Vacant Former Special Education School Building in Buffalo NY
Buffalo Public School PS 24, Buffalo New York
Located at 775 Best Street in Buffalo, Erie County, New York, Buffalo Public School #24 (PS 24) was the first school to offer special education within the City of Buffalo school system. Beginning in the 1930s, PS 24 housed several "sight-saving" classes, and over the following decade the building not only became the headquarters of sight saving classes and courses for the blind but also for several programs designed for students with learning and intellectual disabilities, predating state and federal laws regulating education for all students with special needs. Prior to this era, children with special needs were often trained in separate school facilities or simply were not educated at all, so PS 24 played a key role in the integration of special education programs into the city school district.
Designed by local architect Charles Day (C.D.) Swan and completed in 1901, PS 24 combines elements of earlier school design from the late Victorian era with new and emerging scientifically based theories on school planning and function. The exterior of the building reflects a relatively elaborate, decorative Classical Revival scheme that seems akin to the high-style, individualistic schools common in Buffalo throughout the late nineteenth century. The building reflects considerations to fire safety, heating, ventilation, and interior lighting, all intended to provide students with a quality education and better provide for their safety; concerns that would become hallmarks of standardized school planning.
Over the course of the latter half of the nineteenth-century, the dramatic growth in the Humboldt Park neighborhood led to the establishment of PS 24, which occupied three different buildings near the corner of Fillmore and Best Streets from 1857 until 1976. The original PS 24 building opened in 1857 and was temporarily located at the southwest corner of Best and Adams Streets while construction finished that year on the three-story rectangular school building on the corner of Fillmore and Best Streets. The second building used by the school was constructed in 1888 directly across Fillmore Avenue. That building is no longer extant, as it was demolished in 1955. In 1901, the district demolished the 1857 building and constructed the present building at the corner of Fillmore Avenue and Best Street.
The original 1857 school opened to accommodate the growth in Buffalo's East Side. In 1860 there were 16,291 residents in Wards 6 and 7, which included parts of the Fruit Belt, Cold Springs, and the northern half of "Polonia," between Broadway Avenue and Genesee Streets. By 1880, the proximity of Humboldt Parkway and Belt Line caused the population for the two wards to balloon to 36,495, leading to the construction of a long, two-story (with basement) school just across Fillmore Avenue in 1888. In 1890, the population for the two wards had doubled once more to 73,415, leading not only to the re-opening of the 1857 school but the construction of a one-story annex next to the 1857 school in 1893, and the use of the nearby "Floss Tavern" as an annex for two years. In 1900, Wards 6 and 7 were divided into seven new Wards, and the population for the wards around PS 24 (11th, 14th and 16th) was 46,583.
In 1901, this rapid growth and the increased demand for more classrooms led to the demolition of the original 1857 school (and its 1893 annex) to make way for the extant three-story building. While the City of Buffalo allocated $70,000 of bond money in 1900 for a new PS 24 school building, actual building costs neared $90,000 by 1903. In 1931 proposals were put forward to expand PS 24 with additional classroom space. After a few months of debate, Mayor Charles Roesch rejected the proposed expansion when it became clear that the school's attendance did not warrant an addition and it was not constructed. The school had a capacity of 1,384 pupils and only 942 in attendance.
During its first thirty years of operation, PS 24 featured the same curriculum as other schools in the city. However, by the 1930s PS 24 had developed into the Buffalo school district's primary location for educating children with special needs. These programs started with sight saving classes for the visually impaired and transitioned in 1960 to educating students with intellectual disabilities. The school had ample space to educate special needs students who were bussed to the facility from across Buffalo. Importantly, the design of PS 24 led educators to believe it was a modern and scientifically advanced institution of learning, the perfect setting for educating children with special needs.
Buffalo Public School #24 housed several innovative programs from at least 1930 through the school's closure in 1976, including sight-saving classes, braille instruction lessons, and classes for students with intellectual disabilities, all of which predated state legislation requiring their implementation. The use of the programs at PS 24 reflect the changing views regarding disabilities in the United States, as well as the evolution of educational programs to treat students with special needs.
Prior to 1900, most students with disabilities (both physical and mental) were treated at individual facilities across the country, such as the State Institution for Blind Students located in Batavia, which opened in 1866. In North America and Europe the prevailing nineteenth century belief held that blind, deaf, and intellectually disabled children were "biologically and morally inferior," and as a result many of the earlier institutions were religiously based. Educators created raised print letters for the blind and sign language for the deaf. In addition, they established schools and institutions to help the blind, deaf, and cognitively and intellectually disabled. However, their practices "clearly reflected the traditional perceptions of disabled persons as charity recipients. While the institutions provided educational services, they clearly were administered wholly as public charities." This base assumption of unequal ability led nineteenth-century schools for the impaired to focus on spiritual improvement and vocational training rather than general education. Rather than nurture potential, these schools focused on ensuring that their pupils would be capable of contributing on some positive level to society and the workplace.
Dr. Margaret Winzer, a researcher and historian specializing in special needs and disabilities, argued that due to the emphasis on vocational training and developing children with disabilities into productive industrial workers that:
This focus on trade education separated students with disabilities from public schools. The vocational regimen was combined with an intense emphasis on religious studies rendering the "handicapped" charity school a much different institution from the public school system, which focused on literacy and mathematics. Even blind students were trained for the working world. Blind students from the lower echelons of society went to school and, "focused solely on learning handicraft work … [they] manufactured doormats from Manila hemp in looms, produced various kinds of basketwork, made mattresses, and fabricated moccasins." In the twentieth century as attitudes changed and society began moving to better integrate those with disabilities, these views changed and education began to be administered with greater equality to all students regardless of disability or impairment, particularly those with seeing and hearing impairments.
One of the biggest factors in this shift was the enforcement of compulsory education for all children as well as the passage of stricter child labor laws. New York State passed stronger compulsory education laws in 1894, and due to the influx of children with disabilities, by 1900, Buffalo and New York City began creating classes for "retarded or crippled students." The creation of these courses signaled a shift from the previous morality based programs to more progressive standards. As Winzer stated, "Institutions became schools, albeit separate and special, with strictly educational goals." This model changed yet again to a more integrated system as views, especially regarding blind and deaf students, changed. Although advocacy for the placement of deaf and blind students in regular classrooms gained a small degree of momentum in the nineteenth century, it wasn't until compulsory school laws were passed that the movement for greater integration of students with disabilities in public schools began in earnest.
Once the integration began to be implemented, two models were advocated. Alexander Graham Bell encouraged full integration of the deaf and blind into 'normal student' classrooms. Due to a combination of factors, including untrained educators and a general lack of material aides for students with disabilities, Bell's method failed. The alternative and more successful method was the creation of special classes within the public school, which provided more focused attention to students with disabilities. In creating segregated classes within the regular school system it is interesting to observe the ideas that governed the thought process of educators:
Between 1910 and 1920, several key developments occurred regarding classes for the seeing-impaired. Cleveland was one of the first cities in the country to offer a class for the blind in 1911, providing textbooks and large blackboard instruction to students under the direct tutelage of "the school oculist." In 1913, Cleveland broadened this program, and removed all "semi-seeing" students from the blind classes for special classes designed for conservation of vision or "sight-saving classes." In the same year, New York City began its first "experimental" sight-saving classes, but the demand was so high that it immediately increased the number of classes offered. As a result, in 1917, New York State passed statutes requiring city and union free school districts to identify children with "physical defects" or "retarded mental development" and to provide special classes for groups of ten or more, and in 1924 state aid was authorized for such classes for the first time.
Buffalo held its first sight-saving class in April of 1918, with a class for eleven students as PS 18. The class was intended for "the child whose eyes are unfit to the ordinary work required in school. The teacher explains and reads to the children, saving their eyes, and enabling the pupils to continue in their regular grades." Buffalo expanded the program and operated two such classes by 1924. In 1925, an article in the Buffalo Courier titled, "Preventing Physical Waste," noted that one of the leaders in the National Committee for the Prevention of Blindness traveled to Buffalo and reported that there were,
Her arguments were echoed two years later in 1927, when another article noted that nearly one-in-twelve children suffered from defective vision "to such a degree as to constitute a handicap," and one in 500 were such serious cases that they could not justifiably be taught alongside their peers. Since it cost roughly ten-times as much to educate a student with severe impairment, there were only 264 sight-saving classes in the country in 1927, well below the recommended number of 5,000.
While it is unclear whether PS 24 offered sight-saving classes for elementary students prior to 1930, in that year the district's first sight-conservation class for high school students was offered at PS 24. Additionally, in the same year, thirty students in grades four through eight were enrolled in sight saving classes at PS 24. By 1934, Buffalo had increased its sight-saving classes from two to at least five, with classes for students with impaired vision at Schools #31 and #18 and three classes serving 72 severely impaired and blind students held at Public School #24, the "local headquarters of sight-saving classes." PS 24 emphasized integrated classes along with the sight-saving techniques. Students would do oral exercises with their classmates, before heading to special courses where reading and writing subjects would be taught with larger fonts and bigger writing implements. Starting in the fourth grade, students were trained to write on typewriters and were given exam questions written in a large font called bulletin. The school even offered braille classes for high school students. The Buffalo Association for the Blind gave Dr. F. Park Lewis a tour of the school in 1934; Lewis was a noted ophthalmologist who had several published books about child blindness, including, Infant Blindness, or Opthalmia Neonatorum, and What to Do For Blind Children.
In 1940, the program at PS 24 had evolved to include six classes, with bussing for students from all over the city that were selected through the district's screening process. The school grouped first through eighth grades into four classes with two grades each (first and second grade, third and fourth, etc.), and additionally offered a class for "visually handicapped children with mental retardation," as well as a final braille-only class for students "technically and totally blind." Many of the classes provided accommodation for children with severe, but recoverable, near-sightedness, allowing them to pass from traditional classrooms to the sight-saving classes and ultimately to "regain normal or near-normal vision by adulthood." For other students, instruction was completely in the sight saving classrooms, where they began learning braille in fourth grade, mastering it by the sixth grade, including in the use of braille typewriters.
Although early laws regarding special education were directed largely toward students with physical disabilities such as blindness, deafness, and physical handicaps (usually related to contracting polio), many school districts did offer classes for students with cognitive and intellectual disabilities as well. In 1919, Buffalo had "Classes for Mental Defectives" in twelve schools for 756 students, although it's unclear whether there was a true program of study, or just a mechanism to remove these students from the classroom. Literature from the era gives few clues to the seriousness of education, simply saying, "Children are kept until compulsory education requirements are met, or until removed to some other institution." In the 1940s, New York State more actively addressed the higher numbers of students with intellectual disabilities that were entering the school system as a result of compulsory education laws. In 1944 a new law declared that the Education Department should, "Stimulate all private and public efforts designed to relieve, care for, cure, or educate physically handicapped children" and coordinate its efforts with other government programs." The law was extended in 1957 to encourage the inclusion of children with intellectual disabilities into these efforts as well and enforced in 1961 with a law that required schools districts hold classes for all children with special needs.
With the passing of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965 (ESEA), several of the innovative programs implemented at Public School #24, including mandatory bussing of students with special needs to facilities that could accommodate them, became mandated at the Federal level for the first time. Unfortunately, it wasn't until the passing of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975 (and key revisions in 1986 and 1991) that many of the other features, including courses for students typically excluded from education were mandated across the country. In Buffalo, the passing of ESEA allowed the city to tap into funding through "Title III," relating to supplementary education centers "which are innovative and experimental," to create a new "Demonstration Center" in Public School 28 for teachers across the city to learn how to instruct children with intellectual disabilities. This allowed many schools to offer instruction for their students in neighborhood schools rather than bus them to PS 24. While PS 24 continued to offer Special Education classes until 1976, when it was closed, its significance as the primary center for Special Education in the Buffalo school district diminished after 1965.
PS 24 continued to operate and offer special education classes up until 1976, when it was closed as part of Buffalo Plan for Desegregation. After the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown Vs. The Board of Education, a similar lawsuit was filed in Buffalo due to the highly segregated nature of the district in the early 1970s. Prior to this, the school district attempted to solve the issues of segregation in 1967 with the development of the Quality Integrated Education program, which allowed students in the inner city (downtown) to attend predominantly white schools in the city's streetcar suburbs. Although popular, in 1973, Judge John T. Curtin ruled that the school district had failed to meet acceptable levels of integration, and required that all schools be desegregated on a percentage basis.
Joseph T. Murray, Associate Superintendent of Instructional Services, devised the Buffalo Plan for School Desegregation as a result of the 1973 ruling. Implemented in 1976, it required an extensive bussing program, and reworking of current infrastructure. As a result of the plan, twenty schools were closed, including Public School #24, which reopened as "Public School 59" (the original PS 59 on Glenwood also closed in 1976), part of the Science Magnet School. The Science Magnet School constructed a new building in 1982 immediately adjacent to the science Museum, as well as an annex at Buffalo Zoo at 1 North Meadow Drive and operated out of all three buildings (including former PS 24) until it closed the 1901 Best-Fillmore building in 2002.
Architect Charles Day Swan (1855-1914)
Charles Day Swan, known as C.D. Swan, was a notable Buffalo-based architect whose extant works can still be seen throughout the city. Between 1873 and 1881 Swan worked as a draftsman in the architectural office of Richard Waite, beginning when he was only eighteen years old. After 1881 Swan broke off and began his own practice. One of Swan's first major commissions was a brick store located on Main Street between Huron and Chippewa Streets (no longer extant: site of Fountain Plaza). Additionally, Swan was the architect for PS 9 (1889) and the United Presbyterian Church on Richmond Avenue (1889).
Following his early successes, Swan expanded his firm and took on partners on multiple occasions. The first partnership with Newman Gardner lasted only a year; however, between 1884 and 1888, then later in 1894, Swan formed a successful partnership with John Falkner. The pair designed numerous buildings and specialized in "artistic dwellings." However Swan and Falkner did not limit themselves solely to private dwellings, also designing commercial buildings, public schools, and churches.
Charles Swan proved himself capable of attracting national attention to his work. Twice, houses he designed were featured in issues of the Scientific American Architect's and Builder's Edition with color plates to highlight the features of Swan's designs. Later, in 1890, Swan entered a competition for the right to design the Erie County Savings Bank. Although his design was not selected, it was featured in American Architect. Developers in Canada also sought out Swan and twice he was tasked with constructing massive hotels around Lake Erie. The most prolific period of Swan's career was during the 1880s and early 1890s, and following 1896, Swan designed far fewer buildings, although a number of his structures from this period (including the Zink Building and PS 24) still stand. Charles Day Swan passed away on May 4th. 1914 in Cambridge Massachusetts. He was buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery and received a small obituary in The Buffalo Express. Although Swan's later years lacked the energy of his busy period in the 1880s and 90s, he nonetheless contributed a number of beautiful structures to the skyline of Buffalo, New York.
PS 24 features ornate styling that balances Late-Victorian ideals with the emerging standardized school designs. Although the increased standardization of school design would also lead to more utilitarian and simplified Neoclassical and Colonial Revival designs by the 1920s, Swan incorporated a great deal of flourishes and detailing even as he adhered to growing national standards in school designs. The facade in particular shows this balance between ornate late-Victorian school designs and the more utilitarian twentieth-century design, with a center entry beneath a tall arched brick and stone entry and a projecting bay up to a parapeted cornice with inlaid stone bullseye. While still maintaining turn-of-the-century standards, such as blank elevations on the east and west elevations of each end of the "I," the building is capped with an ornate denticulated projecting metal cornice supported by metal brackets with decorative leaded glass windows throughout, before terminating with a projecting brick cornice that has projecting sections in line with the pilasters below.
History of Schools in Buffalo, New York, 1837-1901
In 1837, Buffalo became the first city in New York to enact legislation to create a public school system. This feat was organized by Oliver Gray Steele, who had moved to Buffalo ten years prior. Working as president of the Buffalo Waterworks and manager of the Buffalo Gaslight Company, Steele also served as superintendent of schools for three different terms. By 1839, enrollment in city schools had increased from 179 to 1,500. The city encouraged further enrollment by making education free to all children under the age of sixteen. In order to facilitate this new system, Superintendent Steele divided the city into fifteen school districts and paid for its implementation through increased taxation, setting up Buffalo as one of the earliest cities possessing a free public school system.
The Buffalo school system expanded again when the city annexed Black Rock in 1853 and experienced rapid population growth due to the city's industrialization near the end of the twentieth century. Throughout its first sixty years, the Buffalo school district went from serving the needs of 1,500 students in six schools to educating 56,000 in sixty schools." In 1893 the city took another progressive step forward by providing textbooks, free of charge, to the student body.
The combination of a more favorable school environment, the increasing population of Buffalo, and increased educational requirements from the state prompted two major building phases for Buffalo city schools. The first era lasted from 1881-1910 and saw the construction of 43 new elementary schools. The second phase lasted from 1921-1930 and led to the construction of twenty-four new buildings and twenty-six additions onto already existing structures." Enrollment peaked in the 1930s when Buffalo claimed 95,000 enrolled students. That number would decline with overall population in the following years.
The 1890s in particular was a time of exceptional school growth, coinciding with the expansion of Buffalo. Industrial growth and an influx of immigrants necessitated the aforementioned first major wave of school construction. Prior to this expansion, classes were taught in rented spaces or annexes as schools struggled to accommodate a growing student body with ever diversifying needs. As a response to this, the city initiated construction in 1893 of seven new schools, each located south of Hertel Avenue.
Superintendent Steele helped create the system that would carry Buffalo's education into the twentieth century, and his successors would implement practices mirroring national trends in education reform. Administrators all over the country were adjusting to a growing school population compelled by law to receive an education. Often these children were either not interested in classic education, or needed other ways to maintain interest in school.
New York State passed its first mandatory education law in 1853 but reenacted the legislation again in 1894 with stronger attendance laws. As mandatory attendance laws developed, schools needed to cater to a wider range of student needs, prompting a diversification of the types of spaces found in schools, which had to contend with the more than doubling of the state's student population, which went from 34,058 in 1894 to 88,675 in 1904, and 143,865 in 1910.
This dramatic increase in students also meant schools catered to children who previously would not or could not attend school (usually poor, immigrant, sick, or students with physical disabilities). This forced schools to accommodate a variety of students, not just the academically inclined. School designs began to incorporate bathing facilities for children who did not have running water, as well as lunchrooms for children to purchase food if they could not return home for lunch." Curricula were broadened to meet the educational needs of students beyond the typical Latin and English courses, and "college preparatory," "commercial," "general," "science," and "teachers" fields were all added as a way to cater to expanding student bodies.
Buffalo's Humboldt Park Neighborhood
PS 24 is located in the Humboldt Park neighborhood, an area that developed rapidly near the end of the nineteenth-century on Buffalo's East Side. The neighborhood grew quickly after the Civil War due to several factors, including: its proximity to the bustling Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood; its selection as the location of Olmsted's Humboldt Parkway and Parade; and industry along the railroads to the north, east, and west. Located on the eastern half of the city, the Humboldt Park neighborhood emerged out of the development of the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood to the south, and the "Fruit Belt" neighborhood to the west. It is centered along Fillmore Avenue and is roughly bordered by the Kensington Expressway to the west (formerly Humboldt Parkway), Genesee Street to the south, the New York Central Railroad's Belt Line to the east, and Ferry Street to the north. The neighborhood was originally settled in the 1850s and 1860s by German families moving away from the increased commercial development occurring around Broadway-Fillmore and downtown.
Genesee Street and Fillmore Avenue were major thoroughfares in Buffalo. When surveyor Joseph Ellicott laid out the original plan for Buffalo (then named New Amsterdam) in 1804, he designed a radial street grid with "spokes" extending out from the central Niagara Square in every sub-cardinal direction. Genesee Street extended off Niagara Square from the northeast corner and was named Busti Avenue until 1826, when the road became a public highway with horse-drawn streetcars running along the street as early as 1864. Fillmore Avenue was surveyed as a public highway that would extend north and south of the city as early as 1831, and it was completed through the Broadway-Fillmore area in the late 1840s. When Frederick Law Olmsted was invited to Buffalo in the 1860s and 70s, the location at this key intersection, combined with the sparse population at the time, proved a great combination as he laid out his vision for the first "urban park system" in the United States.
