Bayard Rustin Educational Complex
public school in New York City
The Bayard Rustin Educational Complex, also known as the Humanities Educational Complex, is a "vertical campus" of the New York City Department of Education that contains a number of small public schools. Most of them are high schools—grades 9 through 12—along with one combined middle and high school, grades 6 through 12.
The building, located at West 18th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, formerly housed Bayard Rustin High School for the Humanities (M440), a comprehensive school that graduated its last class in the 2011–2012 school year.
History
The building—which is actually two buildings, one on 18th Street and the other on 19th Street, connected in the middle—was constructed in 1930 as Textile High School, a vocational high school for the textile trades, complete with a textile mill in the basement; the school yearbook was titled The Loom. It was later renamed Straubenmuller Textile High School after the vocational education pioneer Gustave Straubenmuller, then renamed Charles Evans Hughes High School after Governor of New York and U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes.
In 1952, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, which investigated Communist influence in schools, accused two-thirds of New York City teachers of being "card-carrying Communists." Irving Adler, Mathematics Department chair at Straubenmuller and executive member of the Teachers Union, was subpoenaed by the subcommittee but refused to cooperate, invoking his rights under the Fifth Amendment. He was fired. Adler later admitted being a member of the Communist Party USA.
In the wake of disciplinary problems so bad that teachers picketed the school, it was shut down in June 1983, and reopened in September 1983 as the High School for the Humanities with a revamped curriculum focusing on English and the humanities. It was later renamed the Bayard Rustin High School for the Humanities after civil rights activist Bayard Rustin.
In January 2009, following publicized difficulties, including safety issues, a Regents Test scandal – in which the school's administration falsified test scores to push up the school's average – and a continuing low graduation rate, the Department of Education announced that the school would not accept any ninth-graders in the fall of 2009, and that it would close after its last students graduate in 2012.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4874340. Authority coordinates are 40.743, -74.002. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2011, 2012, 1930 and 1952.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bayard Rustin Educational Complex” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.