Two icons of Frederiksted’s past were brought together Saturday afternoon to create something for the future, as the refurbished Danish School was opened as the Arthur Abel Complex.
The Danish School has been a vital piece of the town’s history since it was built in 1799. But the structure was severely damaged by Hurricane Hugo in 1989, and became a moldering and neglected hulk, a grim reminder of the passing of years.
Then in 2006 the 26th Senate voted to restore the building and convert it to government offices. And they turned it into an honor to another figure from the past who helped build Frederiksted.
On Saturday, a crowd of about 300 joined together in the beautifully restored brick courtyard of the school, its Danish yellow face glowing in the sun, for a ceremony rededicating the building as the Arthur Abel Complex.
Frederiksted native Arthur Abel worked for the territory’s Public Works Department for 54 years, insuring the town had water, that its road were paved, that things worked. He even hung the Christmas lights each season, making sure everything was lit up both for the holidays and the Crucian Festival.
Abel, who died in 1985 at the age of 83, was represented by large contingent of his family – children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren – plus many old friends in the audience.
The Rev. George Franklin, a grandson of Arthur Abel, remembered his grandfather as a man "small in stature, but he stood strong and tall." Abel never attended college, Franklin said, but he knew how to do everything. He was always taking things apart to see how they worked, then putting them back together. And once he’d done so, he could always repair it.
"There was no engineer who could tell him how to do anything," Franklin said, and then roughening his voice he added, "because he was Arthur Abel!"
Gov. John deJongh Jr., who was on hand for the ceremony and who will have an office in the complex, called the project "the rejuvenation of the jewel of this island."
And by naming it for a local, self-made man who gave of himself for his community, the governor said, the legislators showed that "by instinct, by nature, by passion we are a very good community."
Orrin Arnold, an alumni of the Danish School, told the assemblage what it was like to be educated there. He started at the school as a first grader in 1942, and remembered teachers, the school nurse, friends, lunches and the principal. Especially the principal — a Mr. Brown, who was the one who administered punishments. He had a saying, Arnold recalled, "that what you didn’t learn with your ear, you learned with your …" Arnold then let the sentence hang, and the audience filled in the blank (hint — it rhymes with ear) and laughed.
The building’s long history, dating back to Danish colonial days, years as a hospital and a school, set Senate President Louis P. Hill to thinking about what legacy current Crucians might leave behind.
"We have an enormous responsibility on our shoulders, to create institutions that will last 300 years," he said.
"We are here such a brief time. What we do goes beyond us, and we will be judged by what we leave behind."
