One of Manhattan’s most famed institutions is coming back this month. 

Central Park’s Loeb Boathouse, which shuttered in 2022, is reopening by the end of this month for boating, snacking and classic New York vibes in Central Park near West 74th Street.

Legends Hospitality, which manages food at major events and tourism spaces including Yankee Stadium, Circle Line Cruises, and One World Observatory, took over the lease, promising $3.5 million in improvements to the historic property.

The company will reopen the boathouse with a phased approach, The New York Post first reported.

Stage one of the boathouse includes opening a casual snack bar and bringing back the famous row boat rentals, which will allow boats to be pre-booked online (and you can use credit cards, so no more cash-only boat rides). Later this summer into fall, the dining room and patio overlooking the lake will open with a brand new menu. 

Legends will pay the city $750,000 annually for the 10-year lease, plus a percentage of sales. 

Official opening dates and menus have yet to be announced.  

Loeb Boathouse first opened its restaurant in 1983 and set the stage for many celebrations, weddings and classic rom-com moments, including iconic scenes in Sex and the City and When Harry Met Sally. Prior to its role in the cultural canon, the boathouse was a popular spot for birders, boaters and parkgoers in need of a public restroom, dating back to the original boathouse in the 1870s. The current structure dates back to the 1950s, but has undergone several improvements since. The newest opening promises renovated bathrooms, plus outdoor improvements and more to-be-seen changes. 

* This article was originally published here

Every spring, the NYC Department of Education releases the results of the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), a 3-hour long, 114 question test of reading comprehension and math questions that is the sole criteria for admission into NYC’s Specialized High Schools (SHS). The SHS represents some of NYC and the nation’s top high schools.  Each year, the headlines shout, “Only, some single digit number, of students are accepted into Stuyvesant this year.” Stuyvesant High School has the highest cutoff  score and is considered the most competitive of the 8 SHS. After the scores are released, there are some words of outrage by different concerned individuals and organizations and then we wait for next year for the cycle to repeat. No significant changes are ever made.

Let’s look at this year’s results. Only 11 Back students received offers to Stuyvesant and 7 have accepted those offers. Let us look at the larger but equally prestigious Brooklyn Technical HS. This year 56 Black students received offers out of the 1,498 offers that were made, a paltry 3.74%. 

Some would say that maybe Black students are not taking the test. Out of the 27,667 students that took the test, 5,714 students were Black, representing 20.65% of all test takers. I would consider that a pretty significant number. Out of these 5,714 students, only 131 received offers, representing 2.29%. My heart goes out to the 5,583 students who did not receive offers and tried their best.

I would assert that the SHSAT is the most challenging High School entrance exam our students encounter. Its complex reading passages and challenging math questions are based on concepts that students learn in  school but most have not experienced the intricate level of questions being asked on the exam. The SHSAT can reduce high performing students who are  level 4’s on state tests to shells of themselves, guessing their way through the test, completely outmatched by a test like nothing they have seen before.

RELATED: Chancellor Banks addresses confusion over admissions policy

Despite these challenges, in the 80’s and 90’s a school like Brooklyn Tech would have anywhere from 30 % to 45% Black students attending the school. Tech was considered the Howard U of SHS. Since the early 2000’s there has been a steep decrease in the number of Black students attending the SHS.

Why have the numbers fallen so low? The majority of the population of the  SHS has historically come from the gifted and talented (G and T),  classes, programs or schools of NYC. Ask any alum from a SHS that attended in the 80’s and they will proudly tell you about their middle school and how it prepared them for the test without prepping, just based on the depth and quality of their curriculum. G and T programs are frowned upon today and most significantly, are no longer housed in most schools, as it used to be. The few G and T programs that exist do not exist in communities of color. The few historically G and T schools that did exist in Black communities, such as Philippa Schuyler Middle School, no longer functions as G and T schools. The acceleration that occurred in G and T schools allowed students to move past the limits of their grade level curriculum and interact with higher order work. If students never see the challenging questions and concepts found on the SHSAT until they sit for the exam or just take the two practice tests found in the city’s SHS brochure, how are they expected to perform well? There is absolutely nothing wrong with our Black students, we just have not, will not, for whatever reason, prepare them or give them the tools needed to navigate the complexities of this test.

