Skip to content

LaGuardia High School Campus

The LaGuardia High School campus occupies a nine-story building at 100 Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan's Lincoln Square neighborhood, adjacent to Lincoln Center. Designed by Argentine architect Eduardo Catalano and opened in 1984, the building merged two predecessor schools -- the High School of Music & Art and the School of Performing Arts -- into a single facility that has housed over two thousand aspiring artists at a time for four decades. The building's location next to one of the world's most significant performing arts complexes was both symbolic and practical, but its aging infrastructure, insufficient practice space, and the particular exhaustion of navigating nine stories while chronically ill made it a more complicated space than its prestigious address suggested -- especially for Charlie Rivera, who commuted from Jackson Heights, Queens every day on a body that fought him for every block of the journey.

The Commute

Before the building, there was the commute. For Charlie Rivera, LaGuardia began not at 100 Amsterdam Avenue but at the elevated 7 train platform in Jackson Heights, where the morning air smelled like exhaust and the empanada cart on Roosevelt Avenue and the particular metallic ozone of the subway that New Yorkers stopped noticing after the first year and never fully stopped smelling.

The route was the 7 train from Jackson Heights to Times Square -- forty minutes on a good day, longer when the MTA was being the MTA -- then a transfer to the 1 train northbound to 66th Street-Lincoln Center. The total commute ran between forty-five minutes and an hour, carrying a saxophone case that banged against his leg and the legs of everyone around him, standing because the morning trains were packed and there were no seats, swaying with the particular rhythm of a New York City subway car that the body learns to anticipate after a few months and that Charlie's body sometimes couldn't anticipate because the dizziness arrived without warning and turned the swaying into something dangerous.

Good body days: the commute was his. Headphones in, music playing, watching the city pass through the window as the 7 emerged from the tunnel in Queens and ran elevated through Jackson Heights, past the rooftops and the water towers and the morning light hitting the Citicorp Building in Long Island City. The subway was New York at its most democratic -- every body pressed against every other body, nobody special, everyone going somewhere. Charlie loved the city even on the days it punished him.

Bad body days: survival mode. Counting stops. Gripping the pole with both hands because the nausea was building and if the train lurched he wasn't sure he could stay upright. Getting off at an intermediate stop to sit on a bench and breathe, watching two trains pass, knowing he'd be late, knowing the lateness would be interpreted as unreliability rather than a body that couldn't sustain an hour of standing. The particular humiliation of finding a trash can on the Times Square platform to throw up into while a thousand commuters walked past without looking because this was New York and people threw up on platforms and nobody had time to care.

Peter Liu made a similar commute from his neighborhood, and the two of them often rode together -- Peter learning early what it looked like when Charlie's body was having a bad day, learning to position himself so Charlie could lean against him without it looking like leaning, learning the geography of every bench and every bathroom between Jackson Heights and Lincoln Center because Charlie might need one at any stop.

Exterior and Arrival

The building sits at the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and West 65th Street, a modernist block adjacent to the Lincoln Center campus. Arriving from the 66th Street subway station, students walked past the Lincoln Center plaza -- the fountain, the Metropolitan Opera House with its arched windows, the New York City Ballet, the Philharmonic -- before reaching the comparatively utilitarian entrance of their high school. The juxtaposition was deliberate in design and relentless in practice: every morning, LaGuardia students walked past the institutions they aspired to join, the physical proximity a daily reminder that this is where the path leads if you are good enough and lucky enough and, in some cases, well enough to follow it.

For Charlie, arriving at LaGuardia meant arriving in a neighborhood that was not his. Jackson Heights was Dominican and Colombian and Bangladeshi and Filipino, packed tight, multilingual, loud with life. Lincoln Square was Lincoln Center -- cultural institutions, expensive restaurants, the kind of wealth that manifested as quiet, clean sidewalks and doormen. Charlie was awed by the proximity to world-class music and simultaneously aware that this neighborhood had not been built with kids like him in mind. The music belonged to him. The address did not.

The building's exterior was Catalano's modernist design -- clean lines, concrete and glass, functional rather than beautiful, the aesthetic of 1980s institutional architecture that prioritized purpose over warmth. The main entrance opened into a lobby that was always crowded during arrival and dismissal, students carrying instrument cases and dance bags and art portfolios, the particular choreography of nearly three thousand teenagers funneling through a space designed for fewer of them.

