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George Brady School

From National Register of Historic Places Registration, written by Deborah M. Goldstein:

"George Newton Brady, the namesake of Brady School, was a native Detroiter. He was interested in the welfare of boys and young men, and was associated with various charities, including the Michigan Fresh Air Society and the Boy Scout movement. He donated land in Oakland County as a permanent summer camp for scouts. The neighborhood just west of the large stately houses and substantial middle-class abodes of Boston and Chicago Boulevards (now Boston-Edison Historic District) was just beginning to grow when Brady School was built. Streets were unpaved and transportation was meager, with the Clairmount streetcar line not completed until 1922. However, the large apartment buildings under construction on Boston and Chicago Boulevards were built to house the growing families that would justify building Brady School.

Brady School opened its doors to 350 students in November 1921 with thirteen teachers. Prior to its opening, children in the area attended classes in three rented rooms over a drugstore at the corner of Clairmount and Linwood Avenues. Brady was to house kindergarten and grades one through eight, but in March 1922 Hutchins Intermediate opened and grades seven and eight were transferred there. A second unit of Brady was completed in 1924... The new addition added seventeen classrooms, a gymnasium, two playrooms and a lunchroom at a cost of $365,110.00. The expanded building had a capacity for 1320 children in grades kindergarten through six. At around 1937, the population of school children at Brady was approximately 56% Jewish. Mary C. Sullivan was Brady’s first and only principal, retiring January, 1962.

Brady School is the first of what came to be known as Detroit's "Brady Plan" school buildings. Its plan consisted of units that could be built over several years as dictated by necessity. One wing was built first, sometimes in two units, the central unit next, and the opposite wing last. The unit plan became central to the building program of the Detroit Board of Education in this period into the next." Grant, Parker, and Courville were also "Brady Plan" schools, some of which were only built through the first and second units.

In 1961, a five-room kindergarden wing was built on the northeast side of the property. Through the late 1990's and early 2000's enrollment hovered around 500 students, about half of the building's capacity. The school closed in 2007, and has been vacant since.

Brady was designed by the architectural firm of Malcomson & Higginbotham in the style of Collegiate Gothic, featuring Pewabic tilework. The school was nominated for the National Register of Historic Places, however the building has since been scrapped heavily.