350 East 10th Street; 605 East 9th Street | Block : 392 | Lot #10

Description & Building Alterations

350 East 10th Street is former Public School 64. Built between 1904-1905, it was designed by the Board of Education’s chief architect Charles B.J. Snyder and is a mid-block H-plan building. PS 64 is a rare Snyder school in that it uses the French Renaissance Revival style and the building’s design was not repeated for any other school location, as was often the case with school designs. A local New York City Landmark, the five-story building is described in its designation report as featuring “keyed surrounds, slate-covered mansard roof, terra-cotta moldings and keystones, contrasting brick and stone materials, and pediments filled with fruit and foliage [that] resulted in a visually prominent school building. This distinguished structure and its distinctive plan and siting in the middle of a crowded neighborhood of tenement buildings helped create a strong statement about the importance of education and the importance of the building itself in the crowded immigrant neighborhood. P.S. 64 was designed while Snyder was at his creative and inventive peak, and is an unusually intact example of a school building from this early period.” Edgar Yipsel “Yip” Harburg, who wrote The Wizard of Oz lyrics, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the director of All About Eve and The Barefoot Contessa, and Sam Levene, who played Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls on Broadway, all graduated from this school.

In 1977, at the height of the city’s fiscal crisis when waves of drugs, crime, arson, and abandonment swept through the eastern stretches of the East Village, this building was taken over by several community groups and turned into the CHARAS-El Bohio Community Center. CHARAS was an acronym for the first name of the organization’s five Puerto Rican founders: Chino, Humberto, Angelo, Roy, Anthony, and Sal.