Interior: General Character

The building's interior reflected its 1984 construction: linoleum floors in the hallways, fluorescent lighting that buzzed at a frequency most students stopped hearing after the first month but that some -- the ones with sensory sensitivities, the ones with migraines, the ones whose nervous systems processed sound differently -- never stopped hearing. Cinder block walls painted in institutional colors that had been chosen by someone who did not live inside them. Drop ceilings with acoustic tile that absorbed some of the noise and none of the energy.

Nine floors connected by elevators and stairwells. The elevators were slow and unreliable in the way that NYC public school elevators were slow and unreliable -- technically functional, frequently crowded, occasionally out of service. Students who could take the stairs took the stairs. Students who couldn't take the stairs waited for elevators that arrived when they arrived and held a maximum number of bodies that was always fewer than the number of bodies waiting. For a student with an undiagnosed condition that made standing difficult, the elevator was both a necessity and an advertisement of vulnerability -- everyone who saw you waiting for it instead of taking the stairs drew conclusions.

The hallways were never quiet during passing periods. Saxophone scales bled through closed doors. A dancer stretched in a stairwell. Someone was always rehearsing something, even in the corridor, even sitting on the floor with their back against the wall, even in the minutes between classes that weren't long enough to get to a practice room and too long to waste. The building hummed with the particular energy of several thousand teenagers who were all very good at something and who were all producing the sounds of that something at various volumes throughout the day.

The smell of the building was institutional -- floor cleaner, cafeteria food drifting up through the ventilation system, the rubber of dance shoes, the brass and valve oil from the instrument rooms, the acrylic and turpentine from the art studios. In winter, the heating system ran hot and dry, turning the upper floors into arid boxes where singers complained about their throats and saxophone reeds cracked. In fall and spring, the windows that could be opened let in the sounds of Amsterdam Avenue -- traffic, construction, the ambient roar of Manhattan that was its own kind of white noise.

The Concert Hall

The LaGuardia Concert Hall was the building's crown jewel -- a 1,150-seat performance venue that could host professionally produced events. The hall occupied multiple floors of the building's interior, its vertical space cutting through the nine-story structure to create a room with actual acoustics rather than the deadened tile-and-linoleum sound of the classrooms. The seats were theater-style, the stage properly equipped with professional lighting and sound, and the acoustic design good enough that performances in the LaGuardia Concert Hall could sound, if you closed your eyes, like performances at the professional venues a few blocks away.

For students, performing in the concert hall was a rite of passage. The space transformed rehearsal-room musicians into performers -- the distance between the stage and the back row, the way sound behaved differently in a proper hall than in a classroom, the particular vertigo of standing on a stage where the audience could actually hear what you were doing and judge accordingly. Charlie's early performances at LaGuardia took place on this stage, and the experience of hearing his saxophone fill a 1,150-seat room for the first time was one of the moments that told him, before he had words for it, that this was what he was going to do.

The Theaters

In addition to the concert hall, the building housed a thrust-stage theater and a black-box theater, both serving the Drama and Technical Theater programs. The thrust stage pushed the performance space into the audience, creating an intimacy that the concert hall's proscenium layout didn't allow. The black-box theater was the most flexible -- a room that could be configured for any kind of performance, its walls painted black, its lighting grid exposed, the space itself deliberately blank so that each production could define it anew. Instrumental Music students occasionally performed in these spaces for cross-department collaborations, but they were primarily the domain of the drama and dance students.

The Jazz Rehearsal Room

The most narratively significant interior space at LaGuardia was the room where Nelson Taveras directed the jazz ensemble -- a mid-floor classroom that the jazz program had claimed and personalized over decades of use. The room was institutional in bones -- the same linoleum, the same fluorescent lights, the same cinder block walls as every other classroom in the building -- but the jazz program had layered its identity over the institutional skeleton until the room felt like something specific rather than something generic.

Posters lined the walls: concert announcements from decades of LaGuardia jazz performances, photographs of notable alumni, a faded print of Miles Davis that had been there so long nobody remembered who put it up. Acoustic panels had been added at some point -- not by the school's facilities team but by a previous director who understood that jazz rehearsal in a room with bare cinder block walls was jazz rehearsal inside a resonant echo chamber. The panels softened the sound enough to make the room workable without deadening it entirely, leaving a warm-but-bright acoustic that rewarded clean playing and exposed sloppy technique.

