Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts

Overview

Every other specialized high school in New York City is bound to the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test — the single exam that has decided admissions to Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech since the 1970s. LaGuardia stands alone. New York State’s Hecht-Calandra Act, the law that locked those test-score admissions into statute, did target LaGuardia’s two predecessor schools — but admission to the merged school was, and still is, by audition and portfolio rather than by testing, which is how the city’s one performing-arts specialized school survived the standardization of everything else (NYU Steinhardt, 2021). The school itself puts it plainly: LaGuardia is “New York City’s only specialized high school where admission is earned by audition and portfolio” (LaGuardia High School).

That exception is more than a footnote. It means LaGuardia is the one selective public school in the city where a teenager can be rejected from every other specialized school and still walk into a conservatory. About 2,400 students from all five boroughs now train there at a conservatory level in one of six studios — Dance, Drama, Fine Arts, Instrumental Music, Vocal Music, and Technical Theater — while completing a full college-preparatory academic program, a block from Lincoln Center at 100 Amsterdam Avenue (LaGuardia High School).

Keller’s bargain: a vocational school for the stage

The performing-arts half of the school began as a theory about keeping kids in school. The idea grew out of a decade-old arts program at Metropolitan Vocational High School on Catherine Street, run by its principal, Dr. Franklin J. Keller. Keller believed the performing arts deserved their own vocational program — and that combining vocational arts training with a traditional curriculum would persuade otherwise disinterested students to stay in school. His formulation, preserved in a 1982 city landmarks report, was blunt: “Why not use honest preparation in these professional areas as the medium of exchange for a decent tolerance for academic studies?” (NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, December 21, 1982).

Location, Keller decided, was non-negotiable: the Lower East Side was “difficult to get to, a rather poor neighborhood, and far removed from the feeling of Broadway and Times Square,” so a Times Square site was essential. The school’s backers settled on 120 West 46th Street — an 1893-94 Romanesque Revival building by C.B.J. Snyder, originally P.S. 67, notable as the first school Snyder is known to have designed before his thirty years as the Board of Education’s superintendent architect. The proposal was announced in the New York Times in June 1946, and the School of Performing Arts opened in September 1948 with enrollment set at about 620 students, half the day for academics and half for studio classes, with students chosen by audition (NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, December 21, 1982).

The planning commission for the new school read like an opening-night guest list: Helen Hayes, Martha Graham, Walter Damrosch, Olin Downes, Brock Pemberton, and Margaret Webster. The founding trio of specialties was Music, Drama, and Dance — radio was briefly intended as a fourth. Educational authorities at the time believed it was the first school of its kind in the United States, and its early graduates proved the concept: Rita Moreno, Liza Minnelli, Al Pacino, Ben Vereen, Arthur Mitchell, and Priscilla Lopez all came out of the West 46th Street building before its landmark designation in 1982 (NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, December 21, 1982).

Two schools, one name, twenty-three years of waiting

The music-and-art half is older. In 1936, Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia founded the High School of Music & Art for gifted students in music, art, and the performing arts — an event he later described as the “most hopeful accomplishment” of his twelve years as mayor. The two schools were merged on paper in 1961 as a single organization, but that was where the unification stopped: they kept their separate campuses, Music & Art at Convent Avenue and 135th Street (“The Castle on the Hill”) and Performing Arts in Times Square, and would wait more than two decades for the promised shared building (New York Press, circa 2010).

The wait became one of New York education’s longest-running stories. A site in the Lincoln Square area was chosen in the 1950s, and a groundbreaking ceremony was held in 1958, with the city publicly promising completion by 1964. The promise slipped through budget crises and bureaucratic inertia until finally, in September 1984, students from both schools walked into a new concrete building beside Lincoln Center, designed by Argentine architect Eduardo Catalano and named in honor of the mayor who had founded the original school nearly fifty years earlier (Playbill, circa 2015).

The “Fame” school and the audition gauntlet

The 1980 film Fame — later a television series and a stage musical — was set at the fictional “New York City High School for the Performing Arts,” drawn directly from the real school. The building itself was not used in filming, but the nickname stuck: LaGuardia is the “Fame” school to this day (Playbill, circa 2015).

The Broadway record makes the nickname earned. Al Pacino — two Tony Awards, an Academy Award, four Golden Globes, two Primetime Emmys — got his earliest performance training there. Priscilla Lopez created the role of Morales in A Chorus Line and built the show’s famous “Nothing” number directly from her own LaGuardia acting-class experiences. Martin Charnin debuted as “Big Deal” in the original West Side Story before writing the lyrics and directing the original Annie. Jonathan Tunick, one of the rare EGOT winners, orchestrated nearly every Stephen Sondheim score. Lonny Price, Sarah Paulson, Hal Linden, Charles Busch, and Ellen Barkin all came through the same halls (Playbill, circa 2015).

Getting in, the New York Press noted, can be “as competitive as auditioning for a Broadway play.” In the year it covered, the school accepted 664 new students out of 9,000 applicants — eighth and ninth graders from the five boroughs auditioning in their chosen studio by sketching a live model, setting up a lighting board, jumping into a ballet class, playing an improvisation game, performing a monologue from an O’Neill play, or sight-reading a piece for trombone. Academic performance counts too. Ninety-eight percent of LaGuardia students went on to some form of higher education (New York Press, circa 2010).

The student who auditioned to sing and was sent to act

One of the school’s most famous graduates arrived intending to sing. Onika Tanya Maraj — Nicki Minaj — moved from Trinidad to South Jamaica, Queens, at age five and successfully auditioned for admission to LaGuardia. She tried out for the singing department but was admitted to the drama department instead, and spent her school years training as an actor (Caribbean Magazine, June 15, 2015). Footage of her as a teenage drama student — stealing a scene with what the press called a “powerful, emotive performance” — circulated years later as proof of where the stage command was learned (Entertainment Tonight, December 29, 2015).

Her path through the school doubles as the classic LaGuardia story. She graduated in 2000, and a week later was cast in the Off-Broadway play In Case You Forget. The acting career did not take off as hoped, so she worked waitressing and odd jobs — including, she has said, being fired for discourtesy to customers — before pivoting to rap, mixtapes, and eventually a record deal that made her one of the best-selling female rappers in history (Caribbean Magazine, June 15, 2015).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not name the school’s current principal or report current rankings; neither appeared in a personally read source recent enough to cite. Enrollment is the school’s own figure (~2,400) and should be read as such. The 1958 groundbreaking and the city’s 1964 completion promise are recorded in the merger-history account; the exact dates of each construction delay were not found in a citable source and are not stated. Nicki Minaj’s school years are described as the cited sources describe them; nothing is claimed about her later career beyond the pivot the sources document. This school is not LaGuardia Community College (CUNY), a separate institution with the same namesake.