25th Hour | City College of New York — Where the Teacher Loses His Nerve

Jacob Elinsky teaches literature at Coventry Preparatory School, a place of stone arches and long corridors where a seventeen-year-old named Mary can walk into his classroom and quietly take the ground out from under him. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the entire part in a state of held breath — sweating, deflecting, never once saying the thing he is thinking. The building does half the work. It looks like an institution built to keep adults firmly in charge, and Jacob is visibly failing that brief.

The school is the High School for Mathematics, Science and Engineering, which sits in Baskerville Hall on the City College campus at 138th Street and Convent Avenue in Hamilton Heights. This is CCNY's neo-Gothic core: dark Manhattan schist quarried out of the subway excavation, trimmed in white terracotta, crowded with carved grotesques representing the arts and the sciences. Shepard Hall next door is the giant of the group, finished in 1907, more cathedral than classroom block, and students have been crossing in front of it ever since.

Convent Avenue is a public street and the campus grounds are open. Stand at the gate on a weekday afternoon and the extras are real — teenagers spilling out, arguing, late for something. That is exactly the traffic Jacob was drowning in.