Capturing Cleveland High one
click
at a time
UMSL professor photographs his vacant, deteriorating alma mater By Ryan Heinz
Dan Younger isn’t apt to wax nostalgic about his old high school but that didn’t stop him from lugging his camera equipment to the shuttered Cleveland High School in south St. Louis. Younger, professor of art at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, shot its interior several times last year. The reason why is simple. “I’m nosey,” says Younger, whose towering build is often clad in black and white from his fedora to his Chuck Taylor shoes. “It wasn’t about a sad farewell. It was more about me being curious, going from room to room to see what was left in it.” CHS is a brick behemoth known to locals as “the castle” due to the two turrets protruding from the school’s midsection. continued 10