CONTEMPORARY NY
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Old Stuyvesant High School

architect

 

location

345 East 15th St.

date

 

style

Beaux-Arts

construction

 

type

Education

 

images

 

 

Stuyvesant High School is named after Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of New Netherland before the colony was taken over by England in 1664.

The school was established in 1904 as a manual training school for boys, hosting 155 students and 12 faculty. In 1907 it moved from its original location at 225 East 23rd Street to 345 East 15th Street, where it remained for the following 85 years. Its reputation for excellence in math and science continued to grow, and the school had to be put on a double session in the early 1920s to accommodate the rising number of students. In the 1930s, admission tests were implemented, making it even more competitive. During the 1950s, a $2 million renovation was done on the building to update its classrooms, shops, libraries and cafeterias. In 1969, 14 girls enrolled, marking the first co-educational year. Now, approximately 43 percent of students are female.

Stuyvesant High School moved downtown to 345 Chambers Street in Battery Park City, TriBeCa in 1992. The new ten-floor, $250 million building has 12 laboratories, a large cafeteria overlooking the Hudson River, 12 shops, multiple gymnasia, a 25-yard, six-lane swimming pool, over 450 computers on 13 networks, and a 26" color RCA television in almost every room. Moviegoers may be able to recognize the school from several scenes in the movie Hackers, filmed in November, 1994 using upperclassmen students as extras.

Shortly after the new building was completed, a bridge was built at a cost of $10 million to allow students to enter the building without having to cross the extremely busy and dangerous West Street. The bridge is now the primary method by which students enter the building, and many Stuyvesant students will have memories of crossing it twice a day.

notes

Dealing with A Crowd

by Ngozi Utti

345 East 15th Street is the address for over 1,500 students from 
Health Professions High School and two more schools occupying the fifth 
floor. I.C.E.(Institute for Collaborative Education) and P.S. 226 both 
share the fifth floor. It is ludicrous that the Board of Education has 
three schools packed into one building and does not think about how the 
students feel. This is a very big problem in 345th East 15th Street 
because it affects many students and staff negatively. 

Teachers like to teach small classes because they are easier to handle. 
Mark Benerofe, history teacher and girls basketball coach, states, “The 
smaller the class, the more work gets done more efficiently.” I agree 
with Mr. Benerofe based on my own experiences in overcrowded classes 
and the difference of the environment when there is a smaller class 
size. Tiffany Fontaine, fellow classmate and friend at Health 
Professions High School, claims that when classes are smaller, her 
learning capacity is heightened because her focus is on the teacher and 
the board instead of other distractions. The bigger the class is, the 
more frustration sets in because of the lack of concentration of fellow 
students. 

Overcrowded classes are not the only problem that affects students 
negatively at 345 East 15 Street. The schedules of gym periods with all 
three schools are very confusing. Since Health Professions occupies 80 
percent of the building, it gets first dibs on the big gymnasium, while 
I.C.E. gets the leftover time which is not much. Usually since the gym 
is taken up the entire day, I.C.E. gets the weight room whenever Health 
Professions is not using it. It seems like there is no problem, right? 
Wrong, since the three hundred-student body increase, the school has 
had to make more room for the new students by splitting up the 
overcrowded gym classes. The staff of I.C.E. is frustrated because it 
is constantly being moved around whenever Health Professions makes a 
program change or makes extra classes during its gym period. The kids 
in I.C.E. only get gym twice a week while Health gets gym four or five 
times a week.

The throng of kids at 345 East 15th street is overwhelming even for me, 
and I have been going to Health Professions for three years now. You 
would think that someone who has gone to the same school for that long 
would have gotten used to it by now, but I have not. Cramming 375 
students per floor for the first four floors and an extra 200-300 
students on the fifth floor really isn’t healthy for the student body 
learning environment. This negatively affects how students and staff 
work and in time, I hope that the staff in charge will be more 
responsible in making the learning environment more conducive to 
learning. 

Contact Information for Health Professions:
345 East 15 Street NY 10003
Telephone (212) 780-9175 Fax (212) 979-7261
E-mail http://www.healthprofl@yahoo.com/  

contact

nyc-architecture.com

links

http://hsforhp.tripod.com/pyesite/default.htm