For Landmark East Harlem's Back to School Series feature, we are exploring the beautiful historic schools that have educated generations of East Harlem children. The schools highlighted in this tour were all built before 1950. Most of them were built in the first few decades of the 20th century, with the majority still in use today - some as schools, while others have been converted to community resource centers and housing. Sadly, some of these architectural gems have not survived the test of time and changes in development patterns.

“308 and 310 East 94th Street, south side, east of Second Ave. Upon the excavation at the right was constructed a 2-story garage (No. 304-306). April 21, 1917.” The storefront at 308 East 94th reads J Reich Fancy Groceries.

304 East 94th Street, ca. 1917. Constructed as a garage in the late 1910s or early 1920s as a garage during the influx of cars in the city, this 94th Street building has been home to Telesca-Heyman for more than half a century. Telesca-Heyman is a custom cabinet shop which alters, resizes and retrofits wood furniture and architectural woodwork.

97th Street, between First and Second Avenue, 1929. The Metropolitan Hospital dates to 1875 when it was founded as the Homeopathic Hospital on Ward's Island. The medical facility moved to Blackwell's Island (now Roosevelt Island) in 1894, and in 1955 it moved again to a campus in Manhattan, here, between First to Second Avenues and from East 97th to East 99th Streets, where it remains today.

“Tenement conditions, 1840-1842 Second Avenue, c. 1910.” The Yorkville neighborhood of the Upper East Side was home to working class immigrant communities from Europe, most notably Germany. In the first decade of the 1900s, and especially following the General Slocum steamboat disaster (which killed over 1000 community members), German immigrant families began to move from “Kleindeutschland” on the Lower East Side to Yorkville.

1770 Second Avenue, June 7, 1940. The small two-story building has hosted a number of divergent tenants. In 1904 a Henry D. Hoppe sold milk (and likely other items) here. In the 1920s it was the home of the Lexington Cigar Company. In the mid century, a firm of plumbing and heating contractors worked from here. Since 1990 the building has cycled through a series of restaurant, with its most recent tenant, Manny's (a sports bar) closing in 2017. A fun fact about this building. In 2007 the lot was considered by the MTA as a possible location for a vent plant at the southern end of the planned 96th Street Station on the Second Avenue line. The fact that the building only had a single commercial tenant made the impact of demolition much lower than other options in the neighborhood. In the end, concerns about the structural stability of the neighboring buildings (had this one been razed) caused the MTA to look elsewhere for the vent plant. And this tiny two-story survivor remains!

Second Avenue El trestle at East 94th Street; March 6, 1941.

Public School 150, 1920. Designed by famed school designer C.B.J. Snyder and completed in 1904, Public School 150 functioned as an elementary school until 1927. That year it became the home of the Hunter Model School, a laboratory school for teacher education established in 1870. The model school was joined in the building by the prestigious Hunter College High School. When the Hunter schools moved on to new buildings in 1940, the red brick school became Machine and Metal Trades High School. Today the 1904 building with Dutch Renaissance and Collegiate Gothic facade details houses the Life Sciences Secondary School.

Municipal Asphalt Plant, 1943. Built by Ely Jacques Kahn and Robert Allen Jacobs, and completed in 1941, the Municipal Asphalt Plant replaced an earlier asphalt plant on the same site. The complex, which provided asphalt for Manhattan streets included a number of small structures for materials storage as well as the main building, a mixing plant, seen here during construction. Given that the once commercial neighborhood had become semi-residential by the 1940s, the Borough Present (who spearheaded the project) wanted an industrial building that somehow would also fit in with the new residential developments along the East River. The parabolic arch shape of the building satisfied these requirements while also creating an efficient space for the plant's equipment. The style and shape of the reinforced concrete building were controversial at the time. Robert Moses called it the "Cathedral of Asphalt" and said that it was "the most hideous waterfront structure ever inflicted on a city by a combination of architectural conceit and official bad taste." (This is an ironic statement from a man who was often accused of similar vices.) The structure was lauded by others as representing bold progress in design and construction and as "functionalistic." By the late 1960s, the asphalt plant was no longer in operation and the outlying buildings were razed. Though a recreational field was added adjacent in the early 1970s, the city had plans to demolish the plant for high rise buildings and a school. Local residents George and Annette Murphy, along with other community members, fought this plan, citing the lack of recreational space in the dense neighborhood. They succeeded and in 1984 Asphalt Green, a community center that offers sports activities opened to the public. The plant was retrofitted with a gymnasium, classrooms, and an indoor turf field.

