Franklin K. Lane Educational Campus: A History of Transformation
Franklin K. Lane Educational Campus, located on the border of Brooklyn and Queens in New York City, has a rich and complex history. From its origins as a beacon of educational opportunity to its eventual phasing out and transformation into a campus housing multiple smaller schools, the story of Franklin K. Lane reflects the changing landscape of urban education in New York City.
Origins and Construction
Franklin K. Lane High School (FKLHS) traces its origins to 1923, when it opened as a combined junior-senior high school in temporary quarters at the former Public School 85 building on Evergreen Avenue in Brooklyn. This establishment responded to the post-World War I population boom in outer Brooklyn where Jewish, Italian, and Irish families predominated, necessitating expanded secondary education to facilitate assimilation and skill development amid the city's broader high school construction surge during the 1920s. The school is named for Franklin Knight Lane, United States Secretary of the Interior during the administration of President Woodrow Wilson. The National Park Service was established during his tenure in office.
By the end of the 1920s, this school, as well as many other high schools throughout the city, was bursting at the seams with students. Local politicians and school officials begged the Board of Ed to at least build an extension, and ground was obtained, but they dithered until at last it was decided that a new high school was needed instead. That was in 1931. There were actually many heated fights over where the new high school would be located. There was strong support for the school to move to Bushwick, as well as a strong push to place the school in Queens. Both locations had very overcrowded schools. But at last it was decided to give the school to both boroughs. FKLHS actually strides the border between Brooklyn and Queens, with half of the school in each borough. More of it is in Brooklyn than Queens, so officially, it’s in Brooklyn.
The Franklin K. Lane High School building was constructed in the 1930s as a New Deal-era project primarily funded by the Public Works Administration (PWA Docket No.), with the structure completed in March 1938. It was now 1935, and in the middle of the Great Depression. The city was given a massive federal subsidy in the form of WPA funding. Designed by architect Walter C., the school was designed after Independence Hall in Philadelphia. School architecture had gone from the stately Collegiate Gothic designs of C.B.J. Snyder to the more “American” Georgian and Federal buildings of the Colonial period. For many people, then and now, the design of Franklin K. Lane constitutes the quintessential American school building. Because so many schools across the country were built with WPA funds in the 30’s, it’s not hard to see why people feel that way.
C.W. Short and R. Stanley-Brown wrote: “This is one of the largest and most modern schools in New York City and has been highly rated by the Municipal Art Commission. It contains the usual administrative offices, service rooms, 84 classrooms, library, commercial museum, 4 gymnasiums, rooms for social activity, homemaking, artcraft, 8 drawing rooms, a swimming pool, and an auditorium. The student capacity is 1,700. The construction is fireproof. The building is 362 feet long by 284 feet wide, with a basement, four stories and penthouse, and is 82 feet high. At the time Franklin K. Lane High School was built, it was one of the largest high school buildings in the world. Each of the four floors spans a quarter mile. To walk from one end to the other on all four floors would cover a mile. It had a huge gymnasium and auditorium, and large classrooms. The school could house almost 3,600 students. The boys' large gymnasium is named for 1938 alumnus William "Red" Holzman. The library is named for Sam Levenson, another alumnus, Class of 1930. The Guidance Suite of offices is named for Franklin A.
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Following the completion of its new facility in August 1937, Franklin K. Lane High School opened its doors to students. The school is located on the Brooklyn/Queens border at the bottom of a steep hill at the corner of Dexter Court and Jamaica Avenue.
Mid-Century Growth and Challenges
Over the next 70 years, the school was well known for its academic and athletics activity. One of the greatest stars to emerge from Lane was William “Red” Holzman, who was a star basketball player here, who then went on to become a bigger star at City College, an excellent player with the NBA, and finally, an award winning coach. He graduated from high school here in 1938. Other notables were Franklin A.
The postwar baby boom further strained capacity as Brooklyn's residential population swelled, filling the school's halls with local students drawn primarily from adjacent zoned districts under New York City Department of Education policies that prioritized geographic attendance over open choice, fostering tight-knit community integration but presaging overcrowding without additional infrastructure. As enrollment expanded in the mid-20th century, reaching thousands of students, the infrastructure experienced chronic strain from overcrowding, which exceeded optimal utilization in later decades. Although specific major additions in the 1950s and 1960s are not extensively documented, the growing student body contributed to accelerated wear on the aging facilities.