Olmsted was invited to Buffalo in 1868, and over the course of the next three decades designed a four-component system, including the large primary park around a dammed Scajaquada Creek, a waterfront park at the mouth of the Niagara River, and "The Parade," the smallest of the three, but connected to both via long parkways. The Parade was located at the intersection of Best, Fillmore and Genesee Streets, and served as the terminating point of the largest of the city's new parkways. Unlike, "The Park," which consisted of a large open field ("The Meadow") and a 46 acre lake, the Parade was intended for more active recreation, featuring a parade ground, an area for children's games, and a grand refectory, the largest of the buildings designed by Calvert Vaux for the park system. The refectory, modeled after the beer gardens Olmsted had seen in Germany's public parks, was incredibly popular among the German community that emerged around the Park.
The neighborhood also benefited from its proximity to the New York Central Railroad's "Belt Line," a rail line that developed between 1871 and 1883 that encircled the city and passed through and around emerging neighborhoods. The Belt Line led to a rapid expansion of industry throughout Buffalo, creating new industrial and manufacturing nodes served by rail traffic throughout the city. The rail line connected portions of the former Buffalo and Niagara Railroad, the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, and the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway to form a complete loop around the city. The loop had nineteen stations spaced one mile apart and lead to the expansion of industrial facilities throughout the northern and eastern quadrants of the city. This allowed workers to travel from any residential enclave to factories on the other side of Buffalo.
The Parade's German influenced architecture likely appealed to much of the city, as well as the nearby residents. The German community was one of the first large immigrant groups to settle in Buffalo, and with 31,000 German born or second-generation residents they composed nearly 50 percent of the city's population by 1855. This community originally settled east of Main Street in the area known as "The Fruit Belt," due to the streets bearing names of different fruit trees. Many of the German immigrants were skilled craftsman, the community quickly prospered with the successful growth of the city during the mid-nineteenth century. As immigration continued after the Civil War, the predominantly Protestant initial settlers moved further eastward along Genesee Street. Subsequent waves of German immigrants were largely Roman Catholic.
The area around Genesee-Fillmore still bears the names of many of these early German families. Rich Street was named for Gaius B. Rich, founder of the Western Savings Bank; Wilson Street, named for Guilford B. Wilson, member of the Board of Trade, and Rohr Street, named after Mathias Rohr, President of Volksfreund, a Buffalo-German newspaper. Some of these early families began developing the land around their homes, including George Roetzer, who lived at Mills and B Street in 1870. An editor for Volksfreund, Roetzer began buying up land around Genesee and Fillmore, and by the time Olmsted and Vaux prepared their plans for "The Parade" the area was already rapidly subdividing and becoming another German enclave. The design for the refectory mimicked German beer gardens, and even the location of the Parade might have been chosen to win support from the German community for the park system as a whole. George Urban, owner of the George Urban Milling Company, owned a large tract of land just north of the new Parade, on which he laid out "Urban Street" and subdivided for development. Similarly, Simon Fougeron (who, like Urban, was a refugee from Alsace Lorraine) cut "Fougeron Street" through a large farm he maintained along Fillmore Avenue. In 1896 John Charles Olmsted redesigned the Parade, adding three axial water features, including a five-hundred-foot wading pool, named the Humboldt Basin, for general recreation. The redesign turned the military parade ground into a center of general recreation and the park was renamed Humboldt Park to reflect that change.
Building Description
The former elementary school known as Public School #24 (PS 24) is located on the East Side of Buffalo, New York, at the southeast corner of Best and Fillmore Streets in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. Directly across the street to the north is Frederick Law Olmsted's Humboldt Park, now named Martin Luther King, Jr. Park.
The area to the east and west is primarily residential with a housing stock dating to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. South of the school, Genesee Street, a primary traffic artery on the East Side, runs southwest to northeast and contains a mix of commercial buildings as well as vacant lots. The school itself faces the park to the north and occupies a half-acre parcel at 775 Best Street. It is built almost to the lot line at the front with an approximately ten-foot-deep grassy lawn to the west. The area directly to the east and south of the school is paved in asphalt and used as the property's own parking space.
Designed by architect Charles Day (C.D.) Swan, the school building was constructed in 1901 as part of a two-building campus. Although the earlier part of the complex has been demolished, the building alone is significant. It is I-shaped in plan and oriented north-south with the principal and rear elevations occupying the shorter bars of the "I" and the longer sides forming the side elevations. In style, the building is austere and stylized Neoclassical. It rises three stories in height over a raised basement and has a flat roof. The primary exterior material is red brick; however, the building also incorporates sandstone, terra cotta, and pressed metal details. On the interior, the building has a typical double-loaded corridor plan with staircases at each side and at the front of the building. In addition, almost all of the original features and finishes remain on the interior. Though some updates have been made to finishes in the past thirty years and the building has been empty since 2002, PS 24 is in a very good state of repair.
