I drive past Whittier Middle School most mornings on my way to the office — that solid brick building on 6th Street has been anchoring the Cathedral district since 1931, back when this neighborhood was the edge of town and downtown Sioux Falls was still something you could walk across in fifteen minutes.
The building itself sits like a fortress — three stories of red brick with those tall windows that let in decent light, the kind of construction they just don't do anymore. When I first moved to Sioux Falls, I thought it looked stern, institutional in that way old schools can be. But then I watched kids streaming out after dismissal one afternoon, flooding onto the sidewalks toward McKennan Park or cutting through the neighborhoods toward Whittier Park, and the building made more sense. It's built to last, built to hold the chaos of middle school — that specific energy that comes from housing hundreds of kids who are all growing in different directions at the same time.
The location puts students right in the middle of one of Sioux Falls' older residential areas, the kind where you see the same families who've been here for generations living two blocks from people who moved in last month. Whittier pulls from neighborhoods where houses still have those deep front porches and mature trees that actually provide shade — the parts of town that were here before sprawl pushed everything south toward 41st and beyond.
It's not the newest building in the district, not by a long shot. The hallways can feel narrow, the facilities show their age. But there's something about a school that's been in the same spot for nearly a century — it becomes part of the neighborhood's DNA, a landmark that generations share.
— Grace
When I first moved to Sioux Falls, I thought it looked stern, institutional in that way old schools can be.