Emily Griffith Technical College has long been a school without a traditional campus, but that will change soon.
The school, which is part of Denver Public Schools, is under contract to purchase Centennial Hall on the Mosaic Community Campus at 19th and Quebec in Park Hill for $11 million.
The 140-year-old building was previously home to private Episcopal academy St. Elizabeth’s School. The school closed at the end of this past school year, citing financial reasons. Before the academy, the building housed culinary school Johnson & Wales.
“Centennial itself and the campus, it feels like college, and I feel that thatap something that a lot of our learners maybe don’t feel necessarily in different buildings that we have currently,” said Emily Griffith President Sarah Heath.
The bulk of the school’s classrooms are at 1860 Lincoln St., an Uptown office building that doubles as the Denver Public Schools headquarters. It has other locations in Ballpark, Lincoln Park and a smaller building on the 25-acre Mosaic Campus.
The building will be sold by the nonprofit Urban Land Conservancy, which purchased the entire campus from Johnson & Wales in 2021. It then resold portions to Denver Public Schools, which expanded the Denver School of the Arts, and the Denver Housing Authority, which worked to convert the former dormitories into new housing. But ULC retained Centennial Hall.
Aspen Hall, which Emily Griffith obtained in that transaction as part of Denver Public Schools, will close for renovations at the end of the year. Those classes will move to Centennial Hall for the time being.
Long-term, Centennial Hall and the Mosaic campus will become the main hub for Emily Griffith, Heath said. The school plans to vacate three of its four floors on Lincoln Street, leaving only the student-run businesses on the ground level.
The transition could provide a nice savings to Emily Griffith’s 7,000 students. DPS documents estimate that those traveling to its existing Uptown location spend $40 to $60 a week to park.
“Once RTD is done on Colfax, thatap going to be a really great benefit for some of our learners to be able to physically get to us in a different way, too,” Heath said.
The Centennial Hall purchase is expected to close this fall, paid for out of Emily Griffith reserve funds.
Emily Griffith moved to Uptown in 2013 after spending its first century in downtown Denver at 13th and Welton, which is now a hotel.
Itap not lost on Heath that there’s a connection between her school’s namesake and founder, an early 20th-century Denver teacher, and the campus it will soon inhabit, which was founded as the Colorado Women’s College.
“In conversation with ULC, Emily Griffith was their ideal selection from an educator perspective, just because of the legacy of Emily Griffith herself, … someone who pioneered education as a woman in a time where that wasn’t necessarily the norm,” Heath said.
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