High School for Environmental Studies

 school, interesting place

5-story Art-Deco school completed in 1919 as a movie studio. Designed by Joseph J. Furman for the Fox Film Corporation, it contained two 40-foot-high, 15,000-square-foot stages, in which numerous silent classics were filmed and screened. Loath to spend the huge amount it would have taken to convert it to sound stages, Fox instead used the building for offices. In 1973 Enterprise Development Associates bought it and converted it into a midtown campus for the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which has since moved to the old Haaren High School building a few blocks north on 10th Avenue. Since 1994, it has housed the High School of Environmental Studies, New York's first magnet school specializing in the environment.

The facade is clad in red brick.. It is eight bays wide, with a narrower west end bay and entrance bay, the 4th from the east. The entrance has glass double-doors and transom below a square, metal canopy. It is framed in white cast-stone with a wealth of Art-Deco geometry in shapes suggesting orange slices, since curves, boomerangs, and pan pipes. At the base of the ground floor there are low basement triple-windows that begin at the 2nd bay from the east, and grow higher to the west due to the slope of the site. By the 2nd-from-west bay they are tall enough to accommodate a metal door in the center, and the west end bay has a loading dock with a short window above it. On either side of the entrance there are large bays of triple-windows; all of the windows have green metal framing.

The upper floors also have triple-windows, except for above the entrance, where there are paired windows, and the west end bay, which has double-windows. These all have stone sills and brick lintels. Between the 2nd & 3rd floors the piers have layering in the brickwork. The geometric brickwork is most notable in the zig-zag roof line, which includes three cast-stone panels.