All the planning to revive P.S. 109 at 215 East 99th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenue in East Harlem have all come together in the past month, and we had to take a look back at the block as it was in 1941. The top photo shows East 99th Street during the years that it was framed by the elevated train overhead and a neighborhood consisting of tenement buildings. The train tracks, along with the apartment buildings around the school, would be deconstructed soon after the photo was taken, and the school would eventually be surrounded by public housing projects. The grand Collegiate Gothic Revival style building was designed by New York School City Superintendent C.B.J. Snyder over a century ago and has been closed since 1995. The nonprofit group Artspace, El Barrio's Operation Fightback, and a $1 million grant from the Ford Foundation has now pushed the $52 million, 72 affordable housing units (half for artist and half for local residents) of this adaptive reuse project a step closer to reality. Read more details in the original Artspace proposal (which had the projected finish date of 2008): LINK. Archival image via NYPL
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