An abandoned piano in the abandoned auditorium of the J.W. Cooper School in Shenandoah.
Writing and photos by Wes Cipolla
Originally published in the Pottsville Republican-Herald on October 10, 2022.
SHENANDOAH - The walls of the J.W. Cooper School are the color of dried blood. The hulking building, which was built in 1917 and closed in 1994, cuts an imposing figure on 39 White Street. In its age and overgrowth, it has only become more distinguished.
On a chilly Saturday morning, Reading-based photographer and teacher Valerie A. Hoffman and her students entered the school for a sold-out, on-location photography workshop.
“This is a very hard place to learn photography,” Hoffman said, “because it is very dark, it’s very contrasting light. That’s why it’s a good place to do a workshop. For here, I think it’s more important to focus on the creativity and the composition than fiddlin’ around with ‘Did I get the exposure right?’”
Hoffman was drawn to the history of the school, which started its life as a hospital and a morgue. Its scheduled opening in 1918 was delayed due to the influenza pandemic of that year. It was pressed into service to handle the pandemic’s excess patients and deaths. One wonders how the students and faculty must have felt, teaching and learning in a place which once housed the sick and dead of their town.
After its closure, the building passed through various owners and fell into further decay until Kent Steinmetz of Steinmetz Jewelers purchased it in 2009. Steinmetz founded the J.W. Cooper Community Center, a nonprofit dedicated to repairing the school and restoring its facilities, such as the gymnasium and 800-seat auditorium.
“I like to see things preserved that are historic,” Hoffman said. “The stage and auditorium are pretty stunning. The peeling paint and everything are a special draw for people that like abandoned places.”
The tint of the remaining windows gave the cold, cavernous auditorium a sickly green hue. The auditorium’s ornate Ionic columns were rotting. The gnarled keys on the old pianos have not been played in over a quarter of a century. The hard seats, made of rusty iron and chipped wood, have been left to gather dust and cobwebs. An ancient piece of chewing gum was stuck to the bottom of one of them. The word “BOW” was crudely carved into the backrest.
“We’re having a party all on our own,” Hoffman told her students. “This is a private party, and I’ve never been here alone.”
Besides the photographers, the only living things were a colony of pigeons, whose screeches and flutters echoed thunderously through the auditorium. From their perches, they looked down on an empty stage from the best seats in the house. The floor was covered with feathers.
“I don’t like birds that much,” said Hoffman, who prefers photographing landscapes and objects to living creatures.
The pigeons were a pleasant surprise for bird lover Sondra Cotton.
“I love anything old and sketchy,” said Cotton, of Media. “It reminds me of my elementary school.”
Hoffman warned her students that the right side of the auditorium balcony was off-limits. What about the left?
“That side is safe,” she said. “Mostly…”
The photographers continued their tour, walking on splintering floorboards through hallways lit only by sunlight.
“Don’t go near the edge,” Hoffman said as she and her students walked past the empty swimming pool.
“It’s amazing,” Cotton said. “Not a single tile is out of it… At least there’s not a tar pit of despair.”
“Here’s another bathroom,” Hoffman said. “This one I would not recommend using, though it had really cool chipped paint.”
A rotting rope hangs from the roof of the gymnasium. A solitary basketball sits on the faded, torn-up court.
“It’s cool, very cool,” said Megan Karchner, who came all the way from Newark, Del. with her mother Cindy. “Very nostalgic. Neat architecture and fixtures.”
“It’s history,” Cindy said. “It’s dirty, it’s interesting.”
In a classroom that once belonged to a “Mrs. Cuff,” photographers’ Instagram handles and graffiti like “Austin sux” were written all over the chalkboard. The large windows offered sprawling views of Shenandoah and its autumn colors. It was the perfect photo spot for Chris Mumma.
“I’ve known Valerie for some time,” said Mumma, of Harrisburg, “and we’ve gone on multiple abandoned workshops. This school has interested me for some time. There’s an old feeling to it, almost an eeriness that something belongs here but it’s not here. You just wonder what happened here… What was life like here?”
Mumma is using the school to practice getting different types of panoramic shots.
“I’m trying to tell the story of the school,” he said.
A popular location for photographers, there are entire rooms of the school filled with photographic props. How much of the abandoned school is “real,” and how much is the product of photographers’ collective imagination?
Nevertheless, abandonment is everywhere: forsaken toys, desks, furniture, textbooks and scenery from school plays made up just some of the debris piled high. Next to dozens of desk chairs sat a headless sculpture of the Pieta.
On her website, Hoffman says that she wants her photographs to “bring glory to God, the Creator of all the wonders we see.”
“You’re probably not gonna see that so much here,” she said. “The buildings have unique character. The paint, the arches, the molding really are beautiful. We don’t make buildings like this anymore.”