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George Corsan, a Canadian swimming enthusiast, designed the first group swimming lessons, including on-land instruction, at the Detroit YMCA in 1909. Corsan would teach swimming strokes on land to build confidence.
Known as the learn-to-swim program, Corsan soon traveled coast-to-coast teaching with the goal of teaching every boy in the U.S. and Canada how to swim.
The same year that Corsan began to develop his learn-to-swim program, Ella Flagg Young, a prominent figure in the early progressive movement, unanimously was elected as the superintendent of the Chicago public school system.
It was the first time that a woman was chosen to head a large metropolitan school system. Serving more than six years in the position, the reform-minded administrator brought need change and efficiency to all levels of the Chicago Public Schools, including the construction of high schools that would have swimming pools for teaching boys and girls how to swim.
In late 1910, the board of education accepted plans to build a new high school in Hyde Park at Stony Island Avenue and Sixty-Second Street. Local architect A. F. Hussander presented board President Alfred R. Urlon with drawings and plans for the new building Dec. 7, 1910.
According to the Chicago Tribune, the new Hyde Park High School would be the “most beautiful, the largest, and most expensive of any of the Chicago high schools.” The new building would be “the first public school in Chicago to have a swimming pool and the first in which instruction in swimming will be given.”
The architecture of the building would be in the Classical Revival style, and include 50 classrooms, with a seating capacity of 40 students. In addition to the ground floor pool, the main level also would house a large assembly hall, calisthenics room, foundry and forge rooms, woodworking and machine shops.
The second and third floors would be devoted to classrooms. The total capacity of the new building was estimated to be 2,000 students, which was nearly twice that of any other high school in the city.
Opening day enrollment in Chicago high schools in 1913, reportedly was 15,313 students, slightly less the year before. Hyde Park High School, which opened the same year, topped all high schools with 1,855, and a waiting list of 400 petitioning Young for admittance to the new school.
Designed to serve 2,000 students, Hyde Park High School was already experiencing overcrowding. As enrollment continued to rise, efforts began in earnest in 1927 to obtain an addition to the school, to deal with attendance numbers between 4,000 and 5,000 students.
In 1935, another movement to build an addition to the school, led by Mrs. Warner Sivyer the PTA president, was successful. The construction of a $600,000 addition was added to the high school in September 1938, and dedicated the following January.This building addition would increase the school’s capacity by about 800 students. In time, however, the new addition would not help curb rising enrollment figures.