This is something that I have always wondered about. The original part of this building opened in 1957 and there were many additions between then and 1996 when they built the latest addition. In the 50’s-60’s portions, the Simplex addressable pull stations are mounted on weird metal plates. The plates look to be made out of steel or some other metal. They are rectangular and are around 1ft by 1ft (I’m just estimating). They are painted red.
In areas where they had additions to the school after the 60’s and they removed/relocated pull stations, there are the same metal plates but with no pull stations. This means that whatever was in these places before got removed at some point (probably in the early 80’s when the school got a complete system overhaul with a Cerberus Pyrotronics system), and were part of the original school.
Does anyone know what could have been in these places? I think this school is too new for a pull rod system to have been used.
Unfortunately, the current system (an addressable Simplex 4100U with mostly the 80’s Wheelock/Cerberus Pyrotronics horn/strobes), and this building in general likely will be gone within the next few years. The building is currently still being used for the auditorium, but the one at the new high school should be done in early 2025.
If it gives anyone clues as to what the original system could have been, I discovered some abandoned-in-place Simplex 4208/4207 or similar equipment in an electrical room in a nearby elementary school that was built in the same time period. The current horn/strobes are also surface mounted on top of what appear to be old flush mount trim plates for mechanical horns.
If anyone has any idea what could have originally been in these locations, I would greatly appreciate any information!
Quick Update:
I did manage to find some photos of the building from the final Alumni tour.
Here are all of the ones that I could find that picture FA devices:
These three pictures have the pulls that I’m talking about:
These pictures have notification appliances on the trim plates:
The wall plates behind the 7002T’s are left over from SET-branded FS&S 30-series dual projector horns (there’s one on OSFA’s signaling device page). I have no clue what the ones behind the pull stations are, there may have been a coded system when the school was first built.
what a cool building it is and is sad to see go. I live in Akron, which almost has zero historic schools left–all replaced with cheap looking “shoebox” buildings.
It is a very cool building and it is sad to see it go. The school district wanted to just bring it up to code, but there were a lot of structural issues (part of the building was starting to collapse) and the school was much too small. From a student’s perspective, it is really nice to have a new building that is big enough, safe, and designed for today’s education and technology.
At least they tried a little bit on the new building’s architecture and it is twice the size.
My area in general has done a good job preserving old schools. There are many schools from the first half of the 20th century with no plans to demolish them. The schools that are no longer in service now serve other purposes. They would have done the same thing here if it wasn’t for the extreme structural failures.
There’s a small town west of Akron that still has all of their original school buildings and thankfully does not plan on demolishing them anytime soon.
I’m not sure if you are talking to me or not when you say this. If you are, I have unfortunate news. In the past 10 years, my district updated all of the systems to addressable in every school that was more than a few years old. Most of them got fully addressable Simplex systems.
