Just a couple of weeks ago, two filmmakers slipped into the historic and huge (225,000-square-foot) Spingarn High School, located off Benning Road in Washington’s northeast quadrant. They recorded on video the decay of a building that the city government has let rot for seven long years.

Built in 1952 as a segregated school for African American children two years before the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the building was shuttered by the city government in 2013, citing declining enrollment and plans for a vocational school that never materialized. Seven long years later, the plan came to nothing.

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