An 1850s red schoolhouse hiding in the middle of the Flower District
Imagine being a school-age kid in the New York City of the 1850s. If you were wealthy, your education would be in the hands of private tutors. When you became older, private academies or finishing schools completed your education. You may have even gone to college, perhaps, if you were male.
If you were not rich, you could attend a local free school (or one of the “colored schools” set aside for African American children in the segregated city) until you were old enough to pursue a trade or profession.
Of course, you might not go to school at all—even a minimal amount of schooling was not compulsory until the state passed a law in 1874.
But if getting a basic education was your goal, 1853 would have been a pivotal year. That’s when the New York City Board of Education merged with an older school association called the Public School Society. The invigorated Board began replacing outdated public school buildings with modern facilities to better serve the children of the booming city, whose population was hovering around 600,000.
One of these new schoolhouses still survives. Appropriately painted red and long since empty of students, it sits on the commercial stretch of West 28th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, one of the last vestiges of the Flower District (top photo).
As buildings go, it’s quite a beauty. “One of the three oldest public school buildings in Manhattan, its Italianate design is characteristic of the period, with a symmetrical facade featuring a slightly projecting central section with shallow pediment,” noted the Historic Districts Council of what was called School 48 in Ward 20.
What would it have been like to attend this school on wide-open, almost bucolic West 28th Street in the 1850s? The illustration above (undated, but likely produced soon after the school opened) helps us imagine it.
Newspaper archives fill in the blanks. The New York Times covered the opening ceremonies on January 30, 1856. It was a day heavy with city dignitaries and Ward 20 officials, but the Times took note of the grounds and facilities as well: a playground, library room, teachers’ reception room, and a couple of rooms “for the janitor’s family.”
A girls’ department contained eight classrooms; the boys’ department had six, all of which had bookcases and closets. The classrooms were lit by gas. “A full corps of teachers” was tasked with educating about 750 students. The “beautiful building,” as the Times deemed it, cost $55,000 to build.
Graduation was held every year and even made it into the newspapers. To help wounded Civil War soldiers, schoolkids helped raise funds and donated it to the Ladies’ Home for Sick and Wounded Soldiers on Lexington Avenue and East 51st Street.
In the 1880s, Ward School 48 became Grammar School 48, an all-girls public school in the much more populated Chelsea neighborhood.
The Sixth Avenue corner of the block became home to an elevated train station, lending a rougher edge to the area. (The third photo was taken from the el station; the school can be seen on the left.)
After the turn of the 20th century, Grammar School 48 no longer served as a school, yet the lovely schoolhouse remained mostly intact and untouched (fourth photo, from 1940).
Today, flower companies occupy the converted commercial spaces on the ground floor. Between the truck traffic and the honking of horns, it’s not hard to imagine the school when it rang with the shouts and laughter of young children.
[Second image: NYPL; third image: MCNY F2013.126.19; fourth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]
