George Washington Educational Complex ca. 1925

George Washington High School, home to such alumni as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, actor and singer Harry Belafonte, and baseball star Manny Ramirez, came into existence on February 2, 1917. The high school’s current structure was completed in 1925. Within five years the student body of GWHS had grown to six thousand students, and it was one of the top schools in the city. The demographics of the school began to shift dramatically during the 1960s, along with those of the neighborhood. Over the course of the decade the graduating classes of the high school went from 18% to 70% minority students. In 1964 black and Puerto Rican students boycotted schools that they felt did not employ enough black and Latino faculty members nor place enough emphasis on black and Latino history. In 1983, according to The New York Times, GWHS’ students were 70 percent Spanish speaking, with 90 percent of the Spanish speaking population of Dominican origin. By the late 1980s the school was overcrowded and had fallen into disrepair, with dropout rates well above city averages. At the end of the 1990s, the school was divided into four smaller high schools and renamed George Washington Educational Campus, with the hope of paving a road back to the schools’ former prestige