The High School of Music & Art

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The High School of Music & Art in Manhattan, New York City was started in 1936 by Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia, an event he described as “the most hopeful accomplishment” of his administration^[1]. In 1984 Music & Art and its sister school, the School of Performing Arts High School, were merged into a new school, the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts at a new building in the Lincoln Center area of Manhattan.

Music & Art boasts many notable alumni and many graduates of the school regularly attend reunions organized by the Alumni & Friends of LaGuardia High School of Music & Arts and Performing Arts.

The building that once housed the High School of Music & Art is located in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Harlem on the campus of the City College of New York. The building now houses the A. Phillip Randolph Campus High School, a "magnet school" of the New York City Department of Education.

The 1924 gothic revival building won status [1] as a landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1977. The building was designed by William H. Gompert, Architect & Superintendent of School Buildings for the New York City Board of Education, to house the New York Training School for Teachers. The Training School became the New York Teachers Training College from 1931 to 1933. That school was abolished during the Depression when there was a surplus of teachers for the city's school system, and Mayor LaGuardia used the opportunity to create the High School of Music & Art.

Architecturally, the building blends in with the older gothic revival buildings of the City College campus, designed by noted architect George Post around 1900 to create a setting that came to be known as “the poor man’s Harvard.”

Music & Art graduates often refer to the building as "The Castle," a reference to the design of its gothic towers, and the decorative gargoyles done in a quirky and playful style that the Landmarks Commission report describes as “finials in the shape of creatures bearing shields.” The tower rooms have dramatic acoustics, which Music & Art used as choral practice rooms. The large gymnasium features large Tudor-arch-shaped windows on two sides that at certain times during the day stream sunlight into the room. The auditorium has excellent acoustics, and features diamond-shaped amber windows that during daylight cast a warm glow on its dark wood interior. The iron ends of the auditorium seats have a casting with an image of the Tudor window arches in the gymasium.

According to the Landmark Commission report, this was not an expensive building for its time, and many of the structural components (like the staircase bracings in the stairwell) were left exposed to save money. Yet lots of thought went into humanizing the space and creating a good environment for learning, with plenty of natural light and air, expansive collaborative spaces, and lots of playful decoration thrown in for good measure:

“The five- and six-story (plus basement and central tower) L-shaped New York Training School for Teachers/New York Model School was designed in an abstracted contemporary Collegiate Gothic style and clad in limestone and mottled buff-to brown iron-spot brick, with large window bays filled with unusual folding-casement steel sash windows. Exterior articulation, divided vertically by pavilions, buttresses, and square towers, also differentiated the model school and training school portions, as well as a 'churchlike' wing housing an auditorium above which is a gymnasium.”

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Website of the Alumni & Friends of LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts
• 1977 New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission Report on the old High School of Music & Art Building that now houses the A. Phillip Randolph Campus High School (pdf-format file).