The building is gone, and the name has been changed, but Midtown once had a school at the corner of 33rd and McGee known as the Hyde Park School.
Originally, the land was a cornfield, part of the 60-acre Jacob Ragan farm at Armour Boulevard and Gillham Road. But in the late 1800s, the eight-room frame Knickerbocker School at 33rd and McGee was getting full as the “suburb” of Hyde Park grew.
The school was in the Westport School District; it was not annexed into the Kansas City district until 1899. But in 1894, the Westport board sent a delegation “on a trip east” to scope out new school buildings in that part of the country. When they returned, they enthusiastically began building the Hyde Park school at a cost of nearly $25,000.
The school produced many winning athletes under locally famous principal Charles S. Parker. Parker was, according to a Kansas City Star article, “an enthusiastic advocate of playgrounds, games, and sports, remembered by many, with a stopwatch in hand, timing the children at practice races, during recess, lunch period and after school.”
So it wasn’t surprising that alumni should protest at a proposed change of name to the George B. Longan School. According to a 1931 article in the Kansas City Times, Hyde Parkers acknowledged Longan as a great educator at a public meeting. Still, they thought his name should be reserved for another school while theirs continued to be called Hyde Park, the same thing they called their neighborhood.
However, the school lost its original name in 1932. In 1955, the building was razed to build the (new) George B. Longan school on the south part of the property where the original Hyde Park school playground stood.
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