Samuel Gompers Career and Technical Education High School was a

public In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the ''Öffentlichk ...

vocational school A vocational school is a type of educational institution, which, depending on the country, may refer to either secondary or post-secondary education designed to provide vocational education or technical skills required to complete the task ...

for grades 9–12 located in East Morrisania,

Bronx The Bronx () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Bronx County, in the state of New York. It is south of Westchester County; north and east of the New York City borough of Manhattan, across the Harlem River; and north of the New Y ...

, New York, named for American Federation of Labor founder

Samuel Gompers Samuel Gompers (; January 27, 1850December 13, 1924) was a British-born American cigar maker, labor union leader and a key figure in American labor history. Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and served as the organization's ...

. The school was founded in 1930 as Samuel Gompers Industrial High School for Boys. It was closed in 2012.

Public art

Samuel Gompers High School is the site for a notable

Federal Art Project The Federal Art Project (1935–1943) was a New Deal program to fund the visual arts in the United States. Under national director Holger Cahill, it was one of five Federal Project Number One projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administrati ...

mural created in 1936 by Eric Mose. The three-panel, 600-square-foot fresco, ''Power'', was created in the school library. The work was described in an April 1938 article in ''

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'':

The central theme of this mural is Light. The artist of two decades ago probably would have pictured light as a Greek lady with a torch, or possibly as Prometheus. Mose, however, has combined cubism with physics. The central "figure" is a stylized abstraction of the sun, seen in design with a prism, which relates to a broad band of color that runs along the top of the mural and is broken up into brilliant stripes—the spectrum. Beneath this field the artist has made an abstract design of the forms through which we know light and power. One recognizes spark-plugs, dynamos and such actual electrical machines as a fan. Those forms are all carried out in color-design derived from the spectrum above, and interestingly applied to individual objects such as infra-red, violet ray and other "light" instruments. Thus the mural, a great field of glowing, angled color that looks, superficially, like something by a cubist, and has the quality of Chartres stained glass, is at the same time an accurate scientific chart. Moveover, it is used as one by the school, and so effectively that almost any boy one may find in the library can explain its design.

Notable alumni

Chris Lighty Darrel Steven "Chris" Lighty (May 8, 1968 – August 30, 2012) was an American music industry executive. He co-founded Violator, a record label, management and marketing company, which represented hip hop and R&B artists such as Busta Rhymes ...

, (1968–2012) was an American music industry executive. He co-founded Violator, a record label, *

Frank Malzone Frank James Malzone (February 28, 1930 – December 29, 2015) was a Major League Baseball third baseman who played for the Boston Red Sox (1955–65) and California Angels (1966). Early years Frank was signed as a free agent out of Samuel Gompers ...

, (1930–2015) was an All-Star Major League Baseball player. * Grandmaster Flash, (1958-), is a legendary American DJ.

References

External links

NYC Department of Education: Samuel Gompers Career and Technical Education High School

(1936) at Public Art for Public Schools, New York Department of Education Defunct schools in New York City Public high schools in the Bronx Morrisania, Bronx Art Deco architecture in the Bronx {{Bronx-school-stub