Hard Times, p. 20
VOLUME 5, NUMBER 01
THE WEST SIDE’S COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER
SEPTEMBER 5 - 18, 2012
CPC eyes evolved Chelsea Market scenario
Photo by William Alatriste, New York City Council
Like the bike lane tree pits they beautify, the accomplishments of our own Chelsea Garden Club keep growing. On August 22, the group was summoned to City Hall — where Speaker Quinn and Senator Tom Duane presented them with a proclamation honoring their work. For more info on the club, see page 9.
BY SCOTT STIFFLER The City Planning Commission (CPC) emerged from its August 20 review session having largely solidified design, preservation and community benefit scenarios under which Jamestown Properties would be granted the Special West Chelsea District (SWCD) zoning variances necessary to vertically expand Chelsea Market. As Chelsea Now went to press, the CPC was expected to vote on the matter at a public meeting scheduled for 10am on September 5 (at 22
Read Street). After submitting its non-binding recommendation, the City Council will have 50 days to issue its own verdict on Jamestown’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) application. No recent Manhattanbased ULURP to come before the council has been rejected outright — making it likely that the Jamestown application will be approved, albeit in an amended form that reflects an evolved vision of the project arrived at over months of scrutiny by Community Board 4 (CB4), Manhattan Borough
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Avenues: The World School to open local, go global BY WINNIE McCROY On September 10, Avenues: The World School opens the doors of their flagship New York campus — located on Tenth Avenue and 25th Street, in a 10-story, former Cass Gilbert warehouse. Chelsea Now recently took a tour of their 10-story, $75 million campus, and discussed the private school’s K-12 amenities, educational philosophy and bilingual immersion teaching strategy. For the inaugural class of 725 students (from nursery school to high school), the question remains as to whether Avenues’ innovative, global approach to education will measure up to stalwarts like Horace Mann and Dalton School. “We don’t subscribe to the theory that there is one best school. There are a lot of good schools, and parents choose the one they think is right for their family. We hope to be right up there in the family of great schools in the city,” CEO Chris
Whittle told Chelsea Now during a recent tour. As workers installed walls of flat-screen digital televisions and educators practiced CPR on manikins, Whittle explained that the Avenues New York campus is only the first of 20 planned campuses across the globe, where students will receive a bilingual immersion education, focused on mastery in their chosen field. Whittle, an education and media entrepreneur who revolutionized the charter school movement by founding Edison Schools, began working on Avenues five years ago. After losing a significant backer during the economic crisis, the company raised $75 million from two private-equity firms. They dedicated $60 million to restoring the 215,000-square-foot campus, with the other $15 million invested in teacher recruitment and preparation and parent outreach. Equal parts charm and moxie,
Whittle shares his philosophy that a global, bilingual education is not the future, but our current reality. Beginning in nursery school, students will study in English and either Mandarin Chinese or Spanish via immersion education. In high school, they will be encouraged to study a third language. “Students will have two classrooms, with half their day in English, and the other half in either Chinese or Spanish. And they’re not learning about the language, they’re going to school in the language. They’re doing math and science in Chinese,” said Whittle, who insisted that this, as opposed to most school’s two-year foreign language classes, was the only way to have every child graduate bilingual. The new building houses nursery, lower, middle and high schools. Each boasts spacious classrooms flooded by natural light from the warehouse’s 7-foot windows, pristine cafeterias and a split-level com-
mons, an organizing area for that school. In elementary school, the commons is a small, elevated area for kids to stage productions. In high school, it is a spacious area kitted out with leather couches and individual cubicles for independent study, all overlooking the High Line. “By high school, kids will work half the day in class, and half the day on their own, independently,” said Whittle. “This will be a lot more like college than like what you and I think of as high school, when you sat in class all day long.”
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Whittle was visibly proud as he showed off the school, saying that Avenues was the largest private school building project in the history of the city. Noting that his construction crew had to bore through the single-floor model to make the commons bilevel, he also touted the campus’ solid bones. “This was a great old Chelsea building, and we tried to keep it very much in the vein of down-
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EDITORIAL, LETTERS PAGE 8
HEY SAILOR! PAGE 18