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The Youngstown School was built in 1907 to educate the children of mill workers at the Seattle Steel Company (the mill celebrated its hundred-year anniversary last year asNucor Steel Seattle Inc.). The wood schoolhouse was named for the area around the mill which had just been incorporated into the expanding City of Seattle. With considerable growth in the neighborhood, a new brick Youngstown School was built in 1917 next to the original school.

Youngstown was considered a rough neighborhood then with many taverns and “houses of ill repute” that kids were warned to avoid. Immigrants from Yugoslavia, Scandinavia, Russia, Italy, Greece, France, Austria, and Sicily came to settle in the dell through which Longfellow Creek flowed into Elliot Bay, mixing with the mud flats of the Duwamish River.

In 1939, ten years after the completion of a major addition to the school that made the structure what it is today, the school was renamed “Frank B. Cooper School” in honor of the progressive School District Superintendent. By changing the name of the school, the community hoped to shake the widely held stigma that was associated with the Youngstown neighborhood.

The school was closed in 1989 and the new Cooper Elementary School on Pigeon Hill was built. The district declared that it had no further need for the old building. In 1999, theDelridge Neighborhoods Development Association (DNDA) and the community began the process of bringing the old building back to life. They envisioned the building as a new center for arts and culture.

Now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center hosts 36 live/work studios for artists of all disciplines and 25,000 square feet of public space. In using the original name of the school, the history of the building, the neighborhood, and the alumni are honored. The words “Frank B. Cooper School” will remain above the entrance, joined by the words “Youngstown Cultural Arts Center”.