The music stands were dented and marked with generations of pencil annotations. The chairs were standard institutional chairs -- metal legs, plastic seats, nothing comfortable, the kind of chairs that made your back ache after two hours but that nobody replaced because the budget went to instruments and sheet music, not furniture. The piano in the corner was a mid-quality upright that Taveras maintained himself because the school's piano technician visited once a semester and Taveras's standards for tuning were more demanding than the institution's maintenance schedule.

The chair by the door -- the one Taveras placed for Charlie -- was not visually distinguished from any other chair in the room. It was the same institutional chair, positioned near the exit so that a student who needed to leave quickly could do so without disrupting rehearsal. Its significance was invisible to anyone who didn't know why it was there.

The room smelled like valve oil, brass, and the particular staleness of a space that was used intensively and ventilated inadequately. In winter, the radiator clanked. In late spring, the windows opened onto Amsterdam Avenue and the sound of the city mixed with the sound of the ensemble in a way that Taveras sometimes incorporated into the music rather than fought against.

The Practice Rooms

The practice rooms were the building's most contested resource -- small, soundproofed (to varying degrees) rooms scattered across the music floors, available on a sign-up basis that was theoretically orderly and practically chaotic. There were never enough of them. Nearly three thousand students in a building with a finite number of rooms meant that practice time was a daily competition, particularly during the weeks before juries, recitals, and ensemble concerts.

The rooms ranged in quality from decent -- small but functional spaces with a music stand, a chair, adequate ventilation, and enough soundproofing to practice without being heard in the hallway -- to terrible, the rooms that students called "the boxes," closet-sized spaces with no windows, insufficient ventilation, and a tendency to become oppressively hot after twenty minutes of playing. The boxes were the rooms nobody wanted but everyone used because the alternative was not practicing, and at LaGuardia, not practicing was not an option.

For Charlie, the practice rooms served a dual purpose: they were where he went to play alone, to work through arrangements without the pressure of the ensemble, to explore the saxophone in the privacy that a crowded building rarely offered. They were also where he went to be sick without witnesses. A practice room with the door closed was the most private space available in a building that was otherwise relentlessly public -- a place where he could sit on the floor with his back against the wall and wait for the nausea to pass, or lie down on the industrial carpet and close his eyes until the dizziness subsided, or simply exist in his body without performing wellness for anyone. The practice rooms smelled like sweat and rosin and the ghosts of ten thousand hours of solitary work, and for Charlie they also smelled like the particular relief of a door that closed between him and the world when his body needed to stop pretending.

The SoundLab

The SoundLab recording studio was one of the building's most modern facilities -- a state-of-the-art recording space where students could record and produce music using professional-grade equipment. Access to the SoundLab was managed through the music department and represented a step beyond practice and performance into the world of production and technology. For students interested in composition, arrangement, and recording -- as Charlie increasingly was -- the SoundLab was where the music they heard in their heads could be captured, manipulated, and refined.

The Cafeteria

The cafeteria was where studios mixed. Instrumental Music students sat with other Instrumental Music students, but the tables were close enough and the room crowded enough that the boundaries blurred. The food was standard NYC public school cafeteria fare -- serviceable, uninspiring, the kind of food that existed to prevent hunger rather than provide pleasure. The smell of cafeteria cooking permeated the floors above and below, a constant olfactory reminder that the building was, beneath its artistic ambitions, a public school with a food service contract and a budget that allocated more to saxophones than to lunch.

For Charlie, the cafeteria was a social space he navigated carefully. Eating was complicated -- the gastroparesis that would eventually be diagnosed meant that food sat in his stomach like concrete, that nausea followed meals unpredictably, that the safest strategy was often not eating at all, which was its own kind of visible in a room full of teenagers who noticed when you didn't have a tray. Peter sat with him. Peter always sat with him, and Peter's tray always had enough food for two, and if Charlie didn't eat, Peter didn't comment, and the absence of commentary was its own form of care.

