https://www.westword.com/news/former-denver-school-deaf-blind-historical-landmark-40927883/

Beer Garden’s past as a school for the deaf and blind could earn historic designation

The school's path to becoming a historic site is steeped in both positivity and negativity.

The Evans School, the only school to teach Deaf students, back in 1904.

Deaf children were once punished at the Evans School for using their hands to speak. Now, patrons raise pints where silence was once enforced.

That troubling history could soon change the school’s designation on the National Register.

Built in 1904, the old school at 1115 N. Acoma St. is now occupied by Schoolyard Beer Garden, but its longstanding history with serving the deaf, blind and others with physical disabilities has led to History Colorado and Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind proposing a National Register of Historic Places nomination amendment.

While the school is already on the National Register, the amendment would change its significance from just being an old building. If passed by the Landmark Preservation Commission on Sept. 1, the recommendation will be forwarded to the Keeper of the National Register to be listed as a historic building under Education, in association with Social History: Deaf Community History and other similar areas of significance.

But the school’s path to becoming a historic site is steeped in both positivity and negativity.

“This National Register nomination is an excellent example of a nomination that grapples with difficult history, addressing history without minimizing the harms of the past,” Becca Dierschow, senior city planner for the Landmark Preservation and Community Planning and Development of the City and County of Denver, said in the ammendment request.

Dierschow went on to note that the school’s deep connection with oralism — the forbidding of sign language and the requirement of lip reading — supports the importance of placing it on the National Register.

Before the three-story, brick building became a beer garden, it was the only school in the city that taught people with physical disabilities, like deafness. But it didn’t teach sign language.

After the Civil War, education reformers pushed schools to drop “manualism,” or the use of sign language, and replace it with “oralism,” the exclusive use of speech and lipreading. Around 1860, lipreading and speech were added to curricula all over the country, including at the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind in Colorado Springs when it was established in 1874.

In 1880, the International Congress on Education of the Deaf (ICED) in Milan even declared that oralist education was superior to sign language education, leading to a resolution that banned sign language in Deaf schools.

The idea was that using sign language would slow down student learning. Even famous figures like Alexander Graham Bell (ironically, the creator of the telephone) proclaimed that speech was essential, according to the Disability History Museum.

“This pedagogy was focused on integrating Deaf students into ‘mainstream’ society rather than understanding their needs and primary form of communication,” Dierschow reported.

A 2018 article in the Maternal and Child Health Journal by researcher Wyatte C Hall claimed that not teaching Deaf children sign language can lead to cognitive delays and mental health difficulties. “Altogether, a fundamental and irreversible biological impact — on the brain and on healthy development — appears to occur when an accessible language is not provided by a certain early time period in brain development,” he wrote.