Public School 166

History and architecture

Built in 1897-99, Public School 166 is one of the few remaining nineteenth-century institutional buildings, and one of the oldest extant public schools, on the Upper West Side. The school was designed by New York's Superintendent of School Buildings, C.B.J. Snyder, who held that position from 1891 to 1923, exerting a tremendous influence on the design and construction of the city's schools. He created buildings that were inventive, functional, and handsome as civic monuments and is credited with introducing the Collegiate Gothic style (usually associated with universities) to New York's public school architecture where it was used for over twenty years.

The design for P.S. 166, one of Snyder's earliest essays in the Collegiate Gothic style, served as a prototype for four other schools in Manhattan and the Bronx built at the same time. P.S. 166 was part of the vast school construction program launched to meet the needs of the city's rapidly expanding population just prior to the consolidation of Greater New York in 1898. It was one of eight public schools built between 1888 and 1899 on the burgeoning Upper West Side.

The five-story building has three articulated facades; each has a stone base and first story and is clad mostly in creamcolored terra cotta (supplied by the Brick, Terra Cotta & Supply Co. of Coming, N.Y.), with carved stone ornamentation. P.S. 166 is a significant and early public building where terra cotta is used as a predominant cladding material. The main facade features a turreted central bay with a Tudor-arched entrance, large window groupings with drip moldings, and prominent gables with steeply-pitched roofs.

In the 1990s, P.S. 166 was designated the Manhattan School of Arts and Technology.