GRAMERCY — When Jeremy Wood, owner of the Ecole Internationale de New York, went looking for a space to house two additional classrooms, he wasn’t looking for a fixer-upper.
But he ended up with a New York City landmark with no indoor plumbing.
The building Wood settled on to house the fourth- and fifth-graders from his bilingual elementary school dates back to 1867. It stands along Park Avenue between East 21st and East 22nd streets, attached to the Calvary-St. George’s Church.
The church still owns the building, and at various points, it has been a one-room Sunday school, a theater and a used furniture store, Wood said. His students will move into its newest incarnation at the start of the school year on Sept. 1.
James Renwick Jr., the architect behind St. Patrick’s Cathedral, designed the space 144 years ago to support the church next door. When the structure was built, its lot was already sandwiched between two buildings. Adding windows on ground level was out of the question. So Renwick built up, extending the ceiling 40 feet in the air and adding a ring of windows where the walls met the roof.
When Wood approached church officials about leasing the space and turning it into two modern-day classrooms, the church agreed.
"That part went well," Wood said.
But church approval was the least of his worries.
When he began working on the renovations about seven months ago, the building was dilapidated, Wood said.
The building had no indoor plumbing. The interior had been painted black. Many of the windows ringing the top of the its 40-foot-high ceiling were broken. The roof was leaking, and broken beams were causing the floor to sag.
“We needed two classrooms. This gave us two classrooms,” said Wood, whose son is heading into second grade at the school.
But for only two classrooms, he added, the project has been a massive amount of work.
In addition to the structural damage, the building is a historic landmark, meaning that any changes to the façade had to be approved by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.
The interior of the building, however, was fair game.
"We could do anything we wanted to, but we didn’t want to mess up the historic quality," Wood said.
So Wood and his team of contractors and craftsman set about restoring the building while making the necessary modifications to house his students.
They started at the top.
The windows around the ceiling are dotted with French fleur de lis designs. In order to preserve the original building details, Wood hired an outside company to recreate those fleur de lis panes and insert them alongside the ancient ones.
The difference between old and new is slight, Wood said, evident only in the green tint that distinguishes original panes from recreated ones.
Along the walls of the space, now painted a much cheerier white, Wood left chunks of beam that once supported gaslights throughout the space.
Moshe Gantman, the lead craftsman on site, has also rebuilt rotted window and door frames to look just like they would have when they were first constructed.
But the building’s one gaping room still needed to accommodate two classrooms for students.
So the builders erected a mezzanine standing 10 feet off the floor in the center of the room. A removable wall will encase the lower level, forming one classroom, and the other will reside atop the mezzanine.
“It gives us a second classroom, a lot more space, and in my opinion, the building is just a lot better from up here,” said Wood, gesturing toward the ceiling.
The raw wood beams and intricate windows are much easier to see from a closer vantage point, he added.
The renovation is undoubtedly costly, and Wood said the school is footing the bill for all the construction at the moment. The church will repay the school for all structural repairs—aesthetic touches not included—over time by charging the school less each month in rent.
With just a few short weeks to go, Wood and his construction team were still hard at work on Friday. The removable walls that will enclose the lower-level classroom have yet to arrive, and the stairs leading up the mezzanine were under construction.
But Wood remained confident that they would finish in time.
“It’s always very painful to get to the end,” he said with a smile.
