The Pride of East 103rd Street

Angel and Leilani pause in the school-placement office, a light-flooded room with a Hotchkiss pennant tacked to the wall. They tick off the boarding schools they’re applying to: Kent, Westover, Putney, Loomis Chaffee. “Plus some Catholic schools for backup,” Leilani says.

The East Harlem School was and remains an aspirational place. Though the neighborhood has surrendered, in recent years, to improvident developers hawking bargain-counter gentrification, it’s still a fortress of public housing with few attendant amenities. Many of the kids have endured extreme personal trauma—domestic violence, sexual abuse, parents with drug problems, destitution—and they’re incapacitated by a public-school system that doesn’t know what to do with them. About 60 percent enter the school reading below their grade level. Under Hagemen’s direction (Hans has since joined an education nonprofit that serves low-income youth), the school acts as an eight-to-five, five-day-a-week, ten-month-a-year corrective.

The remedy is a reflection of the man himself. Hageman, equal parts hard-ass and mystic, has a penchant for kung fu, Eastern philosophy, and second chances. He drops references, from Malcolm Gladwell to Montaigne, the way the rest of us say “um,” and he’s just as likely to meditate in his office as he is to beat the stuffing out of the boxing dummy in the faculty gym. His school is a place to learn about lofty things like community (students participate in a daily school-wide gathering called “circle”) and contemplation (the end of each class is heralded by a student banging on a bowl, while classmates sit in silence) but also how to use a comma. Back in his office, Hageman explains the school’s philosophy by way of the Rudyard Kipling poem “If.” “To walk with kings or queens,” he recites, paraphrasing a little, “but keep the common touch.”

The old building wasn’t suited for kings or queens, or anyone else, for that matter. It flooded at the first sign of rain clouds. The board of trustees agreed in 2004 to rebuild and expand the school to accommodate 140 students. It started interviewing architects, including Rogers Marvel, 1100 Architect, and Butler Rogers Baskett, all solid candidates. (Hageman liked the latter; it dealt in the fusty brick architecture he knew well.) Gluck, whose 40-person firm leans unapologetically modern, was a last-minute recommendation from a board member at the Bronx Preparatory Charter School, which Gluck’s firm designed four years ago. “What I loved immediately about Peter was that he had no issue pushing back with Ivan,” says Dede Brooks, the chair of the East Harlem School’s board and herself one of Hageman’s redemption stories. (Brooks, you might remember, was the Sotheby’s CEO who pleaded guilty to a price-fixing scandal in 2000, then spent six months in an ankle bracelet. Hageman took her in and gave her a volunteer job. Today, she’s among the school’s top private donors.) “There was a banter between them that was at times a little heated,” she continues. “I found that enormously appealing.”

But Gluck’s insistence on design-build gave them pause. They worried that conflicts of interest would arise—a common concern about the method, which is why it isn’t practiced more often. For instance, a design-build firm could specify, as architects, a mechanical system that cost $100,000 and then, as contractors, sneak in a model for $20,000. The East Harlem School, which subsists on private and foundation money, couldn’t afford the risk.

Gluck took Hageman to see Bronx Prep. A big campus done on the cheap, it’s a meat-and-potatoes kind of place, with generous, boxy volumes and corrugated metal that goes on for days. Hageman hated it. Gluck pointed out that his firm had only designed it. Things might have been different if it had built the school too. (The contractors might not have tangled with the legal authorities, for instance.) They visited another building. This one, a low-slung synagogue school clad in horizontal bands of zinc, looked like some sort of Miesian sanctuary. Hageman was smitten. “Gluck had done work on this sacred space in a very modern way, evocative of a desert religion,” Hageman says. “It was beautiful, stark, austere, and spiritual. I was like, ‘This is what I want.’”

Had the East Harlem School chanced it with another architect, the project might have limped along like this: the designers would have labored over a set of drawings and delivered them to the school, then toddled off to the next thing while contractors readied their meat cleavers. Inevitably, costs would have stretched beyond estimates, and the contractors would have hacked away at the design, then congratulated themselves on value engineering.

Design-build à la Gluck flips the process on its head. The initial concept for the school was an Edenic five-story building, with grass-covered playgrounds tiered whimsically over the top floors. Everyone loved it. Unfortunately, the architects had to scrap the whole thing. The school rises above a sludgy swamp that easily floods; as a result, new buildings have to be as airtight as submarines. Because Gluck’s staff members are trained as both architects and construction managers, they invited cost estimates from subcontractors early on. Bids for waterproofing came in absurdly high. Rather than move ahead with a design the school could no longer afford, the project architects, Stacie Wong and Marc Gee, pared it back—lopping off a floor here and a green roof there while sparing the classroom space the school needed to grow. “Value engineering traditionally happens when the drawings are done, the building’s been bid, the schedule is approaching, and they find out they’re way over the budget,” Gluck says. “The only thing a contractor can do is make things cheaper, but he can’t change the building. The proper way to value engineer is to completely change the animal… . Had we not done that, the project would’ve been a disaster.”