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October 29, 2008
Wayback Wednesday: A golden era of school construction
New York Times, Oct. 29, 1905
From today’s report about overcrowding and capital planning:
A capital plan designed to alleviate current overcrowding and reduce class sizes to the City’s own target levels, based on the current need, should aim to provide at least 167,842 new school seats. While this is clearly a large figure, approximately 100,000 school seats were added from 1902-5 …
What was happening during those years? The city embarked on a construction spree so that it could fulfill the mayor’s 1903 pledge to provide a school seat for every child in the city for the first time. In just two years, 90,000 seats were constructed and bids were awarded for the construction of 93,000 more.
Judging from a table included in a 1905 New York Times article about the building boom, the city was aiming for an average class size of 50 in those new schools:
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October 29th, 2008 11:26 pm
When I taught in a New York City school, the hooks for students to hang their coats on in the back of the room were numbered in what was clearly very ancient, faded lettering. The numbers went all the way to 50. I always wondered why that many hooks were necessary, but perhaps they were indeed cramming 50 students in there.
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