Mark Haban remembers that the 1976 bicentennial celebration of American Independence was “a big, big deal” in Park Ridge.
Along with a school districtwide sing along on the football field at Maine South, his sixth grade class at Sanford E. Merrill School had put together a mural to commemorate the bicentennial. His grade focused on Washington, D.C. monuments, but others depicted Chicago history and landmarks or pivotal moments in the life of the United States.
When Merrill School closed in 1982, most of its students transferred to Roosevelt Elementary. The bicentennial art came with them and hung in the auditorium of Roosevelt for years.
The four murals are large and faded, but the paper squares still wobble into recognizable depictions of Chicagoland icons, from the Marshall Field’s clock to Bears and Cubs logos to the Adler Planetarium and the Prudential Building.
A second mural shows a man in a tricorn hat, a sailing ship and a troop of horseback riders trotting along a winding path of paper and paste.
Haban remembers helping to make his class’ mural — though he wasn’t terribly helpful, he said.
“I was kind of a goof-off in sixth grade so I might have let some other kids carry the load on that one,” he said. “I’m sure I glued a couple of tiles down.”
Haban is the seventh out of eight kids in his family, which moved to Park Ridge in 1951. For 29 years, his family “had a student at Merrill School continuously until the year before they closed in 1981,” he said.
That kind of involvement with the school gave it a prime place in Haban’s family lore, and he remembered the schoolyard at Merrill as “the focal point of our existence.”
Haban said he’d meant to go take some photos of the murals about a decade ago and made arrangements with Roosevelt to photograph them, but plans fell through. He’d forgotten about them until last month, when District 64 publicized them after the recent construction project prompted school officials to take a fresh look at them.
At Roosevelt on a September morning, principal Kevin Dwyer set two sheets containing about 30 names in beginner’s cursive next to the four framed murals.
Those sheets, which had been pasted to the back of the art, helped clarify the origin of the murals. They had mostly been part of the background since they arrived at Roosevelt and were hung in the school’s auditorium, Dwyer said.
One of the names on the sheets is Chris Taglia. His brother, Michael Taglia, has taught at Lincoln Middle School for 26 years. He was enrolled at Merrill as a third grader when it shut down, he said.
“Merrill was this awesome little school, kind of tucked away in the corner of Park Ridge,” he remembered.
He said he remembers clearly “the rumblings that it was going to close,” and the school board meetings his parents attended on the topic.
“I do remember the last meeting when a vote happened,” he said. “I remember literally waiting by the door as my parents attended that meeting. And then them coming back with the bad news.”
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Taglia teaches broadcasting at Lincoln and said he wants to give his students the option to do their investigative project on the murals and their provenance: talk to former students and dig into the art’s history.
Park Ridge’s Brickton Park, where the school once stood, has a small commemorative plaque letting passersby know the school had stood on the site.
“Every time I go by Brickton Park, I think about Merrill and I know I’m not alone,” he said.
A Sept. 8, 1960 piece in the Park Ridge Advocate outlined the building boom that led to Merrill’s construction:
“Building in Park Ridge was quite heavy, and in 1950-51 a seven room school, later to be known as Carpenter School — was erected at the corner of Cherry and Hamlin. Immediately following that came the Merrill School … As soon as the school appeared, new homes sprang up around here like weeds in your garden, so it was necessary to build a six room addition to Merrill almost immediately.”
The seven-room Edison School opened in 1960. Madison School, which was 15 rooms at the time it was constructed, opened just afterward.
Paul Adlaf of the Park Ridge Historical Society said Merrill was closed alongside Madison School and Edison School when Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 saw a round of downsizing and consolidation in the 1980s.
Dwyer said that kind of closure would be “very traumatic for a community.”
“Some of the teachers would have been let go due to a reduction in force or reduction in students,” he said. “There’s no students for you to teach. So it would be very traumatic for a community.”
He noted that the signatures on the back of the murals tell some of that story.
“I look at a piece of paper and I see a grade level of students — there’s not a lot of students on that list,” he said.
Dwyer said his third grade roster has about 120 students total, while the third grade represented on the back of the mural is only 30 or so students total.
“Those grade levels were getting quite small,” he said. “You might even just have one section at one grade where I’ve got five and six now.”
Haban, who attended Merrill, attributed the dip in enrollment to the wind-down of the Baby Boom.
“I came from a family of eight,” he said. “I knew a family of 15. There were just a lot of incredibly large families.”
Dwyer added that the murals indicate similarities in the curriculum across years and schools. The 3rd graders were learning Chicago history at Merrill and made a Chicagoland-themed mural. Fifty years later, Chicago history still anchors Roosevelt’s third grade history program.
The plan is to display at least one mural in what was the auditorium and is now Roosevelt’s library, Dwyer said. They won’t get any alterations besides a fresh coat of paint on the frames.
The rediscovery of the art and its origins also has Dwyer thinking about how current Roosevelt students could benefit from a similar exercise reflecting on recent history: he said he’s considering a mural project for students to make the turbulent pandemic years into art, as a way to “capture [COVID] for future generations.”
For Taglia, who may now facilitate another generation of student learning about the artworks and their origins, the renewed attention they’re getting is exciting.
“I feel honored that I get to be the one (that) at least carries on the memory of Merrill here at Lincoln, because it was such a special place,” he said.