From the Border Cities Star, July 9, 1929
- Above is a drawing of the Harry E. Guppy School which the Board of Education hopes to start erecting this fall in order to accommodate the increasing public school attendance in Windsor. The building, plans for which were drawn by Pennington & Boyde, will cost about $300,000 and will have 20 rooms. Under the rotary system of teaching it will provide space for 1,200 children, whereas ordinarily such a school would only hold 800.
It is to be erected at the corner of Highland Aveune and Tecumseh Road where the present Tecumseh Road Bungalow School stands.
Left us hanging on this one, didn’t cha. Had to go on Google maps/street view to see if there is in fact a school on this corner, or if this is part of “Unbuilt Windsor”. I drive by often, but never noticed Highland Ave.
Sorry! Part of today’s Catholic Central.
Looks like it would be the current Catholic central , aka Commerce , looks like everything line up except for the roof.
I don’t see how that building would have fit the site. At any rate some serious chopping went on between design and construction.
what happened to those nice front windows? central looks like an empty shell compared to this beaut, any history?
Speaking of it, those windows are missing from what I remember.. It’s just a plain brick wall.. what happened?
This is definitely the current Catholic central. My grandfather’s sister went to Guppy for elementary school in the 1940s. I’m not sure of the timeline after.
Set to be built in the fall of 1929? They must have cheeped out because of the stock market crash?
Nope. The school board’s infinite wisdom was to replace the large windows with brick in order to save heating costs. They did the same to my grade school St. Genevieve, in approx. 1986. The windows were mostly original but with proper glazing techniques and storm windows put over the openings they would work jsut as good as double-paned glass.
I don’t believe the roof line was ever built like the rendering above.
The Catholic board must have had the front auditorium windows bricked in. The windows were still there when I attended Commerce in the ’70’s. Don’t know about that roof over the auditorium, but always found it strange that while the roof over the corner classrooms leaked badly, the auditorium was fine. Maybe because of that “former” roof?
So who was Harry Guppy? I’m not familiar with that name.
JB, have a look at this for info: http://www.historicplaces.ca/en/rep-reg/place-lieu.aspx?id=15203
In the ’50’s, guys who wanted to take a shop class at Kennedy would walk over to Guppy and take their class there. Guys more serious about shop and trades went to W. D. Lowe. Guppy ceased to be an elementary school by 1960 and was renamed High School of Commerce, and females attended there to learn secretarial arts. I left Windsor in 1969, so don’t know what happened to the former Guppy/Commerce school after that. If you erased the fancy central portion and spired roof of the orginal plan and squeezed the left and right wings together, you’d have a pretty good idea of what Guppy looked like in the ’50’s.
My grandfather’s uncle, John Wear (who was an alderman when Windsor became a city in the 1890s) was married to Harry Guppy’s sister, Annie, and worked as a salesman for him during the 1920s. My dad can remember visiting ‘aunt Annie’ as a boy (1940s) and she would talk about the old days in Windsor. The Guppy house on Victoria Ave. at Pine St. still stands. I believe he made his money in the wholesale grocery business (the Red and White Chain). He was Chairman of the Board of Education.
My late sister was a teacher at Harry Guppy from 1956 – 1959 and she loved it. I’m not so
sure she would feel the same teaching today, however.
What’s this I hear about the current Catholic Central being demolished for a brand new high school at another location?
That goes along with the thinking of the seperate board, their the onlyone in the province running a deficet, shrinking enrollment, laying off teaching staff and caretakers, but adding more adminastraters a high salaries. So why not try to get money out of the province for a new building that may or not be needed.
As student enrollment shrinks, the adminastration growes, and libraries close to be replaced by twentyfirst century electronics, that idea quickly disappeard with the new technacle advisor, remember Al from the library board.
Possibly what we need is a new slate of trustees that do not rubberstamp the admiasration.
Harry Guppy and my maternal grandfather, Caleb J. Wall, were partners in a wholesale grocery enterprise called Wall and Guppy, Ltd. back in the 1920’s
My dad was a science teacher there.
I graduated from Harry E. Guppy High School of Commerce in June of 1963 with High School Graduation with a Special Secretarial Degree. My name at that time was R. Swan….