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Designers Give BPC School Preview
First, the name: The nine-story school, serving 950 students from pre-kindergarten to eighth grade (including 100 seats in 10 classrooms for special education students) will be constructed under the working name of P.S. 276. It is being designed by Dattner Architects, the firm that 20 years ago designed P.S. 234. “We see this as the jewel in the crown of Battery Park City,” said Richard Dattner, a principal in the firm. Daniel Heuberger, another principal, explained that the first floor will house a 300-seat auditorium, gymnasium and auxiliary gym as well as administrative offices. Special education classrooms will occupy the second floor. Younger students will occupy the third and fourth floors of the building, with access to a playground that will extend from the third floor out over the roof of the gym and auditorium. The 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grades will fill the seventh and eighth floors. In between, on the fifth and sixth floors, will be the library and cafeteria, to be shared by all the students. “If you think of the school as a kind of layer cake or sandwich, some of the important shared facilities are in the center of the layer cake,” Dattner said. “The top floors will be in a contrasting light brick,” he added, “and in the sense that that’s where the older kids are it is the pinnacle that all the students will aspire to.”
At roughly $575 per square foot, the school will be significantly more expensive than the $450 to $470 per-square-foot city average. Dattner said the higher cost is the result of the building’s relatively small footprint and vertical orientation. “Although this rate is unusual, it is appropriate and cost-effective,” according to the architect. He added that the incremental expense of using “green” technologies is relatively small, accounting for 2.6 percent of the overall cost. As part of the city’s new “green development” initiative, the school building will be the first in the city built under the New York City Green Schools Rating System. “We’ve also written the green school guidelines, so not only will this school be green, it will be violently green,” Dattner said. All classrooms will be well lit with natural light, reducing the need for overhead lighting. Combined with high-efficiency boilers and other equipment, extra insulation and photovoltaic solar panels, designers estimate the school will reduce its energy costs by at least 25 percent. The roof-mounted photovoltaic cells alone will generate 50 kilowatts of energy, roughly one-third of the energy needed to light the school. Modern high-efficiency plumbing will also let the school use 40 percent less potable water than it otherwise would, and 80 percent of the building’s construction waste will be recycled. “It is the green feature that I find so attractive,” said board chairman James Gill. “It’s another first for Battery Park City. With the cost of green features coming down all the time, the day may soon come when there are no more conventional buildings, and we’re leading the way.” In addition to the expenses of actually building the school, it will cost about $3.2 million to prepare the construction site, which is currently being used by the Albanese Development Corp. as a sales office for its nearby residential building, Visionaire. The School Construction Authority and the Battery Park City Authority will share that cost evenly. Battery Park City residents have been calling for the construction of a new school in the neighborhood for years, citing a booming residential population and growing school enrollment in Battery Park City’s P.S. 89. “Lower Manhattan has become a premier residential destination, and that trend has also placed a toll on its public schools,” Gov. Eliot Spitzer said at a press conference on the site Nov. 13. Also in attendance at the announcement were Mayor Bloomberg, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, U.S. Rep.Jerrold Nadler, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, City Councilmember Alan Gerson, and Community Board 1 chair Julie Menin. Bloomberg said the new school, slated to come online in 2010, will be welcome relief to a neighborhood that has seen its population rebound beyond all expectations since Sept. 11, 2001. But Bloomberg cautioned that the school will not be enough to meet the growing demand, and estimated that the neighborhood will need at least 3,000 new seats in coming years to accommodate its growing student population. Just who will attend the new school when it does finally open remains unclear. Margie Feinberg, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said details of the school’s catchment area and whether enrollment will begin gradually or all at once won’t be decided for some time. “We need to get the building designed and built first before we can look at who’s going to attend,” Feinberg said. The 55 Battery Place lot, known as Site 2B, is the last undeveloped parcel in Battery Park City. Former Governor George Pataki proposed building a Women’s Museum on the site, but after almost nine years and nearly $3 million dollars in state funding, the task force he formed to make the museum a reality dissolved itself this year, leaving the site an empty lot where the Authority stores its equipment. The demise of the museum plans escalated lobbying by CB1 to build a school on the site. “We’re thrilled that this has finally fallen into place,” said CB1 Chair Julie Menin after the announcement last month. “This is true democracy in action. The school wasn’t part of the original plans for Battery Park City, but the community was able to make its voice heard.”
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