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Tribune Tours Tweed Courthouse
As School System Changes Loom

By Shams Tarek

As much as Brooklyn’s 110 Livingston Street became a symbol for out-of-borough incompetence for Queens’ public school parents, Manhattan’s Tweed Courthouse has become one of out-of-borough dominance.

Now, parents, faced with Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s plan to replace the City’s 32 community school boards and their district offices with one-third the resources on June 30, opine at meeting after meeting about “The Tweed Courthouse,” “The Tweed Building” or just “Tweed.” 

But isn’t there anything for Queens parents at this symbol of past evils and new ambitions, of fading corruption and progressive education?

The Tribune recently took an exclusive tour of the building to learn more.

As an administrative headquarters, there’s little for parents or students at the Tweed Courthouse, according to Department of Education (DOE) spokesman Paul Rose.  The one feature of the building that the public is likely to interact with routinely, he said, is the City Hall Academy.

School District 28’s current district office will be turned into one of Division 3’s two learning support centers. Tribune Photo by Ira Cohen

The second-ever session held at the school started on May 6, featuring 70 students from three schools: Long Island City’s P.S. 78 and two Manhattan schools.  The P.S. 78 students are third-graders.

The basement-level—but sun-drenched—experimental school is one of the newest built in the City.  A two-week academy that now runs sessions during the school year but may expand in the future, the school is “kind of like an extended field trip” whose “main purpose is to inspire,” Rose said.

It also has some lofty educational goals, designed to be an environment for intensive study of a single topic—an academic experience usually not experienced by students until college.

Right now, the six-classroom school, filled with brand new ergonomic furniture, computer-controlled projection systems and floors painted with maps of the City and other educational diagrams, is focused on bridges, the nearby Brooklyn Bridge in particular.  Photos and facts about the City’s bridges line the walls; the structures are studied as matters of architecture, engineering, history, economics and even literature.

Future sessions may shift the focus to other topics that examine the city, according to the DOE.

The new DOE building that parents and students will interact with most, though, is their nearby “Learning Support Center,” designed to replace existing school district headquarters during a three-month rollout starting July 1.

There will be four of these regional headquarters in Queens, in fact, with two for Division 3, one for Division 4 and one for Division 5, which will also have a Brooklyn Center.  Each Center will be the main office for its regional superintendent, as well as its “Parent Engagement Board,” which the DOE hopes will replace existing district-based school boards, pending Department of Justice approval.

Each Learning Support Center will also host a “Parent Support Office” and about 10 “Instructional Supervisors,” deputy superintendents of sorts who will help principals and teachers deal with the new system and its curricula.  The Parent Support Offices will each have full-time personnel “trained to handle parent issues that cannot be resolved by parent coordinators at the school level,” according to the DOE, which promises that parents will be able to get the same services at all 13 Centers citywide, no matter what district they live in.

Two of the borough’s Learning Support Centers—at 30-48 Linden Pl. and 28-11 Queens Plaza North—will also house DOE “Operations Centers,” which will provide “back office support” including budgeting, technology, human and transportation resources and administrative functions currently performed at over 80 offices citywide, including each of the existing district offices.

The Tribune requested a tour of the Tweed Courthouse recently, arguing that it is the fear of the unknown—both administrative and physical—that’s keeping a lot of parents and educators suspicious of the new DOE.  The agency complied; though it barred access to private offices and cubicle pens, the tour was an unprecedented display of openness by an agency widely criticized for its secrecy.

The three-and-a-half-story Anglo-Italianate building, a polished hunk of white marble on the north side of City Hall Park, is a study in elegance and opulence.

From the outside, the building, at 52 Chambers St., is imposing.  The wide marble staircase brings the first floor one story above the sidewalk, letting pedestrians peek into the “basement,” which has big body-length windows.

At the top of the stairs are four giant Corinthian columns and tall double doors made of carved wood and too heavy to be designed for human use.

Step inside, and the building is a lot more open and inviting.  The first sight after the security desk and metal detector, just past a sculpted and arched opening, is a grand rotunda that starts with the basement one story below and a huge octagonal skylight two-and-a-half stories above.  The whole space is awash in breezy air and natural light and recalls an ancient Roman temple a lot more than a 21st-century Manhattan municipal building.

But the Tweed building is an interesting mix of old and new.  Despite the classical architecture and building materials—there’s actually a steel cage elevator—signs of the most advanced technology abound.  Telephones with big LCD screens connected to the DOE’s data network dot the common spaces.

The building’s main office spaces are filled with open cubicles.  A spokesman said that Chancellor Joel Klein uses a cubicle himself, not a closed office, but he wouldn’t let us see it.

The Tweed Courthouse’s recent renovation cost about $90 million, or 150 percent over initial budget estimates.

For a lot of people, the miscalculation immediately recalled the scandal the building was built upon in the late 19th century, in which a project originally estimated to cost no more than $4 million and take a few years ended up costing $11 to $12 million and taking 20 years, including 10 years of construction.

For others, the project, championed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, represented overspending on a municipal agency with over 1,200 buildings—the public schools—to maintain and more to build.

The dissatisfaction may be natural, considering the circumstances.

The new headquarters of the DOE, the corporate-style result of much deconstruction of the Board of Education by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is the site of one of the biggest municipal shake-ups in City history.  Members of the establishment—and the many regular working people who are losing their jobs under the restructuring—seethed.

The fact that the Courthouse was built upon a foundation of graft by one of the most notoriously corrupt political bosses in the City’s history, and still bears his name, doesn’t help either.  Even Bloomberg acknowledged this.

“For most of its life,” the mayor said about the building a year ago while trying to convince the City to approve it for use as the new DOE headquarters, “it has had to endure a sad reputation as an empty monument to corruption and waste.”

The most primal core of the suspicious looks towards the Tweed Courthouse and the new DOE is the fear of the unknown.

While many old Board of Education staff members from Queens are working in the new system, many will also be relocated out of the borough.  That includes the borough’s seven community school district superintendents and single high school superintendent, all of whom are, as of the latest announcements, either taking education posts elsewhere in other boroughs or leaving the system entirely.

And with three entirely new faces scheduled to lead the three “Instructional Divisions” that will include the borough’s existing community school districts, Queens parents and school staff have very few familiar faces in the house that Boss Tweed built.

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