The school in which I attended middle school was built in 1929, originally intended as a high school. It was a brick and stone building, built in an architectural style that the internet tells me is called Collegiate Gothic.
At the front of the building are two imposing-looking entrance doors. Carved in the stone above one door are the words "Boys' Entrance". Carved in stone above the other door are the words "Girls' Entrance."
The mystery: the school has always been co-ed. (It's been co-ed throughout living memory, and a search of newspaper archives can find no hint that they ever changed it to co-ed.)
Each front entrance door leads to a stairwell, both of which are identical. You can go up to the second and third floor or down to the first floor. Each stairwell let out in the same hallway, about a classroom length apart. There were no hints inside the building that it had ever been divided into two and then later merged (and the interior of the building was such that it was clear when you were entering one of the wings that had been added later etc., so I doubt they would have removed any sort of dividing wall without leaving evidence.)
The gender segregation of entrances was never enforced within living memory. (We actually used the back doors a lot more often because they were more convenient.) The signs were only still there because they were carved in stone and it's hard to uncarve stone.
But the mystery remains: why have gender segregated entrances leading to the exact same hallways in a co-ed school in the first place?
1 comment:
I've seen those boys/girls entrances in NYC schools. The schools were always co-ed, but I assumed that eons ago, for certain activities, boys and girls were segregated. But I can't come up with an example of why segregated front entrances would be necessary.
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