Three Rs Chesapeake Street, nebraska avenue, and 38th street nw
the red-brick alice deal Junior High School honors 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, which opened in 1904 to serve the neighborhood’s African American children. Previously they had walked either to a “colored” school at the site of today’s Murch Elementary or to one on Foxhall Road. Between 1928 and the early 1950s, however, 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, Reno 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 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 pool, long promised to the citizens of Tenleytown, was added in 1978 and rebuilt in 2008.
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