The Brutalist facade of the abandoned George Wharton Pepper Middle School in Philadelphia, PA
The school, named for Republican Senator George Wharton Pepper, a Philadelphia lawyer considered one of the legends of the Philadelphia bar, was first proposed as part of an educational campus including the new Eastwick High School. It was hoped that both buildings would alleviate overcrowding at Tilden Middle School and Bartram High School. Construction was cut from the budget in 1969 but in 1970 plans moved forward again and the groundbreaking ceremony for Pepper took place.
Designed by architecture firm Caudill Rowlett Scott, a Texas company known for its “lean and clean” public schools and lauded by ArchitectureWeekas “masters of modern practice and construction management”, the Pepper proposal won acclaims from Progressive Architecture magazine and a silver award from the Philadelphia branch of the American Institute of Architects. The Art Commission, the city’s design review board, disagreed: they felt the plan lacked humanity and was too concentrated.
The Pepper School, which was expected to cost $18 million and serve 1500 students along with Eastwick High, was not universally welcomed by the community either: residents worried about their children shuffling schools and busing issues, and shouting matches erupted in meetings. There was also concern that the district was trying to shift Black students to deteriorating neighborhoods while keeping the white students in Eastwick. The projected goal of opening the school in 1973 failed to materialize, in part due to building issues and leaks in the construction. Plans for Eastwick High School were axed, but this necessitated adding a gymnasium, auditorium, central administration, and library to George Wharton Pepper Middle School. The school finally opened in 1976.
George W. Pepper Middle School’s interior is currently about as badly vandalized as any building can get.
Problems with both the construction and location of the school plagued Pepper from the start. In 1981 the school was closed to fix issues with the heating system, and in 1986 the school district pressed a lawsuit against the bonding company, architecture firm, and inspection firm responsible for the school’s construction over defects in the school’s electrical systems, as the electrical contractors were defunct. Alleging shoddy work and extensive code violations that could endanger staff and students including improperly grounded or ungrounded wiring and inadequate circuit breakers, the district asked for $750,000 to repair them.
Over the years other challenges faced the school as well; former Pepper principal Nancy McGinley noted when she transferred to the Abington school district that the differences between the schools was stark. At the George Pepper Middle School, where 85% of the students lived in poverty, classes had over 30 students, and $1,500 more was spent per student in the suburbs than in the Philadelphia School District. Abington had 28 interscholastic teams, Pepper had six. No languages were taught at Pepper. Abington had 14 secretaries and clerks, 15 lunch/hall aides, and 11 instructional aides while Pepper had only 3 clerks, 8 hall/lunch aides, and no instructional aides. The result was that as principal she was unable to address larger concerns and planning: “The ultimate losers were the students who attended a school where academics and teacher support became secondary to daily emergencies or simple organizational functions that could have been carried out by support staff rather than the principal.”
There were also several incidences of violence that made the news; in 2000 a 21-year old man was shot during a basketball game in the gymnasium of the Pepper School, and in 2005 a teacher left the school after reporting that she had been pelted with markers, stones, and books on various occasions by students in the art classes, with little support from administration. Perhaps the most upsetting was an incident in 1983 where a police officer dragged a teacher from her car by her legs after she drove over a fire hose stretched across the parking lot and threw her against the fender of a parked car. The officer was found innocent, but witnesses disputed his allegations that the teacher had hit at and kicked him when he opened her car door after she failed to produce her drivers license and registration fast enough.
Of all the flaws in the school’s planning, none were as severe as its placement. Located two feet below sea level, Pepper sits in a flood zone, and when Hurricane Floyd hit the area in 1999, the damage was severe. Pepper Middle School was flooded by nearly 18 feet of water, which left the basement entirely submerged and the first floor with two feet of flooding. I’d like to note that some more recent articles report the water level at nine feet, although I am going with 18 based on both newspaper accounts from the time of the flood and my own (admittedly unprofessional) estimate of the depth of the basement. The flooding badly damaged the boiler room, cafeteria, and computer labs, and destroyed musical instruments and art equipment, causing over $1 million worth of damage. Even worse, the sewage backed up into the building, necessitating a time-consuming and costly cleanup effort. Nearby teachers at Tilden Middle School worked to prepare coursework packets for the children, although many were uncompleted. Twelve hundred students were eventually bused to nearby schools, which were already overcrowded. The school was closed for a month and the incident earned it the nickname “The Pepper Bowl”.
In the following years the school created a number of programs to benefit its dwindling student population: it created the Pepper Pride garden on the property, and trips were arranged to the nearby John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge. Enrollment numbers were down, however, and a program to gradually decommission the school by closing a grade each year was scrapped in favor of a full closure in 2013. The 413 remaining students were transferred back to Tilden Middle School.
The gym at the George W. Pepper Middle School
I photographed the school five years after its closure in 2018, and the vandalism in the school was nothing short of astonishing. Graffiti covered nearly every surface and cans of spray paint littered the floor. Everything that was glass was shattered, pipes were pulled out of the walls, and filthy pools of water had formed in the concrete floors. I’m not a huge fan of Brutalism, but the school was certainly unique and it was a shame to see a costly public resource left to decay after only 37 short years of usage, or less if you count the times it closed due to maintenance issues. In some ways the graffiti evoked a vision of middle-schoolers run amok, lashing out at a massive, impersonal structure that had never been adequately funded enough to give them the experience they might have had at a suburban school. It’s hard not to think of how the faculty of Pepper would feel seeing the mistreatment, after years of attempting to do the best with the situation they were given and provide a good education despite odds that were stacked against them. Brightly colored murals and inspirational slogans remained, but given the surrounding environment they seemed sad and defeated, mementos of defeat in a battle to bring hope to a school that seemed doomed from the start by underlying issues beyond anyone in the building’s ability to rectify.
There is still disagreement over what should be done with Pepper. Though some residents want to see the area reused as a trade school, one must question if the building’s location and the extensive damage to the interior make that a feasible goal. A 2018 study recommended demolition in favor of a commercial corridor on the spot but issues of flooding would still remain. Other residents want the area used for flood mitigation, not development. Until its fate is decided, the George W. Pepper Middle School remains, contentious until the very end.
