Public School 186 opened in 1903 as a Harlem elementary school. C. B. J. Snyder, an architect who eventually became the Superintendent of School Buildings for the New York City Board of Education between 1891 and 1923, designed it. The building is shaped like an H and was inspired by the Hôtel de Cluny in Paris, France. 

The building was in such poor condition by March 1972 that after several attempts to activate the fire alarm failed, Alfred L. Leudesdorff, a deputy chief of the New York City Fire Department, ordered the building closed. P.S. 186 had no public address system, so Harold Lomax, the principal, walked through every floor of the five story building with a bullhorn, making sure it was empty. Dr. Thomas W. Matthew of the National Economic Growth and Reconstruction Organization (NEGRO) had set the fire alarm test up to call attention to the unsafe conditions in the building. Dr. Matthew is quoted in the New York Times as saying: 

“Children would suffocate to death before being burned to death or before they got a chance to leap to their death. In any case, they would die.”

After the school closed, the city gave the building to the New York County Local Development Corporation (NYCLDC) in 1975. NYCLDC sold the P.S. 186 to the nonprofit Boys and Girls Club of Harlem for $215,000 in 1986 with the condition that it would be redeveloped within three years of the sale. The Boys and Girls club planned to demolish the school and replace it with a mixed use facility with commercial space, a public school and affordable housing. However, no work was done for the next few decades and the building continued to decay, which upset many of the people who lived nearby. 

Redevelopment work finally began in 2014, and instead of demolishing the building, it was transformed into an apartment complex for lower and middle income New Yorkers called the Residences at PS186. The exterior as well as some interior elements were restored and preserved in the new building. A new Boys and Girls Club is also part of the complex.