I thought I would look back to try to find the story behind how the school and community centre came to be oriented this way.
Background
Born in Scotland, he trained at the University of Edinburgh and came to Winnipeg in 1913. After serving in the war, he became the head of Architecture and Mechanical Drafting at Kelvin High School. In 1929, the school board appointed him as its Architect and Commissioner of Public Schools, a post he held until his retirement in 1958.
Early in his career, Martin oversaw a long period of schools bursting at the seams with new ones unable to be built due to the financial and building material restrictions of the Depression and Second World War. Some schools were renovated or expanded, but according to the WSD 150 history book, no new schools opened between 1932 and 1947.
The School
June 13, 1946, Winnipeg Tribune
At the end of the Second World War, the school board wanted to be ready to build at least six new schools as soon as the local labour market and construction material supply chain got back to normal.
For the four elementary schools it needed, Martin created a cookie cutter-design (above) that could be used for all of them. The initial design was a more elaborate two-storey structure, but when the school board priced out the construction cost, it found it was prohibitive.
Martin went back to the drawing board to create a more cost-effective design. The new elementary schools would be linear, single-storey, and constructed of red brick with limestone trim. The most notable design feature was a large limestone tower above the front entrance with the school's name inscribed on it.
Schools built to this design were: River Heights School (opened in 1948); Weston School (opened in 1948); Inkster School (opened in 1949); and Sargent Park School (opened in 1949). The River Heights variant would contain ten classrooms with a gymnasium/auditorium. Curiously, it is the only one to have two "entrance towers".
In spring 1947, the $365,000 construction tender for the River Heights school was awarded to the Peter Leitch Construction Co. and work was soon underway.
The Community Centre
A simple explanation for the odd orientation of the school is that it was built first and the community centre was dropped in front of it years later, thus eliminating an early access road or front parking area. This isn't the case, though.
The city decided to get into the recreation business after the Second World War. To this point in time, recreation activities were a patchwork of what various churches, groups like the YMCA, and private athletic clubs offered.
In May 1946, the city hired Charles Barbour of Montreal to be its recreation director. One of his first tasks was to create a city-wide network of publicly funded, community-run "community clubs" that would offer indoor and outdoor activities for all ages throughout the year.
For the River Heights club, the same block of land set aside for school board and city buildings was chosen as the site for the city-funded recreation centre.
The top drawing (above) is from February 1947 and shows the proposed club and school footprint with no provision for any road or parking area out front. The lower drawing shows a 1948 representation of the actual school outline (using the new linear design) and an expansion of the club's proposed footprint that further isolated the front of the school from direct access.
(Note: The maps show "Haskins Avenue", which was merged into Grosvenor Avenue in 1959. "Jackson Avenue" was merged into Corydon Avenue in 1950.)
Winnipeg School Division 150 History Book
The plans for the community club were released just months before the tender for the school's construction was issued. At that point, there was little the school division could do without spending a great deal of time and money on a redesign. (I could find no mention in either daily newspaper of the school board complaining about the footprint of the club.)
Work began on the community club site in May 1947, and it was operating in some form by the summer. In September 1947, the construction tender was issued for the expansion (seen in the 1948 newspaper image) and that was open by spring 1948.
River Heights School opened in two stages. Some classes were moved to the completed section in April 1948. The entire school was ready for occupancy by the time students returned in September.
As with most schools built immediately after the war, it wasn't long before a series of expansions began.
The two-storey expansion near Grosvenor with the side exit was built in 1954, and the staff parking lot was moved to the rear of it.
Other expansions came in 1952 and 1968, as noted above. The latter consisted of a library and a theatre for what was by then a junior high school.
Aside from River Heights School, the other anomaly is Sargent Park School as it also does not face a street, but rather a sports ground. There are two major differences, though.
Sargent Park Sports Park was one of the few city-run recreation sites in the city. Work began on it in 1913, and within a couple of years it boasted a clubhouse, track and field facilities, lawn bowling greens, baseball diamonds, and other sports fields. Hockey, skating, and speed skating were its winter sports offerings. A permanent outdoor pool was added in 1932.
By the time Sargent Park School was built in 1948, the school board knew what was on the land west of it and chose to face the school that way. One thing that Sargent Park School does have compared to River Heights School, is a small parking lot that leads up to its "front" door with the entrance tower.
Whether this was the original intention for River Heights School, to include a parking lot out front, until the community club plan stamped that out, is unclear.
River Heights School followed the baby boom generation. It was an elementary school until 1954, then traded students with Robert H. Smith School to become a Junior High.
In 1975, it was renamed Ecole River Heights School when it became one of the first schools in Western Canada to offer a French immersion program.
Today, the school has roughly 450 students in grades seven and eight.
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