Where: New York City, New York, USA
Here's a truly little detail I need (it probably amounts to thirty words in a 30,000-word story, scattered throughout, but it's important to the plot). Where would a sixteen-year-old boy, the son of a working-class Jewish family, go to school in New York City in 1899/1900? He's smart and what we would call today a nerd, and his parents have high hopes he'll become a doctor or a lawyer.
The family lives on Broome Street in the Lower East Side.
Searched: "public education history", "public education New York", "high school history US", etc. Mostly I get answers far too in-depth, or far too broad in scope, for this little detail.
eta: may not be first-generation immigrants, come to think of it.