Accessibility and Navigation

The building's ADA compliance was a function of its 1984 construction -- ramps where required, elevators connecting all nine floors, accessible bathrooms on designated floors. The compliance was technical and sufficient on paper. In practice, the building presented the specific challenges that a forty-year-old institutional structure presents to a body that does not conform to the assumptions embedded in its design.

The elevators served students with physical disabilities, but using them required navigating the social dynamics of being seen using them. In a culture that valued physical intensity -- dancers pushed through pain, musicians played until their fingers bled, the ethic of the conservatory was endurance -- using the elevator was a visible declaration of limitation that some students couldn't afford socially. Charlie took the stairs on good days and the elevator on bad days and hated both: the stairs because they exhausted him, the elevator because it marked him.

The distance between classrooms on different floors meant significant physical travel throughout the day. A student whose first-period academic class was on the seventh floor and whose second-period ensemble rehearsal was on the third floor had four minutes to cover the distance, which was adequate for a healthy student and insufficient for a student who was dizzy, nauseous, or simply running on a body that had less energy than the schedule demanded. Charlie was late to classes not because he didn't care but because his body moved through the building at a pace the institution's schedule did not accommodate.

The nurse's office existed but was not equipped for the kind of ongoing, undiagnosed chronic illness that Charlie presented. The nurse could take a temperature, offer a Tylenol, suggest going home. What the nurse could not do was explain why a student was dizzy every day, why the nausea came and went without pattern, why a fourteen-year-old was this tired this often. The nurse's office was designed for acute problems -- flu, headaches, sprained ankles -- not for the particular hell of a body that was failing slowly and without explanation.

Compounding the physical inaccessibility was the academic maintenance requirement. LaGuardia required students to maintain a minimum GPA to remain enrolled, with academic probation and a one-semester window to recover for students who fell below the threshold. For a chronically ill student without a diagnosis, every sick day was a day of missed academic content on top of missed rehearsal time, and every bad body week was a week where assignments accumulated faster than a depleted body could complete them. The building's inaccessibility was not just architectural -- it was structural, embedded in policies that assumed a body capable of sustaining a conservatory pace and an academic rigor that would have challenged a student at full health. The threat of losing his spot at LaGuardia haunted Charlie through the hallways as surely as the nausea did, and by sophomore year, the cumulative weight of maintaining grades in a body that wouldn't cooperate became one of the pressures that drove him to crisis.

Relationship to Characters

Charlie Rivera

For Charlie, LaGuardia was both home and hell. The music was everything he wanted -- the jazz ensemble, Taveras, the practice rooms where his saxophone could say things his mouth couldn't, the concert hall where sound expanded to fill space the way his body never could. The institution was everything his body couldn't sustain -- nine stories of stairs and schedules, a conservatory pace that assumed wellness, a medical infrastructure that could offer Tylenol but not answers.

The building held his best moments (first solos in the concert hall, late afternoons in the practice room when the music was good and the nausea was quiet) and his worst (throwing up in a bathroom between classes, sitting on the floor of a practice room too dizzy to stand, the day the ambulance came after his overdose). LaGuardia was the place where Charlie first understood that his talent and his illness were going to coexist for the rest of his life, and that institutions would always be better at accommodating the first than the second.

Peter Liu

Peter experienced LaGuardia as both a musical home and the place where he watched someone he loved suffer. His own relationship with the building was shaped by proximity to Charlie -- learning the location of every bathroom, every bench, every quiet corner where Charlie could rest. Peter's map of LaGuardia was a map of Charlie's body: the stairwell where Charlie sat when the dizziness was bad, the practice room where he went when the nausea was coming, the cafeteria table by the wall where Charlie could lean back without anyone noticing.

Nelson Taveras

For Taveras, the jazz rehearsal room was his domain -- the one space in the building where he had complete authority over how things were done. He had shaped it over years of tenure, adding the acoustic panels, maintaining the piano, curating the posters on the walls. The room was an extension of his teaching philosophy: institutional enough to remind students where they were, personalized enough to feel like it belonged to the jazz program rather than to the building. He played piano in the room after school hours sometimes, alone, the building empty around him, the sound of the upright filling a space that during the day was full of students and during the evening was full of his own music and the radiator's clanking.

Settings High School Campuses New York City Manhattan Charlie Rivera Peter Liu