PS 24 is seven bays in width and eleven bays in length. The raised basement, set upon a short sandstone base, is clad in common bond brick and terminated by a rough-hewn sandstone belt course. At the first floor level, the brick is laid in a pattern that mimics rustication and is capped by a stone cornice. A rough-hewn sandstone sill course is present at the second floor. Stylized Doric brick pilasters define each of the bays in the second and third stories and have sandstone capitals which transition into a stone architrave wrapping the building. Above, a deep, denticulated, pressed-metal cornice wraps the building and has windows in the frieze and a pair of oversized brackets above each pilaster. A parapet three feet in height completes the elevations and breaks to respond to each of the pilasters below. Each of the window openings contains a pair of windows and, apart from those in the frieze, has a rough-hewn sandstone sill and lintel. The basement retains most of its original, two-over-two, double-hung wood sash windows. Those in the upper floors were replaced in the 1960s with double-hung wood sash with a three-over-three, horizontal light pattern. The full exterior of the building has been painted with red and pink on the brick, pale grey on the sandstone elements, and a deep red on the pressed metal cornice.
The primary facade facing Best Street is symmetrically composed of seven bays. Three regular bays as described above flank a slightly projecting and more articulated center bay. At the ground floor of the center bay is a double-story arch that encompasses the basement and first floors and contains the primary entrance to the building. It springs from rusticated piers with stylized capitals and has an archivolt intersected by voussoirs with a scrolled keystone at the center. A large spandrel panel divides the opening within, creating an arched, divided-light transom above and a double-door entry with sidelights below. Above the arch, paired, oversize brackets support a denticulated cornice. In the upper stories, the central bay is articulated with brick rustication and continuous sandstone sill and lintel courses. A Chicago-style window with molded brick mullions is present at the second and third floors. Small Chicago-style windows are also present in the frieze and are flanked by decorative stone paterae. The center bay is crowned by a slight pediment in the parapet with a carved oval plaque bearing the date of construction at its center.
The asymmetrical side elevation of PS 24 fronts onto Fillmore Street. Representing the longer middle bar of the I-shape, this elevation is composed of an eight-bay central portion framed by two-bay projecting pavilions. The northern pavilion is blank apart from framing pilasters at the corners while the southern pavilion contains two regular bays. In the central portion, the northernmost bay contains a projecting arched entryway at the ground floor. The brick arch springs off of simple brick piers with a stone frieze and cornice and has a voussoired brick archivolt above. Within the arched opening, a spandrel panel at the height of the frieze separates an arched, divided-light transom above from original wood double doors below. "Girls" is inscribed on the spandrel panel, indicating that this was the original entry for the school's female pupils. The projecting entryway is capped by a stone cornice. Above, Chicago-style windows light intermediate landings of an interior staircase.
The remaining seven bays are disposed three to each side of a blank, central bay in the same plane as the pilasters. Each of the three, flanking bays are identical and as described above.
The east elevation is nearly identical to the west elevation. On this side the entryway has "Boys" inscribed in the frieze and the center blank bay has a single window opening at each floor. In addition, there is a non-original, single-story, flat-roofed, CMU coal shed in the three northern bays; it has two flush steel doors on its eastern face.
The rear elevation is largely symmetrical. At the center is a slightly projecting central bay with a pair of window openings at each floor; on the eastern side, these have been filled in at the second and third floors. In the outer bays, a single window opening is present at each floor. The detailing is reduced on this elevation with a simplified cornice across all but the center bay and pilasters framing just the outside edges. At the ground floor, a single-story, flat-roofed, CMU addition has laterally expanded an original basement egress enclosure to the south. Its southern face has three, one-over-one windows set in a simple, jack-arched masonry opening.
