Sometimes in Detroit, the real story lies in what came after a building is torn down. The southeast corner of 30th and Herbert streets in Chadsey-Condon neighborhood was once home to a school, but it’s the story about what happened there after it was gone - thanks to the neighborhood’s greatest champion and hero - that makes the story truly worth telling.
The Sill School
As Detroit was entering the 19th century, there was a tremendous population boom on the city’s west side and its schools were quickly becoming overcrowded. School attendance in 1906 numbered 40,619 citywide, when just a year earlier, it was 36,592 - an 11 percent year-over-year increase.
The Board of Education bought the site for a new school on 30th and Herbert streets in July 1897, but it would take several years before the district moved to erect something on it. The plan was to replace the inadequate Hickey School that sat next door, but the district couldn’t afford to knock the building down to build a new one because students needed a place to attend in the meantime. The board voted May 11, 1905, to buy four more lots adjoining the site of the Hickey School for $1,400, or about $51,000 in 2025, when adjusted for inflation.
It was decided to name the school in honor of John Mahelm Berry Sill, the late longtime superintendent of the Detroit Public Schools and the one-time U.S. ambassador to Korea.
Sill was born Nov. 24, 1831, in Black Rock, N.Y. His family moved to Jonesville, Mich., and after his parents died when he was only 10, he and his brother lived on their farm and supported themselves while going to school part time. In 1854, Sill was part of the first graduating class from what was then Michigan State Normal College (today known as Eastern Michigan University). He joined the faculty afterward.
He was then appointed superintendent of Detroit schools in August 1865 but resigned that same year to become principal of the Detroit Female Seminary, where he served until 1873, at which point he left to again become Detroit superintendent. This time, he stayed in the post for 13 years. In the meantime, despite being a Michigan State Normal College alumnus, he served as a regent of the University of Michigan from 1867 to 1869. In 1881, he organized the Detroit Normal Training School and became its principal in 1886. In 1893, he was appointed minister to Korea by President Grover Cleveland, serving until 1897. He died April 6, 1901, and was buried in Woodmere Cemetery.
The firm Malcolmson & Higginbotham, which designed dozens of schools in the city, was hired for the project and came up with a two-story, 18-room building that could accommodate 696 students. Yet, despite the urgency to alleviate the overcrowding issues, work on the new school was delayed because bids kept coming back over the project’s allotted budget of $50,000 (about $1.8 million in 2025). The contracts were finally approved Aug. 24, 1905, after the Board of Education passed a resolution substituting sand-limed brick for vitrified brick to save $900 (about $33,000 in 2025) and going with Southern pine finishes instead of hardwood to knock another $405 off the tab ($15,000 in 2025). Work finally started on Sill School in September 1905, eight years after the Board of Education first acquired land for it.
The solution Sill wasn’t enough
The delays in getting going were exacerbating the district’s overcrowding crisis. The nearby Columbian School, at 5130 McKinley Ave., had to switch to half-day classes. Even as the new school was preparing to open, there were fears that Sill still wouldn’t be enough.
"It was thought that the opening of the new Sill School would take care of the surplus (student population), but the growth has been even greater than anticipated," Superintendent Wales C. Martindale told The Detroit News for a Sept. 23, 1906, article. "Even with half-day classes, the school will be crowded."
The John M.B. Sill School opened in September 1906, but because of the hurried construction, there were a number of issues. There were troubles in getting bathroom fixtures and desks, with some of the teachers reportedly having to use boxes instead. Then there were the parents, some of whom refused to send their kids to Sill because it was too far away. Some said they’d rather their kids get only a half-day's worth of education at a closer school than to have them walk a mile or more to Sill.
On top of that, the rush to complete Sill and the Board of Education’s insistence on cutting corners to save money soon would come home to roost. For years, the school had been settling - and not in the normal way. Its walls were drawing apart, and in January 1932, the 26-year-old school was deemed unsafe and ordered shut down until that September while repairs were made. A committee even looked into determining “the practicality of repairing the building or tearing it down,” the Free Press reported Jan. 27, 1932. Similar problems were cropping up at other schools the district had rushed to build, including Newberry School, at 29th St. near Jackson. Chadsey High was showing issues after it was found its pilings were driven below “a bed of quicksand,” the Free Press said.
During the closure, Sill’s 600 students were transferred to the Ellis School, at 5611 Rich Ave., and to Columbian, and forced onto half-day schedules. Over the next several years, a series of further repairs and adjustments were made at Sill, but there would continue to be issues. In 1957, A. Johnson & Son Inc. was hired to underpin the front west wall of Sill at a cost of $81,000, about $980,000 in 2026.
A place of diversity
The Chadsey-Condon neighborhood was something of a melting pot, with relatively modest - and cheap - homes that found takers in many of the immigrants and migrants coming to Detroit to work in the city’s factories. In 1936, it was noted that of the 35 members of Sill’s graduating class, 25 nationalities were represented. A few years later, the school was emphasizing an intercultural education, a notably progressive move during the era.
In 1942, Sill’s seventh and eighth grades were transferred to Condon Intermediate School at 1314 W. Grand Blvd., dropping Sill’s enrollment to 400. Just three years later, the student population fell again, to 310 - less than half the school’s capacity. This would eventually rebound, and it continued to represent the diverse community around it. In 1946, the school had 357 students, with 218 being African American, 115 white, 14 Polish, four Italian, two Canadian, two German, one Maltese and one Haitian student.
In 1949-50, the entire school was redecorated in pastel colors, and a year later it got new fluorescent lighting - just in time for Sill to see its largest student body in decades: 530 for the 1955-56 school year. It would top out at 654 pupils in 1961.
A familiar story
For reasons that are not clear, the Detroit Public Schools decided to close Sill after the 1972-73 school year. The neighborhood had started to see more abandonment, and the school’s structural challenges were certainly well known by this point.
What would come next would be a scenario that would play out over and over again across the city in the ensuing decades as population loss led to more and more school closures, which led to vandalism and blight, which led to fire.
Residents living near the school said that shortly after Sill’s closure, many of its windows were broken out and young people were loitering inside the building at night. Then, around 11 p.m. on Aug. 28, 1974, someone lit the vacant school on fire. It started in the attic, which would cause the roof to collapse and quickly grow it into a five-alarm fire. The newspapers reported the following day that there were an estimated 140 firefighters and 35 pieces of equipment battling the blaze at its peak.
Though the fire damage wasn't as severe on the first and second floors, they still received heavy water damage. The school stood for a bit until a child playing in the ruins was hurt by falling bricks. The district, which had no plans for the school even before the fire, understandably decided to demolish rather than rebuild it, especially with safety being an issue.
Miss Pee Wee to the rescue
And this is where the story becomes one of community, Detroit perseverance and one of the city’s greatest unsung heroes.
In 1966, Evelyn Richardson moved to the neighborhood from the North End, but everyone knows her by a different name, Miss Pee Wee. Despite standing less than 5 feet, she would soon embark on a mission of standing tall for her community for the next six decades. The 38-year-old, single mother soon became a mother to the whole neighborhood. In the wake of the unrest of 1967 that rocked the city, she founded the Children’s Crusade to help kids in her struggling neighborhood.
“If they showed up hungry at her door, she’d feed them,” the Detroit Free Press wrote in an April 17, 2016, profile. “If they needed a place to play, she let them into the backyard, where there was a swing set. If they needed to get away from their drug-addled parents, they could spend the day in tutoring sessions or Bible study.”
The Free Press added that there were so many kids coming to her pink-and-white duplex that the City’s Health Department began delivering meals for her to feed them. Mayor Coleman Young’s administration even assigned 16 workers to help serve food. By the mid-1970s, she was reportedly serving lunch to 250 kids every day. When she wasn’t doing that, she was organizing street fairs and block parties and hosting Bible studies and offered skills training - anything she could do for her impoverished neighborhood to make things just a little bit brighter.
And by anything, that included taking on gang violence.
In 1975, a year after Sill School had burned, a turf battle erupted between two rival gangs, the Buchanan Killers and the Dirty 30s. “For four years, they held broad-daylight shoot-outs on the side streets as children played and the elderly sat on their porches,” the Free Press wrote in the 2016 article.
Miss Pee Wee wouldn’t stand for it, so she had her son Mike Richardson invite the two gangs to her pink house for a summit. There, she and Big Mike brokered a truce - even having them sign a literal peace treaty - that finally brought an end to the bloodshed.
Miss Pee Wee’s park
But there was still the issue of the vacant lot on the corner of 30th and Herbert, and the fact that the neighborhood’s kids needed a place to be, well, kids. Some of them were already playing in the empty field where the Sill School once stood, but Miss Pee Wee knew they deserved more.
The lord “said he wanted me to take this burned-out school and make a playground for the children," she told the City of Detroit in a 2022 interview.
So that’s what she did.
She lobbied the City hard, and it finally became the 30th-Herbert Park, complete with playground equipment and a basketball court. But budget cuts amid hard times would lead to it becoming neglected. There just wasn’t enough money to go around, and the sparsely populated and often overlooked 30th and Herbert neighborhood was at risk of losing the park that she had fought so hard to provide for the children.
When the City stopped cutting the grass, her grandson bought a riding mower to do it himself. When scrappers stole the metal fencing, Miss Pee Wee and the neighborhood put in a wooden one. The City removed broken playground equipment, but did not replace it. By 2013, there was nothing to the park but a weed-strewn basketball court with cracked pavement and a wide-open green expanse.
As her grandson Michael Richardson told the Free Press for the article in 2016: “This is a really high-poverty area. But the children are still people. They have to have something to do.”
So Miss Pee Wee started lobbying City Hall, just like she had for decades. Finally, in 2017, Mayor Mike Duggan’s administration gave 30th-Herbert Park a total overhaul, bringing beauty and well-deserved dignity to the neighborhood. It got new playground equipment, a new basketball court, a walking path and picnic tables.
The City also gave the park a new name, one that was even more appropriate than being named for the intersection where it was located. On Sept. 23, 2017, it officially became the Evelyn "Miss Pee Wee" Richardson Park.
“The eyes of the whole world are on the city of Detroit, and they’re watching us,” she told the Free Press in 2016. “But we can make life better for our children. We have to start with the children.”
For 50 years, the neighborhood has celebrated "Love Thy Neighbor Day" on Miss Pee Wee's birthday. On July 7, 2026, Miss Pee Wee is to mark her 98th birthday. To watch an interview with her, click here.