Gainesville got a new landmark in 1920 - its high school built on Washington Street.

The stately three-story brick building was home to both junior high and high school students until a new high school was built in 1957.

"The rooms were real big, like 36 feet square. There were big main halls where everyone changed classes. It had a big library with big tables, and everyone would congregate on the outside," former student William Peck said. "It wasn't ‘walk right in and go to class.' There was a social atmosphere. It was the center of Gainesville."

Peck, now the president of the Old Friends Car Club, was a member of the class of 1957.

"We were the last class to leave there, and we went and graduated from the new building," he said. "We went six months at the old school and six months at the new school."

The school was within walking distance of the downtown square.

"All the history of me going to school up there, it was a great place," Peck said. "They would let you out an hour for lunch in those days, and you could go anywhere in town you wanted to eat. Gainesville was a very safe place for children to walk around."

In fact, he said, when his class moved to the new school, they weren't sure how to handle eating in the lunchroom since they could no longer walk to Whatley's drug store or one of the other downtown establishments.

After the high school transition, the Washington Street site became Gainesville Junior High School from 1958 to 1964, Peck said.

James Dorsey attended junior high at the old site.

"I remember going to some games at the gym but by the time I came along it had gotten pretty rickety. It was not nearly as nice as the new one they made," he said. "I went in there in '57. We were the first class to go in there as the junior high part of it."

Dorsey remembers the school being a "pleasant experience."

"The building wasn't very modern and it didn't have air conditioning, but we didn't think much of it back then," he said. "The teachers were good. I do remember they started teaching Latin down there, which was a little bit unusual. It was a good experience and I enjoyed it."

Peck and his father were the ones to purchase the old high school and gymnasium from the city in 1964, after the school was closed.

"The problem was the restrictions the city put on the sale and what could be done with the building (for the next 10 years)," Peck said. "It either had to be a parking lot or a single-tenant merchant for 60,000 square feet. I shopped all the major vendors at that time and everybody wanted shopping centers, 15 acres. That meant we could not do anything with it. If the city hadn't put the restrictions on it, the building would more than likely still be here and I would have renovated the whole thing into office buildings."

For that reason, the building was torn down. After it was demolished, Peck rescued memorabilia, including the contents of the cornerstone, which included 1920 editions of the three newspapers that existed in Gainesville at the time.

When the 10 years were up, Peck turned the gym into an entertainment venue from 1976 to 1979. The Dry Dock Restaurant was put in the building as well.

"We had everybody from Kenny Rogers to the Wild Cherries," he said. "Then they had a fire in the restaurant and I changed it over to an office complex."

Peck owned Gym of '36 until 1998. It's been home to various businesses and offices, including the Ava White Academy and Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Ava White, owner of the academy, did not attend Gainesville High School when it was on Washington Street, but some of her students' relatives did.

"I've had parents and grandparents that come in here and say they went to school here," she said.

"The original gym floor is still here within the building. I think a lot of the brick is original and some of the stairwells. The wood in this building has been well-preserved and it looks more like the 1920s than current times."

The name of the office building was an ode to its former use. When it was the gym for the high school, it was home to parties and school socials and was the local Mecca for basketball fans.

"They had the steel superstructure up for the building when the tornado hit. It twisted the steel up and they had to take it down and redo it," Peck said. "That's the reason I named it Gym of '36, because it was built then. The name stuck."