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| Photo of Interlake School in 1911. Photo property of the Museum of History and Industry, Seattle. |
Wallingford Center used to be a school called Interlake School. Interlake was the first school built in Wallingford. It was built in 1904. Back then, only white people went to Interlake.
Geoffrey Braden used to be a student at Interlake Grade School. We interviewed him about Interlake. He told us about his childhood and brought up memories while looking across our classroom.
[GEOFFREY BRADEN]
According to Mr. Braden, they learned, and the teachers taught the same things we learn now.
When you walk around Interlake, now Wallingford Center, you see very large windows. There are very large windows because back then, they didn’t have electricity, so they made use of the daylight and used it as light for the classroom. Also, when it was Interlake School, there were only 8 classrooms within all three floors. Geoffrey remembered what the classrooms looked like when he attended Interlake.
[GEOFFREY BRADEN: re: bare classroom walls]
Through the years, Interlake’s attendance grew low. After a couple of
years, the people of Wallingford decided to close the school down. With the
school being gone, the building was left empty for many years. With the school
being abandoned, the Wallingford community decided to restore the grade school
into many different retail shops. They used a lot of the building’s original
floor plan. You may notice pictures of the building itself when it was still
a school. As you walk around the building you’ll see that they mostly
left the original floors, stairs, and shape of the building.
I hope you learned a lot from this exciting story, and we enjoyed bringing it
to you!