Tony Bennett gives back to his old N.Y. neighborhood with arts school

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NEW YORK — Tony Bennett and his wife, Susan, walk through the brand-new halls of the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in the Queens neighborhood of Astoria and still marvel at all the details they notice for the first time.

“It looks good there,” Susan says, pointing at a print of Bennett’s painting of Abraham Lincoln that greets visitors to the public high school’s library. Bennett nods, but his eyes are drawn to the rest of the room, painted a bright yellow and flooded with light.

“There isn’t one dark room in this building,” says Bennett, who helped design, with his wife, nearly every detail of the school, down to choosing artists’ names that are etched in the glass of all the classroom windows. “It stops the children from feeling sleepy and lethargic.”

Judging from the students’ reactions to the building, which opened at the start of this school year and which the Bennetts help fund through their Exploring The Arts charity, that planning has generated excitement, especially when Bennett walks the halls and is surrounded by students seeking autographs and pictures as fiercely as if the singing legend were in the latest edition of “Twilight.”

Bennett beams with pride as he says the school now ranks second in Queens academically. Though he is in the midst of a tour and getting ready to head into the studio with Stevie Wonder to record a new album, as well as regularly painting to add to a body of artwork that already includes several pieces housed at the Smithsonian, the school — and the future artists and community leaders it helps to shape — is clearly important to him.

Q. What does it mean for you to have this school here?

A. I’ve always admired the town of Astoria ... We play all over the world — Rome or Paris, Palm Springs or Palm Beach — but this is my favorite town. All the people employed in Manhattan — the ones who make it work, the teachers, secretaries, stagehands, firemen, cabdrivers — they all live in Astoria ... They’re real people. They’re not super-rich, but they’re very educated and family-oriented. The fact that it’s such a beautiful school makes them think, “We’ve arrived.”

Q. Can you talk about going back to Westbury (N.Y.) to play?

A. We’ve played there maybe 22 times, and we’ve been sold out all these years ... It’s like coming back home. (He was raised in Astoria.) I was one of the first ones to open it years ago. It was a brand-new thing — theaters in the round — and it started a whole circuit. Everybody didn’t quite know how to play it because it’s a circle. It took a while for people to learn how to play in the round, but I realized early on that you don’t have to wait for the machinery to turn you around. If you want to sing over there, just turn around.

Q. You’ve said you wanted to keep working on becoming the best singer you’ve ever been. After hearing you sing at Shea Stadium last year with Billy Joel, it seems to be working out.

A. That’s my dream. I’m 83 now, and between music and painting, I still have so much to learn. I have a trainer three times a week to keep me in good shape. It’s a game that I’m privately playing. I just want to prove that if you take care of yourself, that I could sing when I’m 100 and really sound better than I did when I first started.