Against Your Elementary School's Window...
you can't hear the rain.
32 years ago, in March of 1992, you still remember on a cold Spring day like today, the Celtic accented voice of the principal’s secretary.
When she grabbed the microphone to announce, “P.S. 261 will be closing”, your fifth grade class erupted with cries.
“But Ms. Bilgoray, we aren’t going to get to complete sixth grade here?”
“No, trip to Bear Mountain!” you exclaimed on behalf of the class.
“Settle down class”, is all she could say at the moment. She sent you down to the main office to retrieve the pack of letters that were being sent home alerting parents of the changes.
The current sixth grade class would move onto junior high school.
The hundreds of K-5th grade students would be assigned to schools within the district.
This is the end of the year signature book sixth graders would receive in order to fill its pages with memories and contact information. Photo Credit: P.S. 261 Facebook Group Album
When you entered the main office, the front desk secretary gave you the package and you couldn’t help overhear their side conversations about not knowing where they would end up working the following September.
Your friend Chanelle, one of several girls you walked to school with every morning from Aqueduct Avenue, the one who taught you how to jump double dutch back in first grade, was coming towards the main office.
“Can you believe the school is closing?” she asked.
You nodded your head and asked her if she knew any details.
Thousands of students from the Kingsbridge and Fordham area attended P.S. 261 for decades while the structure did not have windows. We all loved this school and its teachers.
Photo Credit: P.S. 261 Facebook Group Album
“Supposedly, since the school building has no windows, the city has said it has to close down”.
“Díque” you said back to her.
You knew darn well at that point that the building did only have one window. It was located near the room where you would go and have hearing tests.
You also knew that the school had just gone through some reconstruction inside of it. In the last years, the building’s floors had been changed to shinier tiles replacing, the wooden panels that once hosted a skating rink. You also knew that the gymnasium had also gotten new basketball hoops.
Yeah, the school was díque, closing.
Yeah, fucking right!
At the age of ten, you learned the word ‘closing’ didn’t mean the building would be shut down. You later came to witness and learn that your elementary school was just another public space in the community that would be ‘repurposed’ for private monetary gain.
The next fall you began sixth grade at P.S. 122 which today is a different public school number. Most of your friends from that fifth grade class ended up at P.S. 86 which was literally a block away from your building and today also has another public school number.
It was right across the Kingsbridge Armory. Your best friend Sky was sent to that school and you wouldn’t see her again until seventh grade.
You lived closer to P.S. 86 than she did yet you were assigned to go to P.S. 122. It sat all the way down suicide hill at the base of Kingsbridge Road and Bailey Avenue.
Down the block from it was a strip of mechanic shops along with a Food Stamps office building and a chicken spot right by the 1 & 9 train.
P.S. 122 was your school for only one year.
A decade later the strip of mechanic shops and the Food Stamps building would be torn down.
A Target store and other shops were constructed in its place.
Schools represent the foundational core of a community. They are where memories are made, lessons are learned, and a sense of belonging is cultivated.
What happens to a community of children when their school is shut down?
Where do the memories go?
What happens to their sense of belonging to the community?
Was the closure of P.S. 261 a harbinger for what would happen a decade later to NYC public schools under mayoral control?
Whenever you pass by the building that once housed P.S. 261 you recall your high school days when you first noticed that the building reopened as a private college. Its glassy black tinted tall windows made the building look sleek yet historic. Its architecture has remnants from the Vaudeville Acts that were performed in the theatre it once was just like many others in that area of Fordham Road.
Every time you pass by it, you stop to look closely at the facade created. The ways the glass performs as a window against the red brick layered walls.
A brick wall, with glass over it, is still a wall.
This, is an act, that beats all of the Vaudeville acts that came before it.
This year, when the guard asked you why you were taking pictures, you said you were a local artist who was fascinated with the windows and doorways of local structures.
This is true.
Although there was scaffolding and the sunset darkened the shots, you still captured the reality of that structure that exists even today:
P.S. 261 was closed 32 years ago because the school building didn’t have windows which posed a fire hazard.
Today, in its place still sits the private college that replaced it. The building’s window frames, however, if you look closely, still pose a fire hazard, even though black tinted reflective glass covers its red brick walls.
It is a for profit structure promising hope to the people in the area.
At age ten, and later in adulthood, you continue to learn how not all windows present an opportunity for all in the community.
You continue to learn how the systems and structures in place are ultimately designed to displace.
You continue to learn about the hazards in your environment that are left in the way of building community.
You continue to learn that disrupting education, closing a community’s school, how this too is how a community is erased.
