Free My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere by Susan Orlean Page B

store and also a master rapper named Spade, and that he was available for interviews. A moment later, Cherie walked into the room. Tiffanie waved her over and said, “Hey, Cherie, remember when I fired you?” Cherie is one of her many best friends and is now the chairperson of the School Improvement Committee.
    “You did?” Cherie asked. She looked puzzled.
    “From my campaign, girlfriend,” Tiffanie said. “Remember? You were slacking.”
    “Oh, yeah,” Cherie answered. She shrugged her shoulders and glanced at the wall clock. “Come on, Madame President. Let’s go bust it out in gym.”
     
     
     
    THERE ARE NEARLY THREE thousand students at Martin Luther King Jr. High School, but on the best possible day fewer than three hundred of them will turn out to vote in the student government elections. The others probably don’t remember to, or don’t care, or don’t get around to it because of a million different reasons, like schoolwork or job work or family problems or love trouble; many of them might just assume that it doesn’t matter if they vote or not. King is one of the biggest high schools in New York City. It is in a gloomy rectangular brown brick building resting on an elevated concrete deck at Amsterdam Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street—a structure that in an architectural drawing might have looked monumental but in real life looks like a giant rusting lunchbox teetering on a rock. Maybe because it is set so high above the sidewalk and so far back from the street, it is almost invisible; I had walked by it at least once a month for ten years without even noticing it. Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts is right across Sixty-fifth Street, at sidewalk level. King is also within earshot of Lincoln Center, but it is more attuned to the odd, lonesome neighborhood of looming windowless buildings with sealed loading docks and metal doors to the west. The area has always been a hodgepodge. The 1955 Manhattan Land Book map shows a wide band of railroad sidings along the river, an enormous Consolidated Edison property, blocks of dinky brick row houses, a College of Pharmacy, a High School of Commerce, New York City Public School 94, and a flop called Hotel Marie Antoinette. By 1976, when Martin Luther King Jr. High School was built on some of the Con Ed property, much of the area had been razed to make room for Lincoln Center and the American Red Cross headquarters and the eventual site of LaGuardia High.
    LaGuardia is one of New York City’s prestigious specialized schools: Interested students have to pass a competitive audition to get in. King is a general high school. Any student in Manhattan is eligible to attend, and students from the other New York City boroughs can apply. As it happens, thousands of high school students who live right nearby choose not to go to King—they attend private schools or other New York City public schools, including the specialized schools—and many kids at King come from far away. Tiffanie, for instance, lives an hour and a half by subway from King, but she wanted to go to high school in Manhattan rather than in Brooklyn and heard that King had a good science program. A classmate of hers who lives an hour away, in Flatbush, told me she applied because she liked the idea of going to a school named after Reverend King. Someone else, from the Bronx, wanted to come to King because her best friend was enrolled, and a few others said they were at King because their own neighborhood schools were scary.
    According to the most recent New York City Board of Education annual school report, for the 1997–1998 school year, more than half the students at King are African American, forty percent are Hispanic, and four percent are Asian. Only one percent of the school’s 1997–1998 student population was white—compared with fifteen percent citywide—and Tiffanie said she didn’t think there were any white students at King anymore. She did remember one