Then & Now: Old Freeland Street School, Worcester
WORCESTER – This building, the former Freeland Street School, is one of many turn-of-the-century schoolhouses in the city still standing.
Built in 1885, the school for most of the 20th century was a neighborhood elementary school, located on the street of the same name, at the corner of Lowell Street. And despite being deemed “obsolete and substandard” by the state by the end of the 1950s, the school ended up having decades left.
On one hand, the school was frequently the target of replacement plans – in the 1960s, for example, school officials had planned to combine it with the old Canterbury Street School. And even by the mid-20th century, Freeland Street already had a reputation for “creaking floors and (an) antique heating system” and “broken windows and broken plaster,” as the Telegram put it at the time.