Norman Thomas High School
The Norman Thomas High School for Business and Commercial Education was a public high school (closed in June 2014) in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City under the New York City Department of Education. Formerly known as Central Commercial High School (CCHS), and before that, the Central School of Business and Arts, its former location was on 42nd Street in a structure constructed with a 20-story office building in the air rights above it. It was renamed after Presbyterian minister and Socialist activist Norman Thomas and moved to occupy the first nine  floors of 3 Park Avenue, a 42-story skyscraper on East 33rd Street at Park Avenue in 1975. The high school was originally designed to train students for secretarial and commercial occupations such as accounting, bookkeeping, merchandising and salesmanship, clerical skills, stenography and typing. As of 1940, every senior at Central Commercial High School was required to complete four weeks of work in an office during the last semester. In later years, this expanded to include such topics as data processing and physical distribution