Allan Appel Photo
The pantheon of civil rights leaders on a Dixwell Avenue school will now include President Obama — in the form of large back-lit digitally printed images on glass wrapping around the gym.
That detail and more emerged Wednesday night as designers ofa new $35 million, 75,000-square-foot charter high school for 550 students laid out their vision and pictures of it at a site plan review presentation to the City Plan Commission.
The site plan review passed unanimously.
The school will be built on the grave of the former MLK Intermediate School. It will become the new home of Achievement First/Amistad High School.
After the sale last year of the former and long vacant MLK Intermediate School to Achievement First for $1.5 million and a passionately negotiated community benefits agreement, the stage is set for construction to begin.
Shelton-based Fletcher Thompson architect Angela Cahill said that demolition could start this summer with a completion expected in 2015.
The chief features of the building to go up on the six-acre site include a three-story classroom building on one side of a large sunlit communal public area off the main Dixwell Avenue entrance. Off that lobby space will run the major public areas, the cafeteria, gymnasium, and media lab, said architect Michael Berger.
Fletcher Thompson
The site plan.
On the interior of the site bordered by Dixwell, Ford Street, and Sherman Parkway (with forested property to the north) will be a parking area with slots for 100 cars. The cars will belong only to staff and visitors. The agreement between Achievement First and the community includes a provision that none of the high schoolers will drive to school.
Buses will deliver, pick up and stack in the interior parking area and enter or exit either by driveways on Ford or Sherman, so no jamming up is expected on the streets surrounding the school.
The full-length athletic field, which is to be built about four feet above the level of Sherman Parkway, will have extensive perforated drainage pipes along the perimeters. That and other features such as a rain garden for the roof run-off met the approval of environmentally-minded commissioners, including Westville Alderman Adam Marchand, who inquired about it.
As to the athletic field, planners anticipate using grass. “We’d love to have artificial. We just don’t know if we can afford it,” said the landscape architect Earl Goven.
Berger explained that the entry space or lobby, which he termed a “gallery,” will function as a sunlit gathering space, a beacon for students, around which cluster the media lab, gym, and cafeteria. These can function for community gatherings after school hours, with the three-story classroom building, on the north side of the gallery, closed off for security purposes.
Fletcher Thompson
Wrapped around the gymnasium and lit at night so the community can see will be large digitally printed-on-glass versions of the civil rights leaders whose visages currently inhabit the MLK walls. President Obama will be added, said Berger. The mural of the civil-rights heroes has been a beloved landmark in the neighborhood. Neighbors wanted to see it preserved.
The architectural drawing shown at Wednesday night’s meeting has Obama placed right next to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the front of the line.
Whether other faces will be added or taken away is still being discussed between school officials and the local alderwomen, said Achievement First Senior Director of Facilities Lisa Desfosses.
Commissioner Maricel Ramos-Valcarel wanted to know the materials being used. The answer: In addition to large amounts of glass, stone at the base, along with brick and ceramic glazed tile.
The next step for the builders is to go before the Board of Zoning Appeals in April with a laid-out plan for new signage. As soon as construction documents are prepared, the project will go out to bid, as early as this summer, said Cahill.