New York Training School for Teachers/New York Model School (later High School of Music And Art) now A. Philip Randolph Campus High School

History and architecture

The New York Training School for Teachers/New York Model School was built in 1924-26 to the design of William H. Gompert, Architect and Superintendent of School Buildings for the Board of Education, and prominently sited in the Hamilton Heights section of Harlem adjacent to City College. This was the first building constructed expressly for the Training School (and its "model school" for practice teaching), first opened in 1898 and one of three municipal teacher-training schools maintained by the Board of Education to assure an adequate supply of teachers for the city's school system.

Most of New York's elementary school teachers, the vast majority of them women, were trained at these schools during their period of operation. The five- and six-story (plus basement and central tower) L-shaped New York Training School for Teachers/New York Model School was designed in an abstracted contemporary Collegiate Gothic style and clad in limestone and mottled buff-to- brown ironspot brick, with large window bays filled with unusual folding-casement steel sash windows.

Exterior articulation, divided vertically by pavilions, buttresses, and square towers, also differentiated the model school and training school portions, as well as a "churchlike" wing housing an auditorium above which is a gymnasium. The Training School became the New York Teachers Training College (1931-33), which was abolished during the Depression when there was a surplus of teachers for the city's school system.

The building later housed Public School 193 (1933-52) and, for nearly fifty years, the High School of Music and Art. Established in 1936 by Mayor

Fiorello H. LaGuardia and considered to be the first public high school in the United States specializing in the study of music and art, the High School of Music and Art produced many graduates who have distinguished themselves in the professions of music, the arts, and education, among others. After the school was merged with the High School of Performing Arts and relocated to Lincoln Center in 1984, the New York Training School for Teachers building has been the A. Philip Randolph Campus High School.

Since 1984 the NYTST building has housed the A. Philip Randolph Campus High School. Established in 1979 as a cooperative venture of the Board of Education and City University of New York, and first located on the City College campus, the school features a college-preparatory curriculum.