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Newark’s New High School of Architecture & Interior Design
The general public got a look at Newark’s newest high school on Wednesday, a former hospital meant to prep students for careers in architecture, design, and the building trades in a city undergoing a years-long building boom.
With classes in session, the district gave reporters and photographers a tour of the orange-brick Newark School of Architecture & Interior Design in the city’s Ironbound section.
Freshmen sat in freshly painted, brightly lit classrooms with windows that once let patients bask in healing sunlight.
Others focused intently on design programs displayed on brand-new double-wide computer monitors.
The same five-story glass-walled stairwell where doctors and nurses once bounded up or down to take blood pressure readings or close wounds now offers young teens a reminder of the outside world amid the pressures inside to pass exams, come up with original designs, or impress classmates with their fashions and phones.
“This school transforms a place of healing into a place of building and learning,” Superintendent Roger León said.
What students will learn, said Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka, a former high school principal, is “how to make spaces that give people a sense of self and belonging to a community; a sense of safety and order; a sense of beauty and inspiration.”
Tuesday’s tour was attended by Frances Bronet, president of Pratt Institute, the Brooklyn-based university that helped design the new school’s curriculum.
“This partnership builds on our long history of creating cradle-through-career pathways for young people,” Bronet said.
Real estate consultant Susanne Newmark, also involved in the new school, was likewise on hand.
The school is being developed in two phases: the initial redeveloped space for classrooms, offices, the library, labs and other academic uses; and what will be a newly constructed portion for the auditorium and gymnasium, now little more than a steel skeleton.
Classes there began with the district’s other schools on Sept. 2, under a temporary certificate of occupancy while work continued.
This year’s opening of the start-up school was for a freshman class only, with 200 students. The district plans to add a new grade level each academic year until 2028-29, when it will become a full 9-12 school with its first graduation.
The 5-story building is a redevelopment project in itself, occupying the former St. James Hospital, built decades ago at the corner of Jefferson and Elm streets and closed before the district announced plans for the high school in May 2022.
The school was created under a lease-purchase agreement between the Newark Public Schools and New York developer Summit Assets.
Under the deal — unusual for a public school project — the state’s largest district will pay the developer $300 million spread over 30 years, at the end of which the district is to take ownership of the building from Summit.
The school’s opening comes two years after an initial projection of fall 2023 as part of a 10-year district-wide expansion program led by León.
The original opening date was later pushed back a year, and then another, as the project hit snags nearly from its outset.
The first came only a few months after its Spring 2022 groundbreaking, when, that September, the state Department of Labor and Workforce Development issued a stop-work order while investigating a complaint that workers were not being paid prevailing wages.
Things were further complicated by a harassment suit filed against Summit by a pharmacy owner who leases space from the developer in a separate building on the square-block property.
Summit CEO Albert Nigri grew so frustrated at one point in August 2022 that he told NJ Advance Media the deal was “off,” although he ultimately stuck with the project.
Wednesday’s tour came on the same day that an organization, including residents of the densely populated East Ward surrounding the new high school, voiced concerns that a shortage of classroom space there was forcing the district to bus children to schools in distant, less crowded neighborhoods.
A spokesman for the group, New Labor, said it welcomed Architecture & Interior Design as a neighborhood school for older students. However, more elementary space is still needed, said Rafael Chavez Santiago, a spokesman for the group.
“Both are true,” he said.
A district spokesman declined to comment on the group’s concern.
The synergy of a school dedicated to creating housing, office space and other parts of what architects call the built environment in a city rebuilding itself was not lost on its mayor.
“I hope,” Baraka said of the students, “they will someday apply what they learn here to building our city’s future.”
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