Foch Middle School, in the East Village neighborhood, opened in 1925 and served the community for nearly 80 years before it closed in 2004.
On Nov. 10, 1921, the school board unanimously approved a suggestion by Superintendent Frank R. Cody to name a new school on the city's east side after Marshal Ferdinand Foch of France. Foch served as the supreme commander of the Allied forces during World War I and played a key role in the negotiation of the Treaty of Versailles that ended the war.
Building the school would prove more challenging than naming it.
Initially, the district gave the job of designing Foch School to Malcolmson & Higginbotham, which had designed dozens of other schools in the city. But some members of the school board were unhappy with the cost estimates provided by Malcolmson & Higginbotham, the job of designing Foch was given instead to the firm Vernor, Wilhelm & Molby. But then the estimates for its design still came in $110,000 - about $2 million in 2026 valuation - over the appropriated amount. After three years of talking about building Foch, the Detroit school board finally gave the green light to approve the overspending on Foch anyway on Aug. 5, 1924, though cuts were still made. Wood was swapped out for marble in places, landscaping for the grounds was dropped, the swimming pool would go unfinished initially, and oak doors were swapped out for pine ones.
The school opened in the fall of 1925, but was not formally dedicated until the following year. Its capacity was listed as being about 2,000 students, but it opened overcapacity with 2,300.
The French government presented a bust of Foch to the school by sculptor Firmin Michelet in December 1925.
The school stood next door to Southeastern High School, providing the feeling of a mini college campus type of educational vibe. As students graduated from Foch, they'd move next door to Southeastern. In 1932, the two schools served more than 4,300 students between them.
Foch celebrated its 25th anniversary in 1950, having enrolled 33,718 students since opening. Of them, more than 18,000 had graduated. Some of the school's distinguished alumni included movie star sisters Betty and Marion Hutton and professional baseball players Don Lund, Maurice Van Robays and Mike Tresh. Lund played for the hometown Tigers from 1949 to 1954.
Around 2002, Southeastern next door underwent a major renovation that required the school to be closed and its students moved next door temporarily to Foch. Foch's students were sent to other DPS schools. After the makeover was complete, Foch was empty, and given the dramatic loss of student population across the district and the school already being empty, DPS decided not to reopen it.
Foch would sit empty for 20 years, but despite that, remained in surprisingly good condition, especially compared to other DPS properties that had been closed for similar lengths of time. The building had some water damage, vandalism and scrapping, according to a 2021 Detroit Historic Vacant School Property Study, yet rehabbing the district put the tab on renovating and reopening Foch at $20.8 million. That was far more than the $2.5 million to demolish it, district officials said. That renovation number is considerably more than estimates by third-party companies hired by the City of Detroit to evaluate schools in far worse condition. It seemed that numbers were fudged to justify tearing the school down, and the district likely wanted to avoid having Foch eventually decay into an eyesore and danger to the community and Southeastern next door.
Demolition began in January 2024, and Foch was completely gone by mid-March 2024.