“When you live in the South Bronx, you hear one story being told about your community everywhere that you go,” Amanda Septimo, a member of the New York State Assembly, told the Bronx Free Press. “This building will change that story.”

I’ll get back to the story she is referring to. The building is the new 191,000-square-foot charter school in the Port Morris section of the South Bronx, designed by David Adjaye, the celebrated Ghanaian British architect.

Adjaye, along with Russell Crader, who co-runs Adjaye’s New York office, repurposed a turn-of-the-last-century former ice plant and warehouse, a long-vacant, previously pigeon-infested ruin that many New Yorkers know unconsciously because of the giant Uber billboard on its roof that faces the Harlem River.

The $50 million school is part of the Dream charter network, which serves predominantly poor Black and brown students from East Harlem and the Bronx. Money for the building was privately raised. It’s designed to eventually accommodate 1,300 students in pre-K through 12th grade, with priority given to those living in public housing, and students with special needs — providing wraparound summer and after-school programs as well as postsecondary support and mental health counseling for Dream graduates. High school students were the first to arrive, in January.

A few years ago I wrote about a different Dream site. That school was newsworthy less for its design — Perkins Eastman were the architects — than because it belonged to a larger neighborhood redevelopment effort. An empty lot on Second Avenue was replaced by Dream — which became East