During the early to mid-1960s, Franklin K. Lane High School's enrollment expanded rapidly due to population growth and zoning adjustments in Brooklyn's East New York and adjacent areas, where shifting demographics increased the draw from neighborhoods with rising numbers of Black and Puerto Rican residents. By January 1969, enrollment reached approximately 5,100, prompting a three-day closure to implement reductions to 4,350 through targeted rezoning, aimed at easing overcrowding and improving management of the single-session schedule. Early desegregation efforts by the New York City Board of Education, focused on rezoning rather than widespread busing, facilitated this diversification, integrating more minority students into Lane's predominantly white student body while preserving operational stability.
Unfortunately, New York City has a lot of problems when it comes to educating large amounts of students in a changing world. As the racial makeup of East New York changed, the problems at Franklin K. Lane began. At first, in the late 1950s, it was black kids being ganged up on and beaten by white kids. But as the school’s black and Hispanic population soon became the majority, the educational and physical problems became more and more distressing. Teachers, the unions, students, administration and parents were all fighting over ways to change the school in the wake of growing urban decay. By the 70s, the city was not spending money on much of anything, and the inner city high schools suffered more than any other schools. Finally, federal programs poured money into the school in an attempt to turn it around. For a while, FKLHS was a model of urban public education.
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Desegregation Efforts and Challenges
In 1974, a federal court ordered desegregation measures at Franklin K. Lane High School in response to a lawsuit alleging racial imbalance, mandating rezoning and other adjustments to raise white student enrollment from its then-current 16% (with 84% black and Hispanic) to a targeted 31%. These efforts, part of broader New York City attempts to address de facto segregation through administrative rezoning rather than extensive busing, achieved short-term gains in racial diversity, temporarily increasing white representation and providing nominal interracial exposure among students. However, long-term outcomes revealed substantial white flight, as white families increasingly opted for private schools, parochial institutions, or relocation to avoid the rezoned attendance zones, contributing to an overall enrollment decline estimated at around 40% in the years following implementation. This exodus, documented in contemporary accounts, eroded the initial diversity gains, reverting the school to a predominantly minority composition by the late 1970s and accelerating socioeconomic homogenization.
Racial Tensions and Violence
During the early 1960s, Franklin K. Lane High School experienced severe racial clashes that escalated into widespread disorder, prompting significant police intervention. Further violence recurred in 1971 and 1974, underscoring the decade's instability. In response to escalating racial violence, including the January 20, 1969, assault on teacher Frank Siracusa where his clothing was set afire, Franklin K. Lane High School was temporarily closed from January 21 to 24, 1969. The incident, amid broader tensions from rapid demographic shifts and overcrowding exceeding capacity by over 1,500 students, prompted Superintendent Bernard Donovan to acknowledge structural failures and commit to reducing enrollment from 5,600 to 4,350. Subsequent riots, such as the October 31, 1969, cafeteria brawl that spilled into street clashes with over 40 officers intervening, led to further brief disruptions and reopenings under heavy guard, including on November 3 and despite closure considerations on November 5.
By February 1970, the New York City Board of Education added 12 unarmed security guards in plain clothes and maintained the single-session format, aiming to curb disruptions without addressing root causes like unchecked militant activism, as critiqued by on-site teacher Harold Saltzman. These short-term security enhancements yielded a temporarily peaceful spring 1970 semester, the most stable in four years, with enrollment dipping to 4,274 by April before partial rebound. However, they failed to resolve underlying cultural frictions, fostering resentment among remaining white students and staff, who comprised a shrinking minority, and accelerating transfers out that presaged broader demographic shifts.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Franklin K. Lane High School experienced repeated episodes of racial violence that escalated into riots and clashes with police. Violence recurred in the 2000s, often linked to gang disputes that originated on or near campus and involved smuggled weapons such as knives and guns. NYPD and Department of Education data from the early 2000s identified Franklin K. Lane High School experienced significant gang presence, with affiliates of groups such as the Latin Kings, Netas, and local crews linked to the Bloods and Crips engaging in recruitment and conflicts among students. To counter these threats, the school implemented metal detectors for weapons screening, alongside an expanded force of school safety agents and NYPD personnel. However, these reactive measures proved causally limited, as violence reemerged post-intervention without sustained reductions tied to stricter disciplinary actions like expulsions for gang involvement.
