The East Side today: old houses, new energy, and the question of what comes next

East High is one of the strongest institutions on the East Side because it carries both age and emotional continuity. The East High Alumni Association says the school was founded in 1861, and Des Moines Public Schools’ history page says it began on the top floor of Bryant School at East 9th and Grand before later moving to Webster School and then into its first dedicated high-school building in 1891 near East 12th and Court.  That history matters because it ties East High directly to the earliest educational life of the city’s east side. Long before the current campus became familiar, East High was already moving with the growth of the neighborhood and the city. It was not dropped into a finished landscape. It grew up with one.  The current main building carries that continuity forward. The Des Moines Public Schools history page says the present main building was built in 1910, dedicated in 1911, and first occupied in 1912. That gives East High more than longevity. It gives it architectural and generational weight. Schools that last that long stop being mere service institutions and become repositories of memory.  The alumni association’s language makes that emotional role explicit. It highlights the school motto, “For the Service of Humanity,” and says the East High School Alumni Association is one of the oldest and largest high school alumni associations in the country. It also says the East High School Alumni Foundation was started in 1986 and now awards $200,000 or more in scholarships each year. That is not just nostalgia. That is organized intergenerational loyalty.  East High also appears directly inside the Capitol East neighborhood plan as a partner in youth volunteerism, mentoring, tutoring, and family engagement strategies. That detail is easy to miss, but it is important. It shows the school functioning not only as a place students attend, but as a community institution embedded in neighborhood improvement itself.  So East High belongs in this East Side package because it helps explain how a side of town reproduces itself emotionally across time. The fairgrounds bring the world in for 11 days. East High does quieter work: building memory, loyalty, and the feeling that east-side identity can be passed from one generation to the next and still mean something.