Eldridge Park raised roofs before it was cool

Eldridge Park Elementary School celebrates 90th anniversary.

By: Lea Kahn
   Lawrence Township "raised the roof" on Eldridge Park Elementary School 90 years ago.
   To celebrate the milestone, students, teachers and alumni gathered Tuesday morning at the Lawn Park Avenue school to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the raising of its roof. School physical education teacher Frederick Barrett coordinated the event.
   For more than an hour, children listened as speakers explained how the feat was achieved without the use of modern hydraulic equipment and what the school was like when they were students.
   There have been a lot of changes since the Eldridge Park Elementary School was built in 1912, Bouldin Hitchcock, the school district’s director of facilities, told the students who sat quietly on the floor in the multipurpose room.
   "This is all about growing, like you and me," Mr. Hitchcock said. "Lawrence was very small. The moms and dads decided they wanted a school for their children, so they built a two-room schoolhouse."
   Mr. Hitchcock picked up two shoeboxes and placed them side by side on the stage.
   "A couple of years later, the township grew. The little school had to grow. So, they decided to put on two more rooms in 1916," he said, lifting off the roof and placing two more shoeboxes on top of the first boxes.
   Mr. Hitchcock showed the students an enlarged photograph of the Eldridge Park Elementary School that featured workmen standing underneath the raised roof of the building. The roof was resting on pillars.
   Lawrence Township continued to grow, Mr. Hitchcock said, and that’s why another addition was put on the school in 1955. There have been no additions to the school since.
   Eldridge Park Elementary School alumni Pat Colavita, a member of the Mercer County Board of Chosen Freeholders, and Fred Vereen, executive director of the Eggerts Crossing Village affordable housing development, also spoke at the event.
   "During Colonial days, when they were raising the roof, what was it time to do?" Mr. Colavita asked the children. "It was time to celebrate. This is a time for you to celebrate."
   Mr. Colavita, a former Lawrence mayor and former school board member, told the children his aunt was one of the first students when the school officially opened in 1913. His uncle and father also went to the school.
   "Do you see that stage," he asked the kids. "I was on that stage. I was in a play. The stage was in the library, which is in the basement."
   Mr. Vereen told students how he was a member of the last eighth-grade class to graduate from the Eldridge Park School in 1948. The Lawrence Intermediate School and the Lawrence Middle School had not been built at the time.
   He spoke of how he and his seven brothers and sisters attended the school, how his four first cousins and 35 second cousins went there, as did 20 of his nieces and nephews.
   Mr. Vereen shared some stories — including the time a skunk crawled underneath the kindergarten building, which was outside of the main schoolhouse, requiring the janitor to get it out from underneath.
   Mr. Vereen also recalled the time he hauled a baby pig from his home in the Eggerts Crossing neighborhood to school for show-and-tell. The pig squealed all the way to school and all the way home, he said. It even squealed in the classroom, he said.
   Former township historian Robert Immordino also spoke to the children. Although he did not attend the Eldridge Park Elementary School, his two daughters were students.
   "We have watched the Eldridge Park School grow … from a so-called library without bookshelves to a state-of-the-art school library with computers," Mr. Immordino said.
   Mr. Immordino told the children that the 90th anniversary of the raising of the roof is important because it is an unusual educational undertaking and also because it is an equally important construction or engineering event. He asked the children to imagine raising the roof of the building and watching skilled bricklayers laying brick for an additional story.
   "If these walls could talk, what wondrous tales and stories they would tell us," he said. "All of you must write down your stories so that your stories become used when we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Eldridge Park Elementary School in a few years."