What can we do, if we care to do anything? Each stakeholder in our children’s educational journey can play a role in addressing this situation. In the case of the city, a few years ago two promising state senators offered a proposal of a practice SHSAT that would be given to incoming 6^th graders, similar to the way the PSAT is given to 10th and 11^th grade students before they have to take the SAT. Giving all students or interested students this pre SHSAT would be multi-purposeful. It would 1) allow students to see where they fared in comparison to students across the city, 2) provide a city wide benchmark that could give parents a sense of where their child really stood in relation to this challenge and 3) create a roadmap to determine the work that would be required for success on the actual test. 

For schools, creating  strong co-horts of students from 6^th grade through 8^th grade that could be enriched and accelerated would be an investment that would bear fruit in two years leading to higher state test results and even Regents classes while still in middle school. This has been done before, but not using a concerted and coordinated approach. Imagine if each school in District 13 identified 15 students per grade for its SHSAT academic enrichment program. In two years, District 13 would have a pipeline cohort of about 100 students each year who would be ready to effectively compete for seats at a SHS as well as potentially take the Algebra and or English Regents in 8^th grade.   Now imagine if District 16 was doing the same thing. For parents, if your school doesn’t provide a program, working with an academic enrichment company for two years may just be the investment that leads to great outcomes for your child’s future. 

When I started CAS Prep 10 years ago the number of Black students offered admission to Brooklyn Tech was slightly above 100. Despite our success in getting students through the SHSAT test prep process, the numbers of Black students offered seats has declined each year. This year’s 56 offers worry me, it represents a drop of 50 students in 10 years. If we don’t wake up and put some legitimate plans into actions, in ten years the headlines may read.” This year Brooklyn Technical High School admits 1500 students and only 7 are Black!”

Samuel Adewumi is an alumnus of Brooklyn Technical High School. He came back to his alma mater to teach math and engineering and was the head football  coach for several years. He created CAS Prep to give students of color an enrichment and prep program that was 1) located in their community, 2) spoke to their needs and 3) believed in their genius and potential. He can be reached through casprep.org or casprep1@gmail.com

The post OP-ED: Educational Apartheid NYC? Specialized High School Admissions system leads to diabolical number of Black students appeared first on New York Amsterdam News.

* This article was originally published here

Rockefeller Center has been home to a multitude of powerful and eclectic sculptures from a massive gardening trowel to a crushed solo cup, and now an enormous stack of charcoal!

The sculpture is part of an entire 10,000-square-foot exhibition titled Origin, Emergence, Return from Korean artists Park Seo-Bo, Lee Bae, and Jin Meyerson on view from June 8 to July 26, 2023. Visitors will be able to explore three generations of Korean art with more than 70 works on display at the Rink Level Gallery.

According to the press release, “all three artists investigate and challenge the notions of abstraction through unique materials – Park with hanji (traditional Korean paper), Lee with charcoal, and Meyerson with CG (computer graphics) and AR (augmented reality).” Topics of life and death, presence and absence, and displacement and diaspora are all addressed through the different materials.

But the pièce de résistance is Lee Bae’s 21-foot tower of stacked charcoal that will stand tall in front of Rockefeller Center’s Channel Gardens. It’s the first time a Korean artist has occupied the sculpture space.

The towering stack of charcoal exists as a spiritual presence to the start of Origin, Emergence, Return. It “evokes the unavoidable memory of disasters heard from around the world, while also creating a contrast to the surrounding skyscrapers and a sense of touching the dimension before or after civilization,” shares the press release. The structure’s abstract appearance made from the natural properties of charcoal “embodies a desire to purify what humans cannot solve.”

The entire exhibition is part of Rockefeller Center’s larger celebration of Korean culture and heritage to come this July. Korean cuisine, fashion, art, music and gastronomy will be showcased on campus from July 19 to 23 through special events, offerings, and pop-ups.

Learn more on Rockefeller Center’s website.

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* This article was originally published here