As previously mentioned, PS 24 is I-shaped in plan and composed of a north-south central block, with two, smaller, east-west blocks at the ends. Each floor is arranged around a double-loaded corridor that bisects the building from north to south. In the central north-south block, the floor plans are flipped mirror images of one another. On the western side of the hall, a main stair in the northwest corner communicates with each floor as well as the Girls' entrance at grade. The remainder of the space is occupied by two classrooms with closets and a large airshaft located in between them. The plan on the east side of the hallway is similar. Here, the stair is in the southeast corner and two classrooms flank what was originally a large airshaft one bay in width and as deep as the classrooms. Additional classrooms occupy the corners of the northern east-west block, while the southern east-west block contains boys' and girls' bathrooms with adjacent coatrooms along their northern walls. Floorplans for the first through third floors are identical except for a slight variation at the first floor where a teachers' room and principal's office occupy the space of the classroom in the northeast corner of the central block. In addition, a staircase leads from the front entry at grade level to the first floor above the raised basement in the northern end.
PS 24 was designed to specifically house classroom spaces and, rather uncommon in school design, contained no large meeting spaces such as a cafeteria or gymnasium which would become standard features in later standardized schools. The original 1901 plans do specify that the main corridor in the basement was also an "Assembly Room"; however, there were no details for a stage, seating, or other auditorium features, nor is there any evidence that these were built.
PS 24 retains a great majority of its original interior finishes. The building has large, airy windows and fourteen-foot-high ceilings throughout with original millwork surrounding almost all of the doors, windows, and chalkboards. The lower two-thirds of the walls are clad in an original ceramic tile with a non-original vinyl base while the upper portion is the original plaster. Above, all of original pressed tin ceilings are present along with pressed tin cornices. It is likely that all of the original hardwood flooring is also present throughout the building; however, it is only visible in the coatrooms and obscured by later finishes in the classroom and hallways.
Each of the staircases in the building is original and retains its original decorative cast-iron railings and wood handrail. The treads and risers are also cast iron but these have been covered with vinyl tile. Each of the hallways is twelve feet in width and would originally have been lit by large windows at both ends, but later partitions have enclosed the ends of the hallways in many cases. The classroom doors establish a consistent rhythm along both sides of the hallway and each has a large transom above it, though these have been filled in. Owing to generous enclosed plenum spaces between the hallway and classroom walls, the doorways also feature deep entries paneled in original millwork. The walls in the hallways, including the tiled portion, have been painted and each of the hallway floors has been carpeted.
A typical classroom is thirty-two-feet wide and twenty-feet deep with three banks of paired windows and chalkboards on two of the remaining walls. Like the hallways, both the plaster and the tiled portions of the classroom walls have been painted. Modern fluorescent lighting is suspended from the ceiling in most cases, though with minimal impact to the pressed tin ceilings above. Each of the classrooms has either vinyl tile or carpeting over the original hardwood below.
Two large airshafts, mentioned above, were originally located in between the classrooms on the east and west sides of the building and played a large role in providing the air circulation required during this era of school design. On the eastern side of the building, the airshaft remains intact. On the western side of the building, only the eastern half of the shaft is intact as a later alteration converted the other half into small single bathrooms.
The basement is accessed by both of the corner staircases. A boiler room and mechanical space are located along the eastern side of the central hallway and have concrete floors with exposed masonry walls. In the eastern corners of the east-west blocks are boys' and girls' bathrooms, with playrooms and storage spaces occupying the whole of the western side of the building. In the finished spaces, the lower portion of the walls is tiled, as on the upper floors, but at this level they are also capped by a millwork cornice. Floors are of concrete throughout, but ceilings are a mix of suspended gypsum, pressed tin, and exposed beams with exposed ductwork.
The attic is also accessed by both of the corner staircases. Apart from masonry bearing walls that carry up from the floors below, the space is open and head heights are high enough to walk about. Currently, the space contains large ducting and smaller electrical and mechanical pipes and conduits. The plenum space in between the interior walls of the building is accessible from this space.
Basement Floor Plan (2016)
First Floor Plan (2016)
Second Floor Plan (2016)
Third Floor Plan (2016)
Facade (north elevation (2016)
East elevation (2016)
West and rear elevation (2016)
Front entrance (north elevation) (2016)
First floor hallway (2016)
Staircase landing between first and second floors (2016)
Second floor classroom (2016)
Third floor classroom (2016)
First Floor classroom (2016)
