Cooley School

The architect of Cooley School's 1912 enlargement was one of the busiest designers of Houston's public buildings around 1900. Olle J. Lorehn drew Fire Stations No. 7 and No. 9 in 1899, the old Central Fire Station and the Palace Hotel in 1903, the 1911 James Bute Paint Company warehouse now called Dakota Lofts, and Sacred Heart Co-Cathedral on Pierce Street, built the same year as Cooley's expansion. City preservation staff credit him, on style alone, with the 1910 fire station on Sampson Street. Like No. 9 and the Central station, his Cooley building is gone.

What the plaque says

Cooley School Soon after Houston Heights (The Heights) was founded in 1891, the new neighborhood's leaders turned their sights to providing schools for the children of the area. Community leaders Daniel Denton Cooley (1850-1933), affectionately known as the "Father of Houston Heights," and Helen Grace Winfield Cooley (1860-1916) believed in education's importance and financed the construction of The Heights' first school. Cooley School opened in the fall of 1894 as a one-room school with an unfinished upstairs room, which was completed in 1896. Due to The Heights' remarkable growth, Cooley school was expanded to a six-room school in 1906 and to a sixteen-room school in 1912. Olle J. Lorehn (1864-1939), a prominent Houston architect who designed Houston's first skyscraper and first apartment building, designed the 1912 expansion, enveloping the earlier construction in the new Georgian-style structure. Cooley School began as a common school in County School District No. 25. In 1898, the municipality of Houston Heights and its Independent School District took charge of the school. Eventually, the financial needs of the several Heights schools became too pressing for the community, leading to the consolidation of Houston Heights with the City of Houston in 1918; Cooley and the other Heights schools then became part of the Houston Independent School District (HISD). The 1912 school building was destroyed by fire in 1961. The school was rebuilt and opened the next year. Cooley School continued to operate as an elementary school until 1980, when it became an HISD administrative building. In 2010, the property was sold for residential development. (2013)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 3.3 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Rothko Chapel — 4.4 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• The Menil Collection — 4.4 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 4.7 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• Reagan Masonic Lodge No. 1037 A. F. & A. M. — 0.2 mi
• St. Andrew's Episcopal Church — 0.2 mi
• Daniel Denton Cooley — 0.3 mi
• Heights Church of Christ — 0.3 mi