Three R's

Three R's. Top of the Town. , The red-brick School ahead and to your left is Alice Deal Junior High, honoring the mathematics teacher and union leader who launched Washington’s first junior high school in 1919 at Seventh and O Streets, NW. Architect Albert Harris’s Colonial design for Deal Junior High represented the finest in modern school construction. From its opening in 1931, Deal’s student body included diplomatic children, giving it an international flavor typical of Washington., On a remnant of old Howard Road behind Alice Deal is the Jesse Reno School, designed by municipal architect Snowden Ashford and opened nearly 30 years before Deal to serve the neighborhood’s African American children. Before Reno opened, they had walked either to a “colored” school at the site of today’s Murch Elementary or to one on Foxhall Road. Reno School served 160 elementary pupils, and offered adult education at night. But between 1928 and the early 1950s, the city razed Reno City, home to most of Tenleytown’s African American families, in order to create a water reservoir, Fort Reno Park, and school campuses. As a result, the “colored” school lost its students and closed. The building survives, however, along with a few fire hydrants amid the lawns of Fort Reno Park and some houses in the 4800 block of 41st Street, as the only visible reminders of Reno City., Woodrow Wilson High School, across Nebraska Avenue opened in 1935, honoring our intellectual 28th president, a past president of Princeton University, and the only U.S. president to have earned a PhD. Princeton’s “tiger” came, too, to serve as Wilson’s athletic mascot. A community swimming pool, long promised to the citizens of Tenleytown, was added in 1978 and rebuilt in 2008.