Los Angeles's Oldest High School on Its Original Site
4131 S Vermont Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90037
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Public high school — campus not open to the general public outside of school events.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved campus
Equipment
No Photos
Est. 1910 · LAUSD Historic Campus · Streamline Moderne Architecture · Vocational Education History · Notable Alumni
In January 1910, the Los Angeles Board of Education accepted bids to construct what would become Manual Arts High School, intended to relieve overcrowding at Los Angeles High School and Polytechnic High School. Architects Parkinson & Bergstrom designed the original mission-style buildings, rushed to completion through 24-hour construction shifts on a 10-acre parcel that had been a grain field and violet garden surrounded by dirt roads.
The school opened for the fall semester of 1910, though the main administration building was still unfinished. Enrollment climbed from 1,000 students at founding to over 3,100 by 1924 — so many that outdoor tents served as overflow classrooms. The curriculum reflected the era's industrial education movement: automotive, sheet metal, agriculture, theater, arts and crafts, bookkeeping, and evening classes in aeronautics, dressmaking, and electrical construction.
The Long Beach earthquake of 1933 damaged multiple campus buildings. The school was partially razed and rebuilt; architects John and Donald Parkinson — who had redesigned the original campus with their father — produced a streamline moderne replacement campus featuring curved facades and improved natural lighting. This is the campus that stands today.
Notable alumni include filmmaker Frank Capra, WWII aviator Jimmy Doolittle, painter Jackson Pollock, and actor Paul Winfield. Ethel Percy Andrus taught at Manual Arts from 1911 to 1915; she later became California's first female high school principal and founded AARP.
Campus tensions in 1967 erupted when the Black Congress, the NAACP, and local politicians protested Principal Robert Denahy's disciplinary practices. Six weeks of demonstrations resulted in 34 arrests and Denahy's eventual transfer to district headquarters. Subsequent high school openings in the area gradually relieved enrollment pressure; current enrollment is approximately 1,038 students.
Manual Arts remains the oldest Los Angeles Unified School District high school still operating on its original site, adjacent to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the University of Southern California campus.
Sources
The folklore attached to Manual Arts High School centers on a single room: the print shop and its associated darkroom. According to accounts circulating among students, the first print shop teacher at the school spent more than 40 years in that classroom — a tenure covering a substantial portion of the school's history given its 1910 founding. The legend holds that he never truly left.
Students working alone in the darkroom have reported the persistent sensation of being watched from behind. The experience is consistent across accounts: someone is standing just outside the developer trays, in the area near the film-drying racks. When they turn to look, no one is there.
Several witnesses describe a figure visible only in peripheral vision — standing by the darkroom door, stationary, then gone when looked at directly.
The specific teacher referenced in these accounts has not been identified in any available school records or news archives, and the accounts themselves originate from student-submitted folklore compilations rather than documented investigations. Whether the story reflects a genuine unexplained phenomenon or the natural tendency of isolated, dimly lit spaces to produce sensory anomalies is not established.
No paranormal investigators or independent journalists appear to have conducted a formal inquiry at this location.
Notable Entities
View the streamline moderne campus from Vermont Avenue, adjacent to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and USC. The 1933 John and Donald Parkinson redesign is visible from the street. This is an active public high school; the campus is not open to general visitors.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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