Academic Struggles and Eventual Closure
Regents exam pass rates underscored chronic weaknesses in core competencies. In the mid-1960s, Franklin K. Lane High School fell on hard times. Parents and teachers brought a legal action in regard to the racial imbalance and poor performance at Lane. In 1974 Judge John Dooling of the Federal Court's Southern District of New York ruled that education at the school was inferior and ruled that the school racial imbalance was to be addressed by redistricting and redesigning the school program. In 1978, Franklin K. Lane High School was one of ten schools across the nation cited by the United States Congress in the Safe School Study. In the 1970s and 1980s, numerous programs were available to assist and enhance students' academic performance: College Bound Program, Career Development Program (CDP), Co-Op Program, Study to Employment Program, (STEP), and Toward Upward Mobility Program (TUM). To address the problems of students with difficulty attending school, the SOAR program was initiated and recognized by the Federal Government for excellence. The school's General Equivalency Diploma (GED) program was one of the most successful in the city with a code of 421. Later, a parent suit brought into question the school's methods of counseling students who were not attending classes regularly. Eventually, these disruptive students were allowed to attend the school again, causing security problems. During the 1980s and 1990s, led by the school's magnet Law Studies Program students were attracted from various parts of New York City, many of whom went on to attend prestigious universities, such as Columbia, Cornell, NYU, and Syracuse.
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Finally, in 2004, FKLHS was called “New York City’s Worst School” on the front pages of the New York Daily News. On March 8, 2004, the New York Daily News' front page headline "City's Worst School" led to a story in the newspaper regarding the poor academic performance, low graduation rates, violence, and students transferring out in large numbers due to those problems.
In December 2007, the Department of Education announced that Franklin K. Lane would be phased out due to consistently poor performance. Marlon (Terry) Bynum, former assistant principal at Lane and the founding principal of Bushwick High School for Social Justice, was named principal of Lane in 2009 after the previous principal died. Lane had long suffered from low levels of academic achievement, but some students said the situation became even worse after the Department of Education decided the phase the school out beginning in 2007. A recent graduate wrote a blog post entitled How Not to Close a School, in which she described how good teachers left, Advanced Placement classes were cancelled, and students were forbidden from walking in certain parts of the school.
Transformation into an Educational Campus
Following the 2012 closure of Franklin K. Lane High School, the facility was reconfigured as the Franklin K. Lane Educational Campus. Today, the building houses four different high schools. They are The Academy for Innovative Technology, The Brooklyn Lab School, Cypress Hill Prep Academy, and Multicultural High School. Some are doing better than others.
Students must pass through metal detectors and the building is rather drab. One bright spot: the Lane campus has large athletic fields and the four small schools share sports teams. New schools opened on the campus and they are administered by the New York City Department of Education as H.S. 420.
Notable Alumni
Franklin K. Lane High School produced a number of notable alumni, including:
- William "Red" Holzman (1920-1998), a graduate of Franklin K. Lane High School in the mid-1930s, achieved distinction as a professional basketball player and coach. After playing guard for the school, Holzman competed collegiately at City College of New York and professionally with teams including the Rochester Royals, appearing in the Basketball Association of America in 1946-1947. The boys' large gymnasium is named for him. He graduated from high school here in 1938.
- Sam Levenson (1911-1980), who graduated from the school in 1930, rose to prominence as a humorist, author, teacher, and television host. Initially a public school teacher in Brooklyn, Levenson gained fame through radio and TV appearances in the 1950s, delivering anecdotal commentary on Jewish-American family life and urban experiences; he authored books such as Meet the Folks (1944) and hosted The Sam Levenson Show (1950-1952). The library is named for Sam Levenson. Mr. Levenson, one of eight children of struggling immigrant Jewish parents, attended Junior High School 178, Franklin K.
- John Gotti, born in 1940, attended Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn but dropped out at age 16 after a record of truancy, bullying, and disciplinary problems. He later rose to lead the Gambino crime family as its boss from 1985 until his 1992 conviction on charges including murder, racketeering, and extortion, for which he received a life sentence.
- Ted Ashley (1922-2002), chairman of the Warner Bros.
- Thomas J. Churchill (1986-1989), Hollywood writer, director, producer made his first film while attending Franklin K.
- Randolph Evans (1961-1976), murder victim of New York City Police Department officer Robert H.
- Myong J.
- Franklin A.
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