Cooley High School, designed by Donaldson & Meier, opened in 1928. It is one of the few remaining grand, ornate high schools left in the city, but faces an uncertain future.
The school was named after former Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas McIntyre Cooley (1824-1898). A mural of him in the school library says he was "one who enunciated the principle of law under which it has been possible to have free high schools in this state."
It was constructed at a cost of $758,270 (the equivalent in purchasing power to about $13.9 million in 2024) to meet the educational needs of a rapidly growing area of Detroit.
Despite its historical significance, Cooley High School was closed in June 2010 and has remained vacant since then.
On Oct. 1, 2017, a blaze destroyed much of the auditorium of the abandoned school.
After sitting abandoned for a decade, and with vandals and Mother Nature alike taking a toll on the building, the nonprofit Life Remodeled stepped up and offered to buy the 321,024-square-foot Cooley from the cash-strapped district and turn it into a $40 million community resource hub. The organization had already done something similar with the former Durfee School. After more than three years of negotiations, the group offered $1 million for Cooley, but Vitti and the school board rejected the offer in March 2023 because they said they had doubts about Life Remodeled's ability to raise enough money. Vitti also said that the district felt that if Life Remodeled's plans didn't move forward, the district would be held responsible by the community for blight or problems that occurred on the vacant campus.
Cooley would continue to rot, making preservation not only more expensive as time went on, but also more difficult.
Finally, in early May 2025, the Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD) announced a $25 million plan to redevelop the Cooley site into a sports facility for not only the school district, but the community. DPSCD said the new complex would help close the opportunity gap when competing for athletic college scholarships.
The $25 million project had already been allocated $15 million from the State of Michigan, and the school district's fund-raising arm was working on securing the other $10 million. DPSCD said at the time of the announcement that it would be completed in 2026.
“Ever since Cooley High School closed in 2010, the community has wanted us to do something special with this legendary site,” Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said in a news release. “We are laser-focused on honoring this commitment with an exciting new complex that builds on Cooley’s legacy and creates equitable sports opportunities for Detroit student athletes and the community.”
Unfortunately, the plan also calls for the partial demolition of historic Cooley.
"The plan is to preserve a part of the building for the locker room, a museum for the alumni and meeting location," Chrystal Wilson, a DPSCD spokeswoman, told Crain's Detroit Business for a May 3, 2025, story on the plan.
But a year later, DPSCD went back on that, confirming news broken by HistoricDetroit.org on May 28, 2026, that the district was abandoning its previously announced plans to save a portion of it.
The decision was tied to a state appropriation of $15 million that had to be spent by the end of that September, and DPSCD planned to use $5 million of that money to demolish the school and salvage architectural elements from it. If the district didn't tear the school down now,
On June 11, 2026, Vitti and Machion Jackson, deputy superintendent of operations, held an online community meeting to explain their decision to go back on their promise of preservation.
“As the architects and the designers better understood the building when they got into it, it was clear to them that if we were going to keep the facade, it would not only increase the cost but also would increase the time line to execute the demo and the construction process, which would have then not have allowed us to use a state grant for $15 million to complete," Vitti said.
Even before Vitti and Jackson met with the community, architectural salvage began on the school, with crews removing some of the terra cotta starting June 9, 2026. Detroit-based Hamilton Anderson Architects was selected as lead architect on the Cooley complex project.
"What we attempted to do was save all of the facade, but based on the time line constraints (to use the state funds for demolition), that was impossible," Jackson said during the online community meeting.
Added Vitti: "My conscience is clean as a way to preserve the facade and not being able to based on the time line and funding constraints that the district has, but I do commit to all alumni that the legacy of the school will be honored through the athletic complex."