Sixth Avenue School

This location is a part of our Pine Bluff series, The City Left Behind. Above you will find a trailer for the series. This location can be found in Episode Two The City Left Behind: Disappearing Children of Pine Bluff. Click here to view the playlists and subscribe to keep up with each episode!

Original Sixth Avenue School 1870-~1920

A lot of people get confused by the storied past of Sixth Avenue and its schools. All hold the same name but actually have three different buildings. The first school was built in 1870 and as you can see in the picture above was ahead of its time for architecture, surely a building that was grieved by the community when lost.

New Sixth Avenue School 1925 Addition 1948

For reasons unknown at this time the building was demolished and replaced with a rather simple building in comparison in 1925.

As the decades went by it and the generations passed through it, the entire community around the school and even the world itself completely changed, transforming again and again until it hardly resembled what the school had originally known at all and yet through it all the school remained, ever faithful to its charge and ever vigilant to its duties.  Technology changed and completely transformed how the school went about its work, yet its commitment to that work remained steadfast and unwavering.  The parents of students returned to the same school that they had attended to drop the children off so that they too might learn.  Grandparents enjoyed sharing enjoyable stories and cherished memories of when they walked the same hallways and corridors as their children.

As a reflection of this growth, a new large addition was added to the school in 1948. This became the face of the building and what the school was known to the public as.

2014 Demolition

But nothing lasts forever and even the most cherished and beloved institutions eventually reach the end of their usefulness.  And as powerful and as driving a force as sentiment and memory can be, sometimes there simply comes a point where the cold hard economic truths of a situation can no longer be avoided or disregarded.

Eventually, new schools must be built to replace the old ones and the mechanism and the means to maintain both simply aren’t there, so difficult decisions must be made.  The day comes when the students leaving the school building are the last ones that will ever leave it.  The time passes when the teachers close out and shut down their rooms at the end of the school year with the knowledge that those rooms will never be reopened.

Playgrounds and schoolyards stand empty after generations of play and laughter.  The last class of students through the school and the final set of teachers to work within it leave their mark upon the now-empty shell of the old school building.  Books and bulletin boards, desks and lockers, graded papers and drawings remain behind for a while, providing a temporary testimony to the type of facility that the structure once housed and then that too becomes nothing more than a memory as the demolition crew moves in with the goal of freeing up the land for further redevelopment as the community itself prepares to move onward into an ever-changing future.

Across town a new school building is constructed, it’s doors open for the first time, it’s initial set of teachers prepare their rooms, the very first round of students happily and excitedly March into its halls, and the entire process starts over anew as the cherished memory of the old school continues to live on and abide in the hearts of all those children that attended it.

The Sixth Avenue School was demolished around 2011 and its pile of rubble still remained on the site until 2014. The building right next to it, the First Christian Church of Pine Bluff also became abandoned. It was burned down and demolished on August 11, 2024.

Gallery Below of Sixth Avenue School

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