One Building, Three Lives: Jones High, Callahan Elementary, and the Center That Carries Both Names
At 101 N. Parramore Avenue, one brick building was Orlando's only high school for Black students, then its only elementary school closed by desegregation, and is now the Dr. J. B. Callahan Neighborhood Center. Its story, and its 2025 state marker.
3 minute read
At 101 North Parramore Avenue stands a red-brick building that has been, in sequence, a high school, an elementary school and a neighborhood center — and at every stage, the beating heart of Parramore. The Dr. J. B. Callahan Neighborhood Center is where Orlando’s Black history of education is written into a facade, and in February 2025 the state finally put up a marker saying so. This is the story of that building, and of the two men whose names it carries.
Jones High School: the only door open
The building was raised in 1921–22 at the corner of North Parramore Avenue and West Washington Street, and opened for the 1922–23 school year as Jones High School. It was named for L. C. Jones, the longtime principal whose family donated the land. Under Jim Crow, Jones was the first and only high school for Black students in Orlando — the single door through which generations of Parramore’s future doctors, teachers, lawyers and musicians had to pass. The school’s roots run even deeper, to the first public school for African Americans in Orlando, formed in 1895; its first twelfth-grade class graduated in 1931. Jones was never only a school. It was the community’s cultural center, the place a segregated city could not keep its Black citizens from making excellent.
By 1950 the building was overcrowded, and attorney Paul C. Perkins, for the local NAACP chapter, sued the school board over the failure to provide equal accommodations. In 1952, Jones High moved west to its present home on Rio Grande Avenue — where it remains a living school, Tigers and all — and the old building began its second life.
Callahan Elementary, and a name that honored a doctor
The Parramore Avenue building became Callahan Elementary School, the only elementary school serving the Parramore community, named for Dr. J. B. Callahan. Callahan, who moved to Orlando in 1908, was the first Black doctor to open a medical practice in the city and the first African American doctor to practice surgery at Orange General Hospital, the forerunner of Orlando Regional Medical Center; his home and office stood at Parramore and Church, where he practiced until his death in 1947. The Callahan neighborhood itself carries his name. In 1970, in the desegregation era, Callahan Elementary became the only school in Orange County to close permanently because of desegregation — a distinction that says more about that era’s costs, and who was made to pay them, than any textbook paragraph.
The center today
The site was repurposed as a community center and renamed the Dr. J. B. Callahan Neighborhood Center in 1987, its front facade retained from the original 1921 Jones High building. It remains a working cornerstone: recreation, after-school and senior programming, and a home for the Parramore Kidz Zone’s Saturday learning programs run with UCF’s education students. On February 15, 2025, the city, District 5 Commissioner Shan Rose, the Callahan Neighborhood Association and former students unveiled a state historical marker at the center commemorating both the original Jones High School and Callahan Elementary.
The center also carries a quieter memorial at its entrance: the L. C. Jones Memorial, honoring the principal whose family’s land made the school possible. Stand there a moment. Between the memorial, the retained facade and the 2025 marker, this one corner holds the neighborhood’s educational autobiography — a school built because a family gave land, a doctor honored because he healed the neighborhood that named a district for him, and a center that still opens its doors every morning to Parramore’s children and elders, on the same ground, a century on.
Visit it as part of the full Parramore circuit — the Wells’Built Museum on South Street, lunch at Nikki’s Place, everything pinned on our Orlando Top Spots Map, and the whole picture assembled in our Parramore guide. A community center with a school in its bones and a doctor in its name: there are worse definitions of what this neighborhood has always been for itself.
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