Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center

107 Suffolk Street | also 141 Rivington Street | Lower East Side | built 1900

The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

1897
Charles B. J. Snyder designs the neo-Gothic Public School 160
Architect Charles B. J. Snyder designs a five-story, L-shaped school on a corner lot in the collegiate neo-Gothic style, completed in 1897. A steeply pitched roofline broken by dormers defines its street facades, which are ornamented in terra cotta, limestone, and brick. Snyder, the Board of Education's superintendent of school buildings, treats schools as civic monuments.
Source: Wikipedia
1993
Edgardo Vega Yunqué and partners found an arts center in the old school
After a fire in the 1970s, P.S. 160 sits empty until the community group Solidaridad Humana starts using it as a school for Spanish-speaking immigrants in the early 1980s. Edgardo Vega Yunqué, Nelson Landrieu, and Mateo Gómez found the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center there in 1993. Less than a year later the three take over the lease from Solidaridad Humana.
Source: Wikipedia
2013
The Clemente wins a preservation award for its restored facade
By 2006, when engineers begin investigating the facade, the school has gone a century without major rehabilitation and has stood under a sidewalk shed for eight years. The restoration, finished in 2012, replaces the roof and copper gutters, repairs the brick and terra cotta, and restores the windows. The New York Landmarks Conservancy gives the project a Lucy G. Moses Preservation Award in 2013.
Source: Wikipedia

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