Biography|Robert Shaye — The Wyoming Avenue School Whose Original Building Is Gone

People meet Robert Shaye as the founder of New Line Cinema, the company that put Freddy Krueger and Middle-earth into multiplexes.

The first public building that put a diploma in his pocket stood on this lot at 17525 Wyoming Avenue, on Detroit's near-northwest side.

Samuel C. Mumford High School opened on this ground in the early 1950s, after wartime delays. A Detroit Free Press photograph from September 1949 already shows the new plant going into service. Wikipedia and later school histories date the formal opening to September 1952.

Shaye was born in Detroit in 1939, the son of Dorothy and Max Mendle Shaye. His father ran a supermarket and painted. His mother had come from Russia. Alumni directories list him with Mumford's class of 1956.

The school he walked was not the one a visitor finds now.

The original powder-blue limestone building, designed by McGrath and Dohmen, was demolished in the summer of 2012. A new 239,900-square-foot school rose on the old athletic field at the same Wyoming Avenue address and opened that August.

The pin is the site, not a surviving classroom.

What the 1950s building did was ordinary and decisive. It sat in a neighborhood that still held a large Jewish student body, and it sent Shaye on to a business degree at the University of Michigan.

The supermarket training film he made for his father's Big Bear Market in 1955 already pointed the same way. The University of Michigan finding aid for his papers dates that first piece of film work to his mid-teens, while he was still a Detroit schoolboy.

Stand on Wyoming Avenue and the continuity is the address, not the masonry.

Photo: Stefan Servos, 2003, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons