Franklin School

About this property

The Franklin School is a building designed by Adolf Cluss in the German round-arch style, located on Franklin Square at 13th and K Streets in Washington, D.C. It was constructed in 1869 and initially served as a flagship school building. It later took on various other educational roles, and became a homeless shelter in the 2000s. In 2020, it became the location of the Planet Word museum after its interior was largely gutted. Built in 1869, the Franklin School was the flagship building of eight modern urban public school buildings constructed in Washington, D.C., between 1862 and 1875 to house, for the first time, a comprehensive system of universal public education. In addition to being an admired educational facility, a small plaque on its exterior describes the building's place in the history of telecommunications, noting Alexander Graham Bell's first wireless communication in 1880, where a beam of light was used to transmit a voice message using his newly invented Photophone. Bell's laboratory was nearby on L Street, and his work was a pioneering step in optical communications, the forerunner of fiber-optic communication systems that now carry most of the world's telecommunications traffic. Bell was also a well-known educator who taught at a special day school for deaf children, who trained teachers of the deaf, and who additionally created an institution for the study of deafness (also in Washington, D.C.). The prominence Franklin School enjoyed was highlighted in the 1870s, when studied in international expositions held in Vienna, Paris, and Philadelphia. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1996. In 2002, the building was used as a homeless shelter, which controversially closed in September 2008. It was briefly occupied by protesters associated with the Occupy movement on November 19, 2011 In February 2015, Mayor Muriel Bowser cancelled the planned conversion of the school to a public facility for art exhibitions, lectures and educational activities by the Institute for Contemporary Expression. Approved by Bowser's predecessor, Vincent Gray, the project involved a privately funded conversion of the school and had its first event planned for September 2015. As of October 2015, proposals were still being considered. On January 25, 2017, it was announced that the building would host a museum of linguistics called Planet Word, led by Ann B. Friedman, philanthropist and wife of The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. In 2018, work on the project was stopped after it was discovered that D.C. and U.S. federal preservation rules were violated in the destruction of the building's interior. A "minimal" fine was paid, work on the project continued and the museum opened "under a significant cloud" on October 22, 2020.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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