The Beacon School

 school, interesting place, high school

The building is a 7-story school originally completed in 1940 as a book warehouse for the New York Public Library. It was completely renovated into a school, designed by John Ciardullo & Associates - with a new exterior, in 2015, after being sold to the School Construction Authority in 2011. The rebuilt structure houses a full-sized cafeteria, black-box theater, dance studio, auditorium, film lab, and library, with writing labs, art studios, and study spaces throughout the building.

The north half of the building is offset to the west from the south half. Both main facades are clad in grey-painted pre-cast concrete panels on the 2nd-6th floors, with the ground floor clad in brown polished granite. The main entrance is on 44th Street, near the west end, where there are two sets of steel-and-glass double-doors in one bay, and another set in a bay to the east, all of which are covered by a lime-green metal canopy, along with a window to the left of the east entry bay. A bright-yellow pier separates this window from another one to the east. At the far west end are two sets of blue metal service doors. The west end of the ground floor has two wide bays of windows and a narrower bay, with two yellow piers dividing them. Each bay is aluminum framing and mullions, and the two by the entrance as well as the narrow eastern one also have a narrow section separated from the other panes by a thinner, bright-orange pier.

The 2nd floor on the north facade has six single-windows at the east half, with the west having four bays of wider windows - the first three with narrow end panes framing two wider middle panes (and a bright-orange metal mullion down the middle of each bay), and the west end bay having a narrow pane in the middle flanked by two wider ones. The 3rd-6th floors have seven bays with the version featuring the orange mullion - except for the east end bays, which are like the 2nd floor's west end bay. The other difference is two of the middle bays at the 4th & 5th floors, which are recessed, with a different window pane pattern, and are separated from each other by a yellow pier; the outline around the interior of the recessed area is also yellow. The 7th floor is set far back at the ends and is clad in ribbed metal. The middle (non-recessed) part has a wide window band that the metal ribs overlap.

The south facade on 43rd Street has another entrance at the west end, with two sets of steel-and-glass double-doors recessed below a lime-green metal canopy. To the right are five large, recessed bays of windows with aluminum framing, each separated by bright-yellow piers (beginning above the brown granite below). Below the eastern four of the bays, there are short and wide strips of glass blocks near the sidewalk level. At the east end is another group of blue metal service doors.

The upper floors of the south facade have seven bays in much the same design as the north facade, but without the recessed bays. The 6th floors has very small square windows in the five eastern bays. The 7th floor is again metal-clad and set back at the ends. It has window bands behind the metal ribbing, divided into five bays, and below each is a smaller square window (except the middle one).

The Beacon School is a highly-selective public high school in Manhattan, New York. Each year the school receives approximately 6,000 applications for its 360 ninth-grade seats. The interior features a site-specific wallpaper mural by Eli Sudbrack titled "Admirable Vortex Arising Fearlessly".

For more information, the public can call (212) 465-4230.

www.beaconschool.org