Dorchester Illustration no. 2393 Christopher Gibson School
Designed in 1893 and constructed by 1894, the Francis A. Brooks Grammar School was constructed opposite the end of Morse Street on the section of Bowdoin Avenue located northwest of the railroad tracks at Mount Bowdoin. The design for the school by city architect Edward March Wheelwright was shown in the American Architect and Building News, December 30, 1893. The completed school was shown in the magazine in the January 4, 1908, issue with the name Christopher Gibson School.
The name change occurred at least ten years earlier in honor of Christopher Gibson, one of Dorchester’s early benefactors. The Gibson name had been applied earlier to a school built in the 1850s on School Street. Gibson Street and Gibson Field were also named for Gibson, who was a 17th century soap boiler.
In 1872 the N. Y. and N. E. Railroad had laid down tracks that cut Bowdon Avenue into two segments. This segment of the street was sometimes called Little Bowdoin Avenue or North Bowdoin Avenue, then between 1910 and 1918 it was renamed Ronald Street.
The lower photo by Ollie Noonan is from 1958 and shows the back side of the building as the children line up to enter the boys’ entrance. Jonathan Kozol was a teacher at the school when he wrote Death At An Early Age as an indictment of the Boston Public Schools.
The building was demolished in 1975 after a fire. The city-owned site is now being called 16 Ronald Street, and in 2016 the city approved a design submitted by Hearth, Inc., to build a new four-story building including 52 one-bedroom affordable senior housing units and 2 studios. I don’t know if the project has gone any further than the approval.