The old Sidney Lanier, which exists today as Baldwin Magnet School. For many years Scott Street (near side of the structure) was closed to afford the school playground space. Then, circa 1981, after the facility had served as Baldwin Junior High for many years, the street was reopened (my project) following the closing of the school. When the building reopened as Baldwin Magnet some years later, its playground space was gone.

At left, an artist’s drawing of Sidney Lanier HS when it was built on South McDonough Street in 1910, which makes the school 100 years old. This was Montgomery’s first public coed school, and it was named for Poet Sidney Lanier, a onetime organist at First Presbyterian, and sometime clerk at his grandfather’s Exchange Hotel.

-Charles Humphries