The Martin Luther King, Jr. Educational Campus is a five-story public school facility at 122 Amsterdam Avenue between West 65th and 66th Streets in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, near Lincoln Center.
The campus is faced on Amsterdam Avenue by a wide elevated plaza which features a self-weathering steel memorial sculpture by William Tarr. The same steel, called Mayari R, was used by architect Frost Associates in the curtain wall of the building, the interior of which has an arrangement of perimeter corridors with floor-to-ceiling windows, leaving many classrooms on the inner side windowless. The school is across West 65th Street from Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts.
The building was formerly the location of Martin Luther King, Jr. High School, which opened in 1975 and was closed in 2005 by the New York City Department of Education due to a history of low academic performance and a low enrollment rate, as well as a history of violence, including the shooting of two tenth grade students inside the school on January 15, 2002, the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. The closing of the school was included by Chancellor Joel Klein and Mayor Michael Bloomberg in the education reform policy. The high school graduated its final class on June 27, 2005.
