The Beginnings of DSA
Lilith Ray
Walking around the halls of other high schools, I am struck by the echoes of the people who have crossed the same thresholds and touched the same ceilings for good luck. There are photos of each junior varsity team every year since 1980, and cabinets decked out with trophies from tournaments past. While I’m sure DSA has a very storied past, it is not immediately visible without sports memorabilia. In the past few months, I have attempted to curate an account of the history of our school, the people and events that made it what it is today. This article is a short segment of the very beginnings of the school.
Seth Dolgan, Class of 99’, went to DSA during its awkward period as a concurrent option at Manual High School. He went to his regular academic classes at Manual before being bussed over to Cole High School for his major, band.
He constantly felt the whiplash of going between worlds, a giant public high school with soccer fields for days to an insulated art school where dancers arabesqued, artists painted, and writers sulked within a singular hallway.
Toting around his Bari, Alto, and Tenor saxophones, his backpack, and sometimes a clarinet, balancing was a feat. He toted his instruments all around the city sometimes, going between schools to his dad’s work downtown.
After school, he says that the best place to hang out was the reverberating stairwell above the music room where he and his friends would improvise and “tell saxophone stories”, whatever that means.
Even when they moved to a full-time building, there was no shortage of places to hang out at. There always seemed to be a grassy knoll, he reflected. He also frequented the Chinese restaurant down the block with bulletproof glass and the old Twist and Shout.
His proudest moment here was when he got into a jazz band that actually did gigs and went to New York City with them. They played Duke Ellington with musicians playing on street corners and carried a big banner in a parade with the school’s name emblazoned in bold.
However, all this excitement came in the midst of a dizzying social climate. In April 1999, Dolgan rolled up to the school fashionably late one day to discover a dead silence. The parking lot was desolate, most spaces lying eerily vacant. “Was it a holiday?”, he wondered, trying to open locked doors in vain. The day was the 20th, and school was in fact in session; however, just a few minutes earlier, two high school seniors had opened fire at nearby Columbine high school. What followed was a national awakening about everything from high school cliques to teenage mental health, a horror that metastasized across the country from our very own state. Everyone in Seth’s graduating class was reeling from the shock, stepping off into the next stage of their lives as a country reckoned with the world they were inheriting.
When I asked Seth what he took with him from his time at DSA, he said he learned that he didn’t fit in musically with many people. But DSA wasn’t about conforming to a group. In his words, “Nothing will ever be like that again”.