The Spectator ● December 2, 2015
Page 7
Features
By Julia Ingram and Elizabeth Lawrence
A colossal white building loomed above us as we walked down East 15th Street in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park neighborhood. The building’s limestone facade was worn, and the thickly painted mint-green doors in the entranceway were typical of a public school, but its Victorian edifices and carefully carved grooves gave it a majestic aura. We ascended a marble staircase decorated with black and brass railings to a wide foyer with entrances to the gymnasium and auditorium balcony. To our left, there was a similar staircase that rose only to the second floor of the five-story building. From the top of that stairwell, we got a bird’s-eye view of the entryway
are the desks that are now found in the Museum Room (Room 229), a classroom in the current Stuyvesant building that is modeled after typical classrooms in old Stuyvesant. “You could just imagine that people had been sitting at that desk for decades. Going back to when Stuyvesant was an all-male school and you had to write with ink and old-style pens, it really made you appreciate the fact it was an old school with a history to it,” Beth Knobel (‘80) said. Knobel also recalled the cornerstone of the building to the west of the entrance—inscribed with the year “1904”—as a constant reminder of the school’s age. “You were a little thought in a larger history every time you walked in,” she said. This history was evident to
“A building just frames an experience; it’s the people who make the experience.” —Matthew Wang, alumnus (’93)
and a torrent of students filing in as they rushed to be on time to their first period classes. This entryway was as prominent for the first 86 generations of Stuyvesant students, who graduated from the old Stuyvesant building, as the TriBeCa Bridge and two-to-four escalator are for us. Much like every Stuyvesant student prior to 1992 did each morning, we continued down the second floor hallway, passing rows of bright blue lockers until we entered an English classroom. However, instead of being greeted by the familiar rows of smooth, tan desktops and navyblue metal chairs, the room was filled with what English teacher Walter Gern called “bomb-shelter type desks.” The wooden desks were drilled into the floor in perfect rows, the back of each chair attached to the desk behind it. A small inkwell lied at the top of the right hand corner of each chipped and graffitied desktop, a reminder of the time of the building’s construction—1904, a time long before Muji pens were the norm for taking notes. These
alumni from the first time they crossed the threshold of the building. “When I walked up to the marble steps of Stuyvesant and I looked up at the beautiful edifice, and I walked in and saw the big staircase and the picture of Peter Stuyvesant, I was sort of overcome with this feeling of being part of history,” recounted Anastasia Broikos (‘86) of her first time in the Stuyvesant building, at an open house for accepted students. Broikos’s story came to life once we walked into one of the inner staircases down to the basement. “The stairs were so incredibly grooved; every time I went up I thought of how many thousands of people have walked through [them],” she said. The light gray steps and cherry redpainted railing of the narrow stairwells sharply contrasted those of the entryway, but nonetheless spoke to the building’s antiquity. “Everything about the building was a constant reminder of how many had gone before you,” Broikos said. After climbing up the worn steps of these inner staircases,
outs included stoops of buildings across the street, a local deli called Tony’s, as well as chains such as Subway and Blimpie. The East Village was a seedy neighborhood during the ‘80s when many alumni, including Tara Allman (‘82) went to the school. Allman described the neighborhood as being “filled with drug addicts, homelessness, and filth.” Knobel also acknowledged the grittiness surrounding the school, and recalled there being riots in Tompkins Square Park. Overall, however, the neighborhood had a special place in her heart. “We didn’t really care. The whole area around the school was our playground,” she said. It wasn’t only their playground—it was also their food court. A myriad of places around the building satisfied different food cravings. “There were a lot of different cuisines. There was a real hodge podge of Polish food and Jewish food, Chinese food. And it was all much cheaper than Whole Foods,” Gern said.