Second Avenue Railway Car Barn, April 25, 1941. This block-long, fortress-like structure was constructed in 1870s to house the horses that powered the lines of the Second Avenue Railroad. When the railway was electrified in the 1890s, the building was used as the car barn for the rolling stock. The electrified streetcar lines were replaced in the early 1930s with buses, and this building was abandoned until it was razed in 1941. In 1947 a new 1.5 acre park was opened on the land, named for some former famous residents of the neighborhood. The Marx Brothers, children of Jewish emigrants from Germany and France, grew up in Yorkville before making it big as vaudeville performers and movie stars. As of 2018, plans for a playground-replacing 670-foot tower has stirred controversy between developers and the local community and preservationists regarding the planned structure and its effect on the neighborhood.

“East 94th Street, west from, but not including York Ave. Note in the foreground construction for the East River Drive. March 7, 1936.” Designed by Robert Moses, construction on the East River Drive (later, FDR East River Drive) began in 1934. The section from 125th Street to 92nd Street is the original 1934 construction, which was planned to as a controlled-access approach to the Triborough Bridge (opened 1936.) Today, the NYCHA Stanley M. Isaacs Houses (1965) and John Haynes Holmes Towers (1969) sit between First Avenue and the FDR Drive.

This pair of stately Romanesque Revival style brick apartment buildings was constructed at a time when apartment-style living was becoming more socially acceptable for New York’s burgeoning middle class. They exemplified the use of distinctive architecture and evocative naming to elevate the image of the multiple-dwelling building type, which had long been associated with the cramped and squalid quarters of Manhattan’s worst tenement districts. In this case, the choice of the noble-sounding names “Kaiser” and “Rhine” signaled the overwhelmingly German heritage of their presumed occupants, as well as the prominent Rhinelander family’s involvement in their construction and in broader real estate development in Yorkville. Although built as two separate structures joined along a party wall with interior courtyards, the buildings’ Second Avenue façades present a unified, monumental appearance. The decorative iron balcony and pent eave roof anchor the façade’s center bay, while the round arches that are a hallmark of the Romanesque Revival style play across the façade at different scales. The red-orange brick façade is embellished by rich geometric patterning and detailing, including corbels, quoins and window spandrels featuring delicate cartouches with ribbons. The building was recently restored with the removal of white paint obscuring the building’s subtle texture and fine ornament. With luck, the cornices that flanked the pent eave roof in this once-picturesque roofline will also be restored.

The Kaiser and the Rhine, August 13, 1941. In 1886 Gertrude Rhinelander, a scion of a well-established and wealthy New York family, purchased a series of lots on the corner of Second Avenue and 89th Street. She commissioned architects Lamb & Rich to design two matching apartment buildings with ground floor commercial spaces. Christened The Rhine (nos. 1716-18) and The Kaiser (nos. 1720-22) by Rhinelander, the buildings were completed in 1887. Rendered in a Romanesque Revival style to look as though a single structure, the building did feature some unexpected architectural details, including an almost Modern style maze-like pattern of brickwork on the second floor facade. A massive and devastating fire in 1904 gutted the building. Gertrude Rhinelander, who still collected the rents herself, rebuilt. It was likely at this time that the Tuscan Revival style roofs were added. In the late 20th century the buildings were painted in muted grey and white tones, but in 2016 the paint was striped off, revealing the rich tones of the original red brick.