Peter Gluck discusses the facade of the East Harlem School. East Harlem, New York is a community beset by poverty and its attendant ills of early high school withdrawal, violent crime, teen pregnancy, and drug abuse. The East Harlem School is an independent, not-for-profit, year-round middle school that recruits students from low-income families in the community. The school had an extremely tight budget, caused both by the high cost of construction that plagues inner-city schools and the fact that its site was within the 100-year flood zone. Peter Gluck and Partners acted as both architect and construction manager in an architect-led design-build process, providing a level of intensive quality control and substantial cost savings, which resulted in a building that would otherwise have been out of reach for such a school.