- City:
- Porterville, CA
- Site Type:
- Education and Health, Schools
- New Deal Agencies:
- Public Works Funding, Public Works Administration (PWA)
- Completed:
- 1938
- Designer:
- W. D. Coates
- Quality of Information:
- Good
- Marked:
- Unknown
- Site Survival:
- Extant
Description
This school was built as an elementary school with funding from the Public Works Administration (PWA) in 1938. It later became a junior high school and was named for William Pitt Bartlett, a Porterville benefactor.
The building is single-story and the design by W.D. Coates is Moderne (Art Deco). The main building front still looked unchanged as of 2009, except for probable window replacement. There are new aluminum windows on the small building on the south, and new aluminum doors on the back side.
There have been at least 2 additions for new classrooms since it was built.
Source notes
Project submitted by Marsha Crabtree Skinner.
Site originally submitted by Marsha Skinner on August 19, 2009.
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I attended this school in the early 1970’s. The building I understood and appreciated at the time to be PWA. One of the wonderful things about the building were the tall windows that we would open and close with hooks attached to long poles. In the Spring, the scent of blossoming trees would waft in and momentarily alleviate our torture, other than that it was HELL. It broke my heart to see later that those windows had been replaced by tiny rectangles utterly out of proportion with the rest of the building.
I went to school at Bartlett in the early 70s and I remember gazing out of those large windows in the wonderfull springtime. I remember a Ben Locke that was a very talented artist. Was that you?