Sweeney Automobile School
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Sweeney School
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Sweeney School in 2016
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| Location | 215 W. Pershing Rd., Kansas City, Missouri |
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| Coordinates | 39°05′00″N 94°35′13″W / 39.083222°N 94.586942°WCoordinates: 39°05′00″N 94°35′13″W / 39.083222°N 94.586942°W |
| NRHP reference # | 14000142 |
| Added to NRHP | April 11, 2014 |
The Sweeney School was a trade school in Kansas City, Missouri, founded by Emory J. Sweeney in 1908 to use the "Sweeney System" (hands on training) and eventually taught more than a dozen trades, e.g., "Autos, Tractors, and Aviation":Sweeney Automobile School and Sweeney School of Aviation c. 1921. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2014.
Enrollment at the Sweeney School grew significantly to train automobile mechanics and radio technicians during World War I. The Sweeney School was known for its
As enrollment began to rapidly increase during World War I, the Sweeney School moved south from its 15th Street location to construction a building that would become a Kansas City landmark. Sweeney built the new high-rise school building for his classes directly across from Union Station on Pershing Road in Kansas City, Missouri. The new ten-story building was completed on October 1, 1917. The new building included 12 acres of floor space and had rooms for 800 students to live on site. The building even had a swimming pool in the basement and a motion picture theatre. The new Sweeney School building claimed to contain the largest cafeteria and dining room in the world as well as the largest electric sign in the world on its roof. The electric sign on the roof towered 80 feet above the top of the building and contained five thousand electrical lamps. In 1917, enrollment at the school was 3,674, and by 1919 enrollment had grown to 7,917.
During the 1918 flu pandemic, 2,300 of the 3,000 students enrolled at the school contracted the disease. Fifteen mechanics died between September 29 and October 4. A quarantine was ordered, which proved successful in combating the disease. According to the Missouri Historical Review, "Army officials described the quarantine as a reverse quarantine, because it was designed to protect the Army men from civilians, instead of the opposite."
Financial reverses caused the closing of the school, in these quarters, and on November 8, 1929, the building was acquired by the Businessmen's Assurance company, which renovated and remodeled the structure and used it until the BMA Tower opened in 1963.
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Wikipedia