In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf describes a series of crumbling realities: the British Empire in its last stages, the impending old age and death of Clarissa Dalloway, and the breakdown of traditional art forms. While reflecting on my approaching graduation from Stuyvesant, I’ve found myself thinking about Stuy in a similar way. It’s not just a nostalgic feeling for the great times here—it’s also an intuition that while my past is crumbling behind me, the school is as well.
Stuyvesant is falling apart, literally.
Student Union Video Homeroom members have been asking the school to fix the televisions in every room for years now, and still, nothing has been done. Most of the clocks in the school are broken or out of sync with each other. The student bathrooms are hellholes: the stalls are disgustingly filthy, the paper towels are used up early in the day and strewn all over the floor, and the sinks are commonly clogged. The senior bar is frequently littered with trash and mice can often be spotted, scurrying across a classroom or dead at the top of the eighth floor escalator.
And of course, above all, there are the escalators.
This winter, as the sun sets earlier and earlier and life slows down and dies throughout our city, I will sit—as I have done for three years now—in both stuffy classrooms and freezing ones. I will slouch there, enjoying the lack of climate control and feeling thoroughly miserable, for both the impending doom of my high school and the destruction of any last vestiges of childhood to which I have clung over the last few years.
The doom that Stuy faces is not merely physical. Our building has been hailed as one of the most beautiful and costly high schools ever, a building whose inhabitants must now leave the once bustling halls desolate by five o’clock every day. Yes, it is a building that is falling apart bit by bit, but it is also a building whose inhabitants are gradually falling apart from each other. They no longer congregate as often, nor as late, in the halls, in the classrooms, in the Student Union. During the school day too, the hallways are cold and empty.
The students go home after school earlier, and the joy of being an adolescent has fallen prey to the specter of an increasingly competitive and college-oriented high school career. My love of learning has dwindled in the face of mediocre teaching, pointless, tedious homework assignments, and a love for the grade, rather than the idea. Whereas I once enjoyed all of my subjects, even if they didn’t involve my career goals, I now find that the only reasons I still attend high school are to get into college and to learn how to write.
These results have only been furthered by the physical degradation of my school. On the one hand, achieving physical closeness leads to both emotional connection and intellectual development. On the other hand, when people no longer have a place to live, love, and learn, their existence becomes bleak and meaningless. Thus, in an otherwise isolating environment, being able to both learn and hang out in a clean, well-run, beautiful (not just functional) building remains a valuable opportunity—one we must protect.
Stuyvesant should be both a beautiful building and a real community. Granted, I love our building because I love the people in it, but honestly, it’s not about me: the people at Stuy change every year. My greatest fear is that one day the building will no longer be there to change along with them.