Former Segregated School Lands $6M Investment, Landmark Status

WEST VILLAGE, NY — A $6 million investment and unanimous committee vote on Tuesday solidified Manhattan's only surviving all-Black segregated school in the city's architectural canon.

The three-story brick building on West 17th Street in Chelsea, last inhabited by students in 1894, was so honored Tuesday with a unanimous Landmark Preservation Committee vote.

"It's very important that we don't always honor the unalloyed, perfect past but recognize the complexity of the past," said Commissioner Michael Goldblum.

Over the nearly two centuries since its construction, the formerly segregated school has suffered water damage and deterioration.

The full scope of damage will be revealed through an ongoing engineering investigation and addressed with a $6 million, four-year rehabilitation effort announced by Mayor Eric Adams Tuesday.

Even still, commissioners said Tuesday the building remained "remarkably intact."

For advocates, Tuesday's win comes after years of effort. The landmarking process formally started in 2018, according to a Change.org petition with over 2,800 signatories.

"At a time when states are trying to erase Black history, we’re celebrating it,” said New York City Councilmember Erik Bottcher.

Some 30 electeds, historians and block associations also lobbied for the school's preservation at an April commission hearing, said Marianne Hurley, a committee researcher.

"New York has woefully too few extant sites that reflect the complex historical trajectory, milestones and breadth of the African American experience in our great city," said historian Eric K. Washington, who created the Change.org petition.

"Justice dictates that we preserve this rare surviving 'colored schoolhouse' in Manhattan, and honor the impressive lives that filled its rooms."

At the time, "Colored School No. 4" was one of Manhattan's eight racially segregated public primary schools, Hurley said. Most recently, the building has been used as a satellite office for the city's Sanitation department.

In the 34 years "Colored School No. 4" operated as a segregated school, its halls were graced with a number of notable cultural figures including abolitionists, musicians, writers, NYC's first Black teacher in a mixed school and the first Black Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana, Washington said in the petition.

"In addition to illustrating what a small, New York City public school looked like before the Civil War, it also shows us how education afforded crucial opportunities and skills to Black students as they struggled against the discrimination and inequities that were part of their daily lives," Hurley said.

The school's impact on lower Manhattan is vast and apparently visible, petition creators said.

"Colored School No. 4 was integral to an informal plexus of other late 19th-century Black schools, churches, enterprises, missions and societies that gave anchor to lower Manhattan’s growing African American enclaves as they drifted upwards to west side neighborhoods like Hell’s Kitchen and San Juan Hill," Washington said in the petition.