historical Society, 1993.
San Pedro News Pilot archives.