different floors, and therefore had more space. But as a result, teachers from different departments didn’t have as much of an opportunity to bond as they had had in the old building. “People knew each other across departments more. It happens here too in different ways, but it was much more of a community of people,” Gern said. The administrative transition to the new building took place in the Fall 1992 semester, during which the pool and TriBeCa Bridge had not yet been completed. Now that Stuyvesant was actually going to have a pool, the prank that upperclassmen played on freshman at the old building, selling them “pool passes” was changed to the current “11th floor pool” joke. Students weren’t allowed to go outside for lunch until the spring, either. Meanwhile, three other schools took the place of Stuyvesant at the old building: the High School of Health Professions and Human Services uses the basement and the first to fourth
After being immersed in a neighborhood full of delis and liveliness, the new neighborhood on Chambers Street took some getting used to. It had more open spaces and fewer places to eat, and was mainly just grass. “It was a completely different world,” said Matthew Wang (‘93), who spent his senior year in the new building. The atmosphere of the new building was also completely different. Stuyvesant had moved there in order to reside in a new, technologically up-to-date building, and that’s exactly what it got. The new building’s modern facade, fully working escalators, Hudson River views, and sheer size was “a breath of fresh air,” Wang said. Light streamed through the windows, and the staircases were much airier than those of the old building, which Gern called “cage-like.” Different departments were divided up into
floors, while the Institute of Collaborative Education and P.S. M226 occupy the fifth. The days of the ancient, large building on 345 15th Street belonging to Stuyvesant may be gone, but it continues to be the beloved, unique building it has been since 1904. The current students use the building the way Stuyvesant students did for over 50 years—learning, hanging out, and laughing. The old Stuyvesant students laid in the grass in Stuyvesant Square, furiously tried to light their Bunsen burners in the labs, and chattered in the auditorium as they made the building their own, just as current Stuyvesant students adapted the half-floor, escalators, and Ferry’s as aspects of their daily school lives. Drawing from his experience in both buildings, Wang said, “A building just frames an experience; it’s the people who make the experience.”
Julia Ingram / The Spectator
Stuyvesant abandoned its Old Building in Gramercy Park in 1992. Its 111-year-old facade was adapted to the High School of Health Professions & Human Services, which occupies four of the building’s five floors.
designated either “up” or “down” to control student traffic, we reached classrooms and laboratories. It was here that we saw that the lived-in quality of the building was not always a good thing. The labs, which had been equipped with partially functional Bunsen burners and rudimentary microscopes, were one of the clearest indicators that an upgrade was needed. “We didn’t even have electricity for the microscopes. We just used ambient light to light our specimens,” biology teacher Marianna Reep said. On top of that, the building had accumulated filth over the years. “I wished it had been clean, which it was not,” Kate Dominus (‘89) said. She recalled an incident during her sophomore year in which she discovered a large cockroach on a staircase. This stairwell, located on the 16th Street side of the building, was a secluded area, and as Dominus described, “an absolutely fabulous place to avoid someone looking for you—or to make out with a boyfriend.” This stairwell led to the auditorium’s stage in the basement, where we could see an array of wooden chairs, tall columns, and black railways that matched the architectural style of the entrance. While most of the seating was found on the same level as the stage, most of the activity happened on the first-floor balcony. With ample open space behind the last row of chairs and sets of lockers, the balcony of the old building was analogous to the half-floor of the new building. “If you had a free [period], you would come to the balcony,” Dominus said. “You hung with your various cliques in [there], and there was a lot of clique intermingling.” Exiting the balcony and entering the adjacent door led us into a similar balcony-like structure overlooking the gym. However, this “balcony” was intended for use as a running track for physical education warm-ups, despite its occasional columns, which were before the track’s construction. “If you weren’t careful, you would go careening into a column. They had some padding on them, but it wasn’t a good atmosphere for running laps,” Knobel said. “That track—it was just bizarre,” Gern agreed. When we left the gym and walked through the basement hallway, passing the former Student Union, ARISTA, and Spectator offices, we walked up the steps to the lobby we had entered from, ascending yet another marble staircase with brass railings. However, the end of the railing seemed to have been cut off, leaving an opened brass tube. When we looked at the railing on the other side of the basement staircase, we noticed a familiar coiled banister ending. The other one is present within a Mnemonics cube: cubes in the school that showcase articles of Stuyvesant’s past. This cube is located on the second floor of the current Stuyvesant building. Once we were outside the building and walking through the surrounding neighborhood, we passed the park, called “Stuyvesant Square,” nearby. Stuyvesant students passed many hours there. “The park was our second home. We’re out in the park and the sun is shining, and we would lay around making fools of ourselves, hopping over fences and watching people play hacky sack,” Broikos said. Other hang-
Julia Ingram / The Spectator
Julia Ingram / The Spectator
345 15th Street: A Tour of the Old Stuyvesant
The Old Stuyvesant Building’s auditorium balcony was a popular spot for students to hang out during their lunch or free periods.