Masten Park High School was the second public high school in Buffalo, New York. It opened in 1897 on the East Side of Buffalo in the Masten Park neighborhood. By 1900, MPHS had enrolled over 1,100 students, as the population of Buffalo soared. A fire during the school day on March 27, 1912, which almost completely destroyed the building. At great cost, the school was rebuilt and reopened in 1914. The building is renowned for its architectural influences, and is now on the National Register of Historic Places. The yearbooks chronicle the students, staff and faculty of the school, and its famous Principal Dr. Frank Sheldon “Fearless” Fosdick. The building served as home to three more Buffalo Public Schools: Fosdick-Masten High School, Girls Vocational High School, and City Honors School.
Scope of Collection
The Masten Park High School Chronicles are paper-bound, semi-quarterly publications of Masten Park High School in Buffalo, New York. Four to six issues per year, 1900-1927, featured literary and journalistic writing of students, photos of sports teams and activities, advertisements for local business in Buffalo, and in the June issues, portraits of graduating seniors. A few issues are missing, as no copies were present in the physical collection held at City Honors School. The bound volumes were scanned at 300 ppi, 8 bit grayscale to produce uncompressed TIFF images, including covers, inside covers, and blanks. Pages were also scanned for text through Optical Character Recognition, which allowed all content, including names and dates, to be searchable and viewed as text.