he south side of the city of Elmira had been preparing to explode in terms of industry and population for nearly 30 years before that boom led to the opening of Southside High School in 1924. The first steps involved simple transportation: in 1894, the City Council decided to add two new bridges – one at Walnut St. and the other at Madison Avenue, thus completing the roadways that gave Elmirans easy access from one side of the Chemung River to another.

The 1890s also saw the creation of electric trolley systems in Elmira. Rival private lines took passengers across the river at Main and Lake Streets and railroad bridges further east. The trolley lines spread like spider webs through the city’s Southside, many subsidized by real estate developers with an eye to selling the new houses they planned to build.

But, it took more than bridges and trolleys to explain the south side’s expansion. The more basic reasons were simply economic – the industrial plants that began to spring up south of the river less than 20 years after the close of the Civil War and which multiplied for the next four decades. F.M. Howell’s box plant was a pioneering operation, opening for business in 1883 at the intersection of Maple and Pennsylvania Avenues.

A dozen years later came Hygeia Refrigeration in 1896. And then came American LaFrance and the enormous Willys-Morrow Plant. All of these manufacturers were in a perfect position to expand and profit from World War I, and in the years after the war, other factories moved in, beginning with Kennedy Valve in 1921.

The factories boomed, and more and more of their workers bought or built houses south of the river, giving up those long, crowded trolley rides over the Chemung River bridges. But the growing number of teenage schoolchildren south of the river still had to find a way to get across the Chemung and then north to the Elmira Free Academy,

When the new “EFA” building (now the Ernie Davis School) opened in 1913, no one imagined it would prove inadequate in terms of space in a half dozen years.. By 1920, however, the Academy was holding double shifts to accommodate all of its registered students. The city faced the facts, and planning began for a high school south of the river.

The new school building designed by the local firm of Pierce & Bickford would represent the latest in school design and facilities. The structure at the intersection of Main St. and Pennsylvania Avenue cost more than half a million dollars and was one of the first junior-senior high schools in the state, accommodating grades six through nine and nine through twelve. It also provided students with the first comprehensive vocational and commercial programs in the area. There were even plans for “model apartments” in the neighborhood where home economics students could learn the latest in domestic science.

The school came none too soon. By the fall of 1923, 7,000 children attended Elmira’s public schools, and more than 900 adults thronged to the evening classes provided by the Board of Education. In the year before Southside High School opened, registration increased by 300.

Parents, children, and teachers watched anxiously as construction progressed. When excavation touched on a lively underground stream, an old wood-burning LaFrance pumper was hauled over to keep the water under control. Hard as the crews worked, the pressure for classroom space mounted faster.

The situation was so critical that classes began at Southside in January 1924, while construction was still under way. The front of the building was covered with scaffolding, and students and teachers could use only the north and south entrances. The cafeteria and vocational classrooms wouldn’t be ready for several months, but at least students from Maple Avenue to Pine City could find a classroom and a teacher.

In these hardy days, there were no school buses. Every student was responsible for finding his or her own way to class. Arthamese Bowen Denny recalled the challenge of her first day at Southside that snowy January, walking a mile and a half from her family’s home on Christian Hollow Road to the end of the trolley line and then taking the cars in from Southport Corners.

All along the way, storekeepers and friends wished her good luck. For a young lady who had managed to pass the qualifying Regents examinations after attending a one-room school on South Creek Road, the journey was just another part of the road toward an education. Arthamese went on to a career as a proofreader at the Elmira Star-Gazette. Her reminiscences of that first day at Southside, Riding the Streetcar to New Southside High, appeared in the Chemung Historical Journal, March 1974, p. 2367.

Aarthamese Bowen’s spirit of pioneering and adventure seems to have been typical of life at Southside that first year. Even when the building was formally dedicated on June 16, 1924, there were no curtains for the stage in the auditorium, and it would be another six months before there’d be a flagpole in front of the school.

According to tradition, Frank M. Edson, SHS’s first principal, maintained not just good order but good spirits in a school where plasterers and carpenters were still at work in the hallways. For the children of Southport farmers and machinists at the “Morrow Plant,” the new school, their school, was a triumph and a prize.

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photos of Elmira Trolleys and LaFrance Trucks, courtesy of Arnold Paul