Sara Krulwich/The New York Times DeWitt Clinton High School, founded in 1897, moved to its current location in the Bronx in 1929.On Oct. 29, 1929, the most devastating day in the history of the New York stock market, Wall Street began its great economic descent. But on the same day in the northern Bronx, people were casting aside the calamity on Wall Street and celebrating the arrival of a new high school building.
More than 2,000 people crowded through the marbled halls to the auditorium of DeWitt Clinton High School on Mosholu Parkway to hear Mayor James J. Walker inaugurate the ambitious all-boys institution, which cost the city $3.5 million. Mayor Walker remarked, “This temple of education will well repay us even after we are gone, by training future generations to be good citizens.” Indeed, Clinton’s impact would not only give back to New York, but repay American society in significant ways.
Its alumni include Ralph Lauren, James Baldwin, Stan Lee (creator of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men), Richard Rodgers (writer of 42 Broadway scores, including “Oklahoma!”), Nate Archibald (the pro basketball player known as Tiny), Richard Condon (writer of “The Manchurian Candidate”), Seymour Berger (creator of the modern baseball card) and Tracy Morgan of “Saturday Night Live” — among many other writers, athletes, directors, chief executives and government officials.
In their new book, “The Castle on the Parkway: The Story of New York City’s DeWitt Clinton High School and its Extraordinary Influence on American Life,” Gerard J. Pelisson and James A. Garvey III, former Clinton teachers, embarked on an exhaustively researched telling of the Clinton story, from its establishment in 1897 in Midtown to its contemporary status as one of the largest public schools in the Bronx. But most important, the book is a tribute to the outstanding, often unsung alumni.
“Other Bronx schools tended to be stuck away on some street somewhere,” Mr. Pelisson said. “Here was a school that had its own swimming pool, football field, track field and a big avenue in front of it adorned with trees and plants. In the days of the Depression, it must have been quite the sight.”
A number of factors went into making Clinton an intellectual incubator to some of the nation’s finest names — most notably, its size and democratic ethos. Clinton was not a neighborhood school, so students from all over the Bronx and Harlem could choose to enroll. It amassed a peak enrollment of 12,000 students, making it the largest high school in the world, according to the 1963 Guinness Book of World Records.
“DeWitt Clinton might be a castle, but it never had a moat, never had something to protect it like an entrance exam,” Mr. Pelisson said. “The school never kept out any kind of nonacademic student. It was always very open.”
Eric Nadelstern (class of ’67), the City Department of Education’s chief school officer and a former teacher at Clinton, said the school’s high level of experimentation helped it gain recognition. “Clinton was a sociological experiment: take inner-city boys and send them to a country school,” Mr. Nadelstern said. “And the faculty of the school had more academic freedom given the numbers it attracted.”
Mr. Nadelstern cited the Bronx’s cheap and speculative housing in the 1930s as the reason the borough attracted such large numbers of working immigrants. Consequently, Clinton’s student body represented an amalgam of ethnic backgrounds from the beginning. “Children who went to school in the Bronx were the children of those immigrant populations who made their mark on society,” he said.
Paul Pitluk (class of ’49) remembers Clinton as a place boys could go to get away from their sometimes troubled domestic lives. “It was nice to have a different feeling than what they had at home,” Mr. Pitluk said. “The Clinton boys had a different environment — for many, an escape from a difficult neighborhood situation.”
Mr. Pelisson and Mr. Garvey researched more than 3,000 Clinton alumni and broke down their achievements by profession. Despite the book’s 373 pages, Mr. Garvey said it was not a comprehensive overview, as he projected that 200,000 students have gone through Dewitt Clinton.
Clinton remained an all-boys school until 1983, a time when the school was experiencing low enrollment and student retention, according to Mr. Garvey. The current principal, Geraldine Ambrosio, said that today girls constitute 56 percent of 4,200 students enrolled.
Robert Esnard (class of ’56), president of the Zucker Organization, a New York real estate company, said that when he was growing up in the Bronx, sports were a major part of his life. Since Clinton had a strong athletic program, he enrolled, and because “all the cool guys I knew went there.” Mr. Esnard reminisced about a Clinton memory that will be forever indelible. He said:
I was in the band at Clinton. At the time I didn’t know who Richard Rodgers was, let alone that he was the writer of the Broadway hit “Oklahoma!” When the movie opened in Manhattan on 42nd Street, they needed a band. Rodgers said he wanted Clinton kids. So there it was. We marched up and down the theater to the opening of “Oklahoma!” I had never been to Broadway before, and for playing the open we got two free tickets. This is the kind of rich history that links you to Clinton.
Mr. Pelisson said it was impossible to go through an entire day without interacting in some way with a Clinton graduate. “We couldn’t have this phone conversation today if it wasn’t for a Clinton guy,” Mr. Pelisson said. “You know closed caption? Invented by a Clinton guy. I could sit at a TV and flip the dial and in 10 stations I’d come up with six or seven Clinton connections. I don’t always finish the movies on TV, but I always read the credits.”
A six-page document with names of distinguished Clinton alumni follows.
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