The Building
By Andrew Johnson
Mary Gage Peterson Elementary School opened on Christiana Avenue in October of 1925. Prior to its opening, children in the area had been assigned to portable school buildings at different locations. One student, Marie Carlson, remembers walking from the portable buildings along St. Louis Avenue over to the new building when it opened. Another student, Bernice Brandel, recalls having attended school on Ainslie Avenue before being enrolled at Peterson in 1926. You can read their letters at the bottom of this page.
The Chicago Tribune reported in December 1946 that a "six room addition, costing about $220,000, has been recommended for Peterson." Superintendent of Schools George Cassell said the addition was necessary because student enrollment had approached 1,100. "Two basement areas in the present school, originally intended as a lunchroom and a shower room, are being used as classrooms." The southern wing opened in 1948.
As the student population grew, no further expansion took place for more than 60 years. In 2009, a northern addition opened with a full cafeteria, several classrooms, a multi-purpose space, an elevator, and a green roof.
But between the 1940s and the early 2000s, as we explain below, Peterson students went to school all over the neighborhood --- wherever they could find room!
The 1925 opening of Peterson School coincided with a housing and population boom in the expanding North Park neighborhood, and the school became crowded almost as soon as it opened. Indeed, the first 30 years of the school's history saw the new building unable to keep up with enrollment demand, with numerous portable buildings placed not only on the Peterson grounds but also at other schools as "branches."
In 1929, the Peterson PTA protested loudly enough that their demand for more space made the Chicago Tribune. According to a 1967 retrospective in the Tribune, two portable buildings had even been placed as a Peterson branch at the Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium during the 1940s. Seventeen years after the PTA's public demand, they would finally get their wish when construction began on the southern edition in 1946.
Just four years after completion, however, student enrollment already exceeded available classroom space. According to a Chicago Tribune article from July 27, 1954, a branch of Peterson School opened in 1952 at 6206 N. Hamlin. This became known as the "Solomon Branch" in 1953, and it housed 365 students through the fourth grade. It transformed into Hannah Solomon Elementary School in 1955, with 10 more classrooms and space for 500 additional students.
A 12-room annex had also opened at nearby Von Steuben High School in 1952, and this situation continued until 1958 when students in the 7th and 8th grades officially became Von Steuben students. Only in 1963 did these grades return to Peterson and to the building on Christiana.
In the early 2000s, Peterson teachers can even recall teaching Kindergarten in storefronts on Bryn Mawr Avenue.