Calhoun School

433 West End Avenue | also 431 West End Avenue | Upper West Side | built 1975

Open on the map5 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

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.

  1. 1975

    Calhoun's new West End Avenue building opens with windows shaped like television screens

    Architect Costas Machlouzarides gave the new Calhoun School building a pair of huge picture windows shaped like television sets on every exposed side. In 1975 nearly every TV screen had that proportion, a look that later fell out of style. The school graduated its first coed class the same year, and in 2004 added floors were built on top of the television-shaped base.

    Source: Forgotten New York

  2. 1983

    Ben Stiller graduates from the Calhoun School in the class of 1983

    Ben Stiller is listed among the school's notable alumni with the class of 1983. By then Calhoun had been in its West End Avenue building since 1975 and had become coeducational. Another well-known graduate, Jordan Peele, followed in 1997.

    “Ben Stiller, 1983, comedian, actor, and film director…”

    Source: Wikipedia

  3. 2005

    May 3

    Calhoun opens a rooftop learning garden, billed as the first at a New York City institution

    On May 3, 2005, the school celebrated its new Green Roof Learning Center, part of a four-year project that added four floors to the building and finished in September 2004. The roof of about 2,500 square feet has a grass area, a sedum area and planter boxes that support an herb garden for the lunch program. The E.E. Ford Foundation gave it a $50,000 matching grant.

    Source: greenroofs.com

  4. 2007

    The school's green roof wins an international design award

    DesignShare, a journal on educational facilities planning, gave its 2007 Merit Award to the Calhoun green roof and its architects FXFOWLE, one of only seven recipients worldwide. The roof drew architects and educators from as far as Japan, Brazil, Italy, Ireland and Great Britain who came to see how it worked.

    “The Green Roof and FXFOWLE were named DesignShare's recipients of a 2007 Merit Award…”

    Source: Wikipedia

  5. 2014

    February 20

    Neighbors mock Calhoun's plan to add a glass base to its television-shaped building

    At Community Board 7's preservation committee on February 20, 2014, the school presented a plan to add a wall of clear glass below the cube, extending the building into outdoor space to enlarge the lobby and expand the cafeteria from 75 students at a time to 200. One neighbor joked that the design had gone from a TV on the bottom and a VCR on top to George Jetson on the bottom, and another remarked that the school had not made the Upper West Side's ugliest building any uglier. The committee approved the plan unanimously, and enrollment had grown from 250 in 1974 to 550.

    Source: dnainfo.com

Further reading

Nearby

All 64 buildings with stories in Upper West Side