The Pride of East 103rd Street

Ivan Hageman wasn’t sold on the design. He feared anything modern. He didn’t like the method the architect was pushing—design-build, in which a single firm stewards everything from the first conceptual drawing to the last layer of paint. It seemed foreign and vaguely suspect. And above all, he thought that the architect, Peter Gluck, was a bit of a jerk. “Peter was somewhat loutish, somewhat rude, somewhat devil-may-care: ‘Either you’re going to go with me or not,’” Hageman says in his second-floor office, which overlooks, like a happy panopticon, the street outside the private school he helms. Recalling their first meeting, in 2004, with the school’s board of trustees, he says, “At the end of the meeting … the chair of the board said, ‘I agree with you, Ivan. He does seem kind of difficult. He reminds me of someone you’ve worked closely with over the years.’ I said, ‘Who?’ She said, ‘You.’”

Out of this grew the most striking new school building East Harlem has seen in years, if not ever. It’s defiantly modern. A black, gray, and white pixelated facade gathers triumphantly over a translucent base, echoing the surrounding row houses. Little filmic windows loom over a street that 15 years ago would have made West Baltimore look like Epcot. Inside, rakish furnishings and circles are thrown up all over the place—in the lighting, around the circulation vents, even on the lockers. They make for an aesthetic that’s both fun and dead serious, which is precisely how the school sees itself.

The $10.6 million building owes everything to the visions of these two men: Hageman, a 50-year-old born-and-bred Harlem-ite with the résumé of an American saint, who returned to the ghetto after attending Harvard to cofound a radical middle school (the sort where you’ll sooner find students meditating than brushing up on their algebra); and Gluck, a 70-year-old New York City architect every bit as ornery as Hageman says. Slamming the profession, he’ll make your ears bleed, so dead set is he in his conviction that building projects work best when architects control all aspects of production. (Though few actually do.) “The question is: What is the role of an architect?” Gluck says. “Architects have reduced their role. It’s a whole litany of what they don’t do. Our position is the opposite. We like to partner with our clients. We become their total advocate.” Here, the partnership—which was less a perfect duet than a system of checks and balances—produced that rare thing in inner cities: architecture with humanity.
 
Angel Romano and Leilani Lopez tumble into the school’s lobby, grinning. “Are you ready for the tour?” Leilani asks. The “tour,” if this were any other private school, would be a hurried march through some fusty brick building, the sort that makes parents reach deep in their pockets, then deeper. Not at this school. Led by students (Angel and Leilani are eighth graders), the tours are open to just about anyone: parents, donors, even Skinny, the drug dealer down the street. And they begin with an exquisitely unconventional history lesson. “The site you see was a drug-rehabilitation facility started by our head of school, Ivan’s, parents,” Angel says matter-of-factly, gesturing around him. “It was later turned into a school.”

That’s the short version. The longer story is this: Hageman’s father, Lynn, was a white minister and civil-rights agitator who earned the highest of all generational honors—he did time in the clink with Martin Luther King Jr. He had his first date with Hageman’s mother, Leola, at a Paul Robeson concert. They wed, then headed for East Harlem after the Methodist Church denied Lynn a parish in his hometown for the sole reason that his wife was black.

The couple founded Exodus House in 1963. It was the first residential drug-treatment center in a neighborhood devastated by addiction. Hageman and his siblings grew up there. He lifted weights and played ball with the ex-junkies, black and brown men under siege and trying to rebound from battles on the street or in Vietnam, who were there by choice or, more often, by court order. “It was like having a bunch of big brothers,” Hageman says. On weekdays, he and his brother by blood, Hans, schlepped across town to Collegiate, an all-boys prep school in a fusty brick building, where John F. Kennedy Jr. was a classmate. “We knew we were hugely privileged relative to the people across the street, and I was going to a school where people were hugely privileged and had no sense of it,” Hageman recalls. “The juxtaposition of these two worlds made us yearn for justice in one way or another. Growing up here is the reason I came back.”

The brothers opened the East Harlem School at Exodus House in 1993, with 13 students. (Their parents’ ill health and a growing group of untreatable crack addicts doomed the clinic. It had been shuttered and turned into an after-school program several years earlier.) The conceit was simple: provide an education with the social and academic rigor of a Collegiate, but for East Harlem kids whose parents could never afford the cost. JFK Jr. helped secure seed money. Hans was the executive director, and Ivan the principal. Soon they were teaching 40 students a year in the old cinder-block structure where their “big brothers” once gathered.