This east side school served Detroiters for generations and was named after a renowned horticulturist.
Burbank was a highly regarded horticulturist known as "the famous California plant wizard." He was born March 7, 1849, near Lancaster, Mass., and despite having little more than a high school education, he was incredibly gifted and bright, dabbling in both mechanics and botany, specifically crossbreeding species. He was influenced by Charles Darwin’s work and believed that by splicing species together, he could speed up the natural selection process and improve life by breeding more resilient and bountiful plants. He was prolific in his work. For instance, it was said that he worked on some 30,000 varieties of plums alone, and maintained 3,000 experiments at a time that used millions of plants.
After Burbank died in Santa Rosa, Calif., on April 11, 1926, his passing was front page news in Detroit and around the country. On Sept. 27, 1928, Burbank's shovel that he used in his experiments was embedded in concrete by Thomas Edison in Dearborn, Mich., and was placed in The Henry Ford's Independence Hall. Edison was in town to help lay the cornerstone for the Edison Museum. Today, Burbank’s shovel sits in a plaza at the museum.
The school
Burbank’s death was still fresh in the minds of the Detroit Board of Education when it green-lit building a new school on Oct. 10, 1930, and naming it after him. It would be one of six schools and 14 additions that the board approved at that time. Combined, those new buildings and additions would add 7,880 seats to the district and bring the district’s capacity to 250,205 by the fall of 1931.
For its part, Burbank initially had a capacity of 580. Contracts totalling $131,500 for the school were approved in December 1930. The construction contract went to E.T. Salkowski.
Burbank School is located in the Regent Park neighborhood and bounded by East State Fair, Rex, Tacoma and Crusade avenues, with its main entrance facing west, toward Crusade. The building - designed by the firm Van Leyen, Schilling & Keogh - utilizes Art Deco detailing in its brickwork and terra cotta. The stonework above the building’s main entrance was executed by Corrado Parducci, a renowned Detroit sculptor whose designs can be found on many of the city’s landmarks, including the Fisher, Guardian and Greater Penobscot buildings.
When opened in June 1931, the school was a two-story building that today is the northwest corner of the school. In 1943, the school was expanded with a one-story addition to the east to give the school a U-shape. Three years, later, a second floor was added to this addition. An auditorium and gym/cafeteria were added two years after that, in 1948.
In 1992, a huge one-story addition was built on the east side of the school, doubling the building’s size to 86,300 square feet. This final addition had a full-size gym and locker rooms, a new cafeteria/auditorium, music rooms and offices. As a bonus for students, this addition created a courtyard. This major addition did not match the architecture of the older parts of the school.
Fisher Magnet
In 2001, the name of the school was changed to Dorothy L. Fisher Magnet School, when that program was moved into the Burbank building. Fisher was an educator and principal who founded the magnet school in 1971 at 10125 King Richard (previously the Clara B. Arthur School). Fisher served as principal of the school until her retirement in 1978.
“Magnet schools came from a need that Detroit had to stop the so-called white flight of the 1970s,” Fisher told the Detroit Free Press for a Dec. 23, 2007, article. “The courts ordered that each of the Detroit Public Schools' eight regions establish a magnet school that would be integrative, innovative and a magnet - meaning students from anywhere within the region could apply to attend. ... The school was based on the premise that we would be a school where every student - whether very bright, good, average or in need of motivation and basic skills - could succeed.”
But the city continued to bleed population, and the district continued to lose students. Given that state education funding is tied to enrollment, that meant that Detroit Public Schools was not only dealing with less money, but was dealing with aging buildings like Burbank that needed significant financial investment.
In January 2007, DPS Superintendent William F. Coleman III said the district was looking at closing 47 school buildings that summer and five more in 2008, including Fisher Magnet, which had 465 students at the time. The moves were to force more than 23,000 Detroit students to change schools but save the cash-strapped school district nearly $19 million a year.
DPS had 119,000 students at the time, but had lost about 60,000 over the previous decade. In that 10-year period, DPS had already closed 35 schools, and many of the 232 remaining buildings were undercapacity. Adding insult to injury, many of the schools targeted for closure had received upgrades and investments in the previous five years under a $1.5 billion bond approved by voters.
“The tremendous underutilization of our buildings cannot continue,” Coleman wrote in his plan. “Spending money on empty spaces is unwise and steals valuable resources from the students and families who have stayed with the district.”
The district scaled back the closures to 37, but didn’t spare Fisher Magnet, which closed in 2007 The school would live on, however, and was moved to 15491 Maddelein St.
After school
In 2014, DPS transferred Burbank to the City of Detroit, one of 57 vacant DPS properties given to the City in exchange for wiping millions of dollars in DPS debt from unpaid electrical bills.
In 2021, the City released a report that offered potential developers insight into the structural integrity and floor plans of more than 60 vacant schools - 39 owned by the City and two dozen still owned by the school district. The effort was not only to take inventory of the dozens of vacant schools littering the city, but also to incentivize redevelopment of the structures by reducing the upfront costs through the assessments provided. The report found that, despite being closed since 2007, Burbank was in good shape – ranking 17th out of the 64 schools in terms of building condition. The report estimated the redevelopment of the school would cost about $18.2 million.
Meanwhile, Burbank was added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 18, 2022, which made it eligible for historic tax credits, facilitating its redevelopment.
Under Mayor Mike Duggan’s administration, the City sought developers for Burbank who would turn the former school into affordable housing for seniors. The school sits in the Gratiot/7 Mile boundaries drawn as part of Duggan’s Strategic Neighborhood Fund initiative, which saw corporate partners pour millions into select areas of the city. Though many vacant schools have been demolished, and few have found new lives, the community told the City that it wanted Burbank repurposed and preserved.
“Looking to preserve (Burbank), it was definitely one of the interests of the community; probably the second-highest after blight was looking how we might find a new use for this site,” Khalil Ligon, lead urban planner and project manager for Gratiot/7 Mile, told The Detroit News for a June 24, 2021, article on the plan. “We’ll be looking to find development partners to do just that.”
As of August 2026, work has yet to start on Burbank.