Ashes To Ashes

Consider this winter scene: a city school in January, battered metal cans filled with ash lined up along the curb. In the basement of the four-story building, there's a dimly lighted room whose gray walls once were white. It contains a big pile of coal—tons of it—and a man with a shovel. It's his job to feed thousands of pounds of coal each day into the massive cast-iron boilers that deliver steam heat throughout the school. Normally, he comes in at 6 a.m. to stir the glowing embers—carefully banked the night before—and stoke the fires to get heat up before the children arrive. But if it's an especially cold day, he may start at 3 in the morning. A deep metal bucket hangs from a steel track suspended from the ceiling, and the man uses it to haul the black, dusty lumps from the storage room, 550 pounds at a time.

A paragraph from a history book chapter on schools in the 1800s? Actually, it was until recently a typical day for 43-year-old Aurelio Castro, the stoker, or fireman, as they are called, at Intermediate School 119 in the Queens borough of New York City. Relics of the Industrial Age, coal-fired boilers—and workers to feed them—still provide the primary source of heat in about 130 New York schools. However, the boilers are going the way of milk bottles on the back porch and classroom desks made of wood, as the New York City School Construction Authority is on a mission to replace all coal-fired boilers in schools with gas- and oil-fired heating systems over the next four years.

Recently, Construction Authority workers tore out a wall of IS 119's basement, broke the 72-year-old boilers into pieces, and hauled them away. Aurelio Castro may have to join a gym, since all he'll be doing to keep the building heated from now on is throw a few switches each morning. "I tell the firemen they're going to have potbellies," says Anthony Grosso, a project manager...