The Five-and-A-Halfth Floor

Unknown to most students, the five-and-a-halfth floor is a place most students pass by without thinking twice. A room that lies between the fifth and sixth floor on the Hudson stairwell. For years, there have been rumors ranging from it being a janitor’s closet to a nuclear shelter to a cryochamber for the preserved brain of Peter Stuyvesant, but this exposé will shed light on the true nature of the state secret.

It all started after the great earthquake of ‘88, when Stuyvesant’s building in the Lower East Side was practically reduced to rubble. For a while, since there was no kitchen, students had to eat asbestos sandwiches and lead paint chips from the collapsed building for lunch. This was the final straw. The Parents Association, a league of 4444 Karens strong, threatened to sue the DoE unless they made a new building. As a replacement, the Department, with investments from the Trump Organization, planned the Battery Park location.

To cut costs, they decided to make the footprint of the school as small as possible. The first proposal was an ugly, chunky campus like Bronx Science. After budget cuts from the Reagan administration, the state was short on cash, so it reduced the planned height of the building from 12 to 11 floors half-way through construction (the story of the 11th floor is one for another time). This change in plans resulted in the five-and-a-halfth floor having a height of approximately five foot two inches (the maximum height for Stuyvesant students).

During the move, there was disagreement about what to do with the floor. Stuyvesant’s abolished Messenger Pigeonry Department (the CS credit before computers existed) argued that they should have the floor because they needed to teach kids how to use what was then the cutting-edge technology of the day. A month after the invention of the internet, the department chair, Jane Dove, was found jobless and pecking for birdseed in Rockefeller Park. Stuyvesant’s former Sleep Habit, Mental Health, and Time Management Department also vied for the five-and-a-halfth floor, as they thought it could be a good place for students to take their 41 minute daily nap periods. However with the dawn of the internet, the school administration saw it as pointless, as the average student would go on to doom-dial MySpace for around 4.5 hours a day.

To cover up decades of indecision and prevent suspicion, the school hid the floor in plain sight, disguising it as an off limit area for custodial staff. But that does not mean that the floor has remained unused for all this time.

In this article, I will uncover a decades’s long scandal engrained in the history of Stuyvesant. I like to call it STUYMANIA. I started my investigation in the school archives in the library. First I looked at the records of every Stuyvesant staff member ever contained within the Indicator yearbooks. In the Class ‘95 edition, I found that the first clue to decoding this mystery was tracking down Em Bessel.

Bessel was a school monitor AKA a “walkman-snatcher,” a staff member who confiscated cassette players during the state-wide “bell-to-bell” ban on cassette players in educational facilities implemented by Governor Mario Cuomo. She was the first to rediscover the five-and-a-halfth floor following the building’s construction.

Within months, she and several coworkers transformed the barren floor, still ridden with cobwebs and abandoned pigeonry gear, into a rec room. Through some shady connections, she was able to make an estimated 2.7 to 4.2 million dollars on the black market walkman trade from selling at Brooklyn Tech after school. The higher student population of Tech created a “vacuum-effect” that led to approximately 104,294 walkmans being trafficked across the East River.

With this money, she built a 218-seat movie theater, a Dave and Busters, a real life Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, a food fabricator, a clothes fabricator, a book fabricator (unused in the past 20 years), and a fabricator fabricator. But by far the most impressive exhibit in their collection is a historically accurate replica of the original Terry’s.

The news of this hidden gem spread among staff through word of mouth. One told two, and those two told four, and those four, eight, and so on and so on. Students never heard about it because the only unlocked entrance was an elevator connected to the 11th floor. By making a deal with a janitor, which involved cleaning a student's vomit, my team was able to get access to a universal “skeleton” key that could access any room in the building.

We were amazed by the pure splendor of the place. Gold-laced halls were filled with artifacts of the past 30 years—fidget spinners, iPods, digital cameras, and Labubus—embodying Stuy’s history. Before we got kicked out, we managed to get in a few rounds at the arcade. Though our espionage may have gotten my team and Gary, the janitor, banned for life, it’s a small sacrifice for revealing the truth to the public.

There’s currently mixed sentiment on whether or not to open the area up to students. Some are calling it a waste of funding and arguing for it to be converted into yet another S&D room/innovation lab/Spanish classroom/whatever. Many supporters of the Small Clubs United Movement of Socialism (SCUMS) point out that “They’re telling us we can’t have this as if the real thieves of funding, Robotics, SciOly, Debate, and Math Team, haven’t been right in front of us this whole time.” As an investigative journalist, it’s my job to deliver the truth, not to make your decision. I encourage you, the reader, to dive into the archives, make conspiracy theories, feed them to AI, and follow the hallucination just like a real journalist.