1873, Poundcake Hill , 1873. Early buildings commissioned to house the Los Angeles High School were among the architectural jewels of the city, and were strategically placed at the summit of a hill, the easier to be pointed to with pride. One of the school's long standing mottos is "Always a hill, always a tower, always a timepiece." Construction on Los Angeles' first public high school (the private
Loyola High School is older) began on July 19, 1872, at the former site of Central School on what was then known as
Poundcake Hill, at the southeast corner of Fort Street (later
Broadway), which the front of the school faced, and
Temple Street, with the back of the school to New High Street (later Spring Street). The approximate
coordinates are . As it was on the hill, a few hundred feet from the streets below, steep wooden stairways led up to the schoolyard. The two-story wooden structure was so big and grand, the finest school south of
San Francisco at that time, with classic lines and a tower with a clock in it, that people traveled from miles around to see it. The teachers liked the wide corridors, walnut banisters, generous windows and the
transoms over the doors. The first principal was Rev. Dr. William T. Lucky (1821–1876) and the first graduating class, in 1875, consisted of seven students. Hickam managed to get the schoolhouse halfway up Temple Street when he ran out of money and left it right in the middle of the street. between Sand Street and Bellevue Avenue (later
Sunset Boulevard, now
Cesar Chavez Avenue), at coordinates , which was a short distance from the older wooden one then facing Sand Street below. is to the right That same year, the
Los Angeles City High School District was formed. It served students of LAHS while the
Los Angeles City School District and various other elementary school districts served elementary and junior high school students. This second location atop a hill was completed in 1891 and LAHS moved in. It was an enormous building for its time. LAHS was the only high school in Los Angeles until 1905. The second high school, on
Fort Moore Hill, eventually became a school for problem students, a lot of them
truancy cases. By September 1948, when preparing for the school to be razed for the construction of the
Hollywood Freeway, plans were made to transfer the students to
Belmont High School, in the
Echo Park area of Los Angeles. As Belmont students and parents protested the transfers, an alternative plan provided that 12 persons be assigned to the senior and junior high schools in the six attendance areas to carry out the program. Also located on what remains of the hill is the
Fort Moore Pioneer Memorial, which was opened to the public in 1957.
1917, Olympic Boulevard In 1917, the school moved to its current location on
Olympic Boulevard, and Rimpau with 1,937 students. The new campus was designed by
John C. Austin and
Frederic M. Ashley in an Elizabethan/Jacobean Revival style, often described as
Collegiate Gothic, typical of academic architecture of the period. To ensure a permanently beautiful vista for contemplation and to honor classmates who had fallen in
World War I, students and alumni purchased the land across the street to create a tree-filled memorial park. On that site, the Memorial Branch Library was later built, also designed by Austin and Ashley, in a Tudor Revival style intended to harmonize with the high school building across Olympic Boulevard. Actual student government was instituted at LAHS in the early 1900s, eliminating one of the main reasons for Star and Crescent's existence. Meanwhile, as the size of the student body increased over years, the lower grades were successively dropped from Star and Crescent until by 1935 only seniors were members. Star and Crescent probably disappeared after
World War II, but it is difficult to determine the exact year since no one at the school today can say when it ended. In particular,
yearbooks were published during the years of America's involvement in that war, so it seems likely it might have disappeared after the war years. In the S'42 yearbook a page was devoted to Star and Crescent with its Officers and Faculty sponsors listed. The graduating class of 1970 received their Star & Crescent pins at a special ceremony. On July 1, 1961, the Los Angeles City High School District and the elementary school districts were merged into the
Los Angeles Unified School District. The replacement structure has been universally decried and finds no champions among either current or former students and faculty, or residents of the neighboring community. The school population peaked at 10,800, but overcrowding at the school has been relieved by
West Adams Preparatory High School, which opened in the 2007–2008 school year. In 2009, some territory of Los Angeles High School's attendance boundary was transferred to
Fairfax High School. In February 2012, a gunman shot at teenage students near the high school. Two were wounded. ==Neighborhoods served by LAHS==