FALL RIVER — With just days until Lizzie Borden’s elementary school can be legally demolished, the Preservation Society of Fall River has one last hope of swaying the building owner to save the property with an online petition signed by more than 1,500 people.

The N.B. Borden School, a brick school house that dates to 1868, is slated for demolition on or after Friday, Oct. 18.

Preservation Society member Alex Silva said the petition shows the support of the community and neighborhood in saving the structure. He hoped it would “maybe change his mind.”

Owner Kevin Santos purchased the building and property, 45 Morgan St., in 2012 for $5,000. His plan was to renovate and construct apartments in the building and use the lot for parking spaces.

He told The Herald News recently that he worked hard to try to save the building, but that it wasn’t financially feasible.

Santos said the cost to build 12 units would amount to roughly $3 million to $5 million, and that it wasn’t possible when figuring current rents of $1,100 to $1,200 per month, plus taxes, water, insurance and other expenses.

Santos plans to raze the building to create 110 parking spaces, some of which will be rented to nearby businesses. He was uncertain if any structures would be built in the future.

Silva said the Preservation Society was against Santos’ decision, and believes the city should have done more to hold the owner to their plans to preserve the structure.

“People are interested in historic properties and they want transparency in these dealings,” Silva said.

Silva said the Preservation Society is proposing a couple of new city mandates to help save buildings in the future.

The society wants to extend the demolition delay from six to 12 months for city-owned buildings, and to place deed restrictions on certain historic properties at the time of sale.

Silva said it would be “another level of checks and balances” in preserving historic structures.

The online petition started in May, and had a resurgence over the past couple of weeks with more signatures added.

The school opened in 1868 as the Morgan Street School during a wave of new school construction in the city. The cost to build the school was $17,008.21, according to city documents.

Lizzie Borden was 8 years old at the time. She attended the school from the third to eighth grades.

The structure is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

It was built in the Second Empire style with a mansard roof and red pressed brick walls. It was the “key structure” for the “Ridge Street subsection” of the Corky Row neighborhood, according to city documents.

It said the school was built during the city’s “peak prosperity” and followed the 1863 abolition of the earlier system of district schools. It had “great influence in training the early civic and industrial leaders of Fall River.”

The document said there were a series of four single-story frame cottages, used as classrooms and heated by stoves, across the rear of the lot behind (south of) the school.

The building was later named for the city’s third mayor, Nathaniel Briggs Borden.

The school was also the location of the girls’ division of Diman Vocational School, a part-time system of practical education that offered courses in manual training to men and boys, and in-home management and nursing to girls.

It is the only surviving example of a brick mansard school, according to city documents.

The N.B. Borden School closed at the end of the school year in 2007.

Silva said historic buildings are a benefit to neighborhoods and the city for their historic significance, and can promote culture and fuel economic development.

He said the “Lizzie Borden” name could have been harnessed as “another avenue for economic development.”

Lizzie Borden is internationally known as the possible murderess in the Fall River hatchet slayings of her father and step-mother Andrew and Abby Borden on Aug. 4, 1892.

The case remains unsolved.

Email Deborah Allard at dallard@heraldnews.com.

