Looking Back: Our Lady of La Salette School

BERKLEY — Currently standing at 2219 Coolidge Highway is The Ivy Lofts, which opened in 2023 after years of proposals and planned developments.

Before then, what stood on the grounds for decades was Our Lady of La Salette School, which opened in 1946 and served kids from first to eighth grades.

The Catholic school was built in the heart of the city of Berkley and opened with 529 students. Two years later, a second wing of the school was added.

Jeffrey Tong, of the Berkley Historical Museum, attended the school as well and graduated in 1957.

“When it opened, they had nuns and there was a convent next door. And of course, nuns didn’t cost anything, but as there became fewer and fewer nuns and they had to hire mostly teachers, it became more and more expensive to operate … because the cost of the tuition kept going up,” he said. “When I went there — so we’re talking in the ’50s — the tuition was … $50 per family a year, and I was one of three boys. So, it cost $50 for all three of us there. But once again, they had nuns, and of course they had money coming in through the collection plate at church every Sunday. But then as they had to hire more and more teachers, it just got very expensive.”

As the years went on, the school suffered from declining enrollment. At one point, Tong said, there were plans to open a high school, but this never happened.

The school eventually closed in 2013. Tong remembered that the school opened one last time for the community and former students to tour it.

“It was kind of sad,” he said. “They had it open one night and everybody could come through, and I went around, took all kinds of pictures of it. Generations of people had gone there. So, it’s always sad when that happens.”

After its closure, the school was vacant for a decade. During this time, developers came through the city with different plans on redeveloping the building.

City Council member Steve Baker was present during this time; while many plans came and went and were dealt rejections, he said he had “quiet optimism” that a project could come through.

“I celebrate the process and the path that it took to give everybody a chance to express their perspectives and share their opinions and work towards a common goal of a successful addition to our community that will have benefits for decades to come,” he said.

A big topic of conversation during those talks was keeping the La Salette school building and architecture intact. Baker said the developers did a good job of honoring the past and the legacy of the building with minimal structural changes visible from Coolidge.

“It honors the history and the past of the building and opens the door to the future going forward,” he said.

Tong said people were glad the building was going to be saved and not torn down.

“It looks the same when you’re driving down Coolidge, and so that’s kind of nice,” he said. “It’s still there. That was one of those things. I mean, it was built to last. They built those things to last back in those days.”