Tricia Joyce had good news to share at the October 25 meeting of Community Board 1 (CB1), where she chairs the Youth and Education Committee. “The new school on Trinity Place will have a full-sized gym and a separate assembly space with room for as many as 140 people.”
This is the culmination of a year-long campaign, during which CB1 and elected officials have lobbied the Department of Education (DOE) and School Construction Authority (SCA) to depart from their original plan for the new school, for which construction will begin soon in the Financial District. DOE and SCA’s plan had featured a combined “gymnatorium,” rather than separate spaces for physical education and performing arts.
The school, which was announced in January, will be located at the site of the now-defunct Syms discount clothing store, on the block bounded by Edgar Street to the south, Greenwich Street on the west, Rector Street to the north, and Trinity Place on the east. It will be incorporated into the base of a larger project, a new residential skyscraper that is also slated to rise on the site. Dates for the start of construction and the opening of the school have not yet been announced. Both milestones are likely to be contingent on the construction schedule of the apartment tower above. But the school’s design has been in development since the project was announced. A preliminary version of that plan was circulated to CB1 in the spring, and drew sharp criticism from community leaders over the intention to build a single space that would house both athletics and assemblies.
“I just felt so passionate about this one,” Ms. Joyce said after the October 25 CB1 meeting. “We did a survey of our Downtown schools and how their gyms and auditoriums were scheduled, and learned that gyms are in use every hour of every school day, and all day long on weekends.” The same survey found that auditoriums in Lower Manhattan schools are booked approximately 75 percent of all school hours. “So it became clear that if DOE moved ahead with their original plan, a significant amount of programming would be lost,” Ms. Joyce continued.
“We’ve already seen the fallout of this at the Peck Slip school,” Ms. Joyce added, “where gym classes compete with performing arts instruction, and there’s no place to put kids when it rains. But we knew there was still time to avoid this, while the Trinity Place school was in the design phase.”
“We understand the dilemma that school planners face,” Ms. Joyce observed. “Their job is not easy, given the challenges and costs, especially in Manhattan, where there are no more lots on which to build schools from the ground up. So they naturally seek partnerships with developers. This process creates opportunities, but it also imposes limits.”
Spire Education:The new school is planned for space at the bottom of this proposed residential tower, on Greenwich Street. Community successfully pushed for education officials to find room within the structure for separate spaces to house athletics and performing arts.
In the case of the Trinity Place school, Ms. Joyce explained, the extra space need for physical education was created by reallocating several thousand square feet originally earmarked for pre-kindergarten classrooms. “In the new plan, these will become the multi-purpose assembly space,” Ms. Joyce noted. “It will have a stage and a sound system, but no bleacher seating, because of the ceiling height. But chairs will be brought in when needed and it will hold 140 people, which is not huge, but large enough given that the school is configured for three classes in each grade, from kindergarten through fifth.” (The school is being designed to hold 476 students.)
The second step in the design revision was for the space originally intended as the combined gymnasium and auditorium to be reconceived as a dedicated gym. “This will now be a full-time space exclusively for athletics and physical education,” Ms. Joyce said. “This is a win for everyone.”
The about-face by DOE and SCA follows a March resolution by CB1, which called upon both agencies to abandon the plan for a combined gym-auditorium space at the Trinity Place School. In June, CB1 enacted a second resolution, inviting other Community Boards to join it in a push for a City-wide ban on such designs. In agreeing to separate gym and auditorium spaces at the Trinity Place school, the DOE has also indicated that it will reconsider similar plans for other new schools throughout the City.