Recently, the indomitable Steve Lackmeyer was tweeting pics of the way certain districts looked before their revitalization took place; much like New York City’s 42nd Street in the 70s, these areas were a taboo wonderland of crime and depravity, with the now vaunted Plaza District being an especially thrilling forbidden zone where both cops and angels feared to tread, where any kind of vice from bootleg Asian kung-fu flicks on VCD to straight-up 8-balls of cocaine were available anytime of day or night for the right price.
I was accepted in the first class of the Classen School of Advanced Studies in 1994, at the start of 10th grade. Myself, along with the rest of my class, were a district-wide experiment in education. And to be honest, those three years we were there, it was an absolute mess. No one really knew what they were doing—least of all the students—so it was easy to say we didn’t really receive a standard education.