Gray: Praise for Carnegie

Mary Jo is a senior at Carnegie, a school for the gifted and talented. This morning, as I drove her to school, she chattered about the nonlinear short story she's writing and the theater department's next play, whose sound design she'll manage. Maybe, she said hopefully, she'll be able to talk her friends in the chamber-music club into writing a little original music for the play's transitions. She was wearing her Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat. And her only worry was that she'd missed the organizational meeting for the robotics club.

I love that school.

Shock of the new

To longtime fans of Carnegie and its predecessor, the magnet program at Jones High School, the sparkling new Midtown campus, at 1101 Taft at West Gray, comes as a shocking change. Until now, Carnegie has existed on the margins. In the No Child Left Behind era, schools for the gifted have been severely out of educational fashion.

The school's shabby old campus, a former elementary school on Scott at Airline, was next to a horse pasture, far not only from most of its students' homes, but also from most Houstonians' consciousness. Never mind that the little school was routinely the top-ranked high school in Houston, frequently listed among the nation's best public schools. (This year, the Washington Post put it No. 10.) Most Houstonians had no idea where it was, or how good it is.

That seems about to change. For months this spring and summer, drivers on busy West Gray wondered about a striking combo of construction projects: A large, thoroughly modern main building rose from the ground, alongside an old brick Art Deco building under renovation.

As designed by Rey de la Reza Architects, Inc., the new campus works as a billboard for the school. The main building - now finished and full of students - declares the school to be thoroughly up-to-the-minute. In front of the double-height glassy library, a metal mesh screen tilts outward, providing not only shade but also a little visual, look-at-me thrill. Rectangles of colored glass peek through cutouts in the mesh, catching drivers' eyes. And at the school's front entrance on Taft, an angled wall functions almost like an actual billboard: An enormous red tile wall sports the giant white letters CVHS. Suddenly, Carnegie is hard to miss.

Best is yet to come

There's much to like about the new campus, which opened when the school year started in August. The upperclassmen talk most about its luxury relative to their old building, relishing things that shouldn't seem remarkable: reliable air-conditioning! Science labs that aren't in a trailer! "Mom," Mary Jo reported, "there are four girls' bathrooms." The old building had one.

I particularly like the Ruthven Outdoor Classroom, a water-absorbing roof garden with a stunning view of downtown. And the urban nerd in me exults in the super-efficient use of the campus' valuable inner-loop space, made possible by deals cut with the city of Houston: Instead of a sprawling paved parking lot, there's a parking garage whose upper deck doubles as the school's tennis court. The land saved is used as playing fields; once they're finished, they'll be open to the public outside of school hours, effectively functioning as a city park.

I'm glad, too, that the new school is built around a courtyard, an grassy echo of the old school's one beloved physical feature - the place where all of Carnegie seemed to gather at lunchtime, as if on a college quad, and where an impromptu concert or Quidditch game might break out. By accident, the old elementary school's layout promoted the kind of effortless mixing that the latest designs for offices and research facilities strive to encourage.

But my favorite part of Carnegie's new campus - and the part that Mary Jo is most looking forward to - is actually the old building, still in the throes of renovation. The Settegast Building is a long, low Art Deco swoop that subtly hugs the curve of West Gray. Designed by Moore & Lloyd and built in 1938, it originally housed an Orange Crush bottling plant on its west side, and a row of shops on the east. Along that fast-developing stretch of West Gray, the Settegast's brick turret is one of the rare visible traces of the area's history before it was Midtown.

Carnegie's Parent Teacher Organization, led by Jeff Basen-Engquist, is still scrambling to raise money for a project HISD's bond didn't cover: converting the Settegast building into an arts center. The west side, with its old bottling plant, would be for the visual arts; the east side would hold a 120-seat theater.

Basen-Engquist recently led a photographer and me through the construction debris. He pointed to lovely architectural details: nifty old brickwork; a high circular window; another window that offered a stunning view of downtown. He talked wistfully about things that could happen there, once he rounds up enough money: that the theater could be open to the public, for talks or Saturday-morning children's theater; that the shops' old display windows could be used to showcase student work to passersby; and not least, that Carnegie's enthusiastic young actors and playwrights would finally have a stage worthy of their productions.

HISD is covering the basic renovation costs, but Carnegie's PTO is raising $350,000 to cover things such as sound equipment for the theater. Basen-Engquist seemed hopeful - he is a congenital optimist - but also worried: After raising $330,000, he's tapped out Carnegie's middle-class parents, and its alumni aren't old enough to donate large sums. The $350,000 didn't include obvious luxuries; he doesn't like thinking about what may have to be cut.

These days, only one thing seems less fashionable than educating the gifted. And that, sadly, is arts education.

And still, I've learned, it matters. I tried to talk Mary Jo out of taking drama her first year; it didn't seem a good match for a shy, awkward kid, and I dreaded having to endure high school productions. But she stuck to her guns. She learned to mix sound, and she learned to make eye contact, and she learned to speak confidently to large groups of people. Best of all, she made theater-kid friends.

One night, a couple of years ago, between acts of a show going well, I watched her literally run around a home-built outdoor stage, adjusting speakers and microphone cords, pausing only to talk with crew members. During one sprint, suddenly, she lept into the air, in a geeky arabesque, her fist raised to the air.

It was a moment of pure joy - the thrill of success, of pulling off something hard, of giving yourself entirely to a project. I thought my heart would break.

At another school, without a place for the arts, that moment wouldn't have happened.

 

lisa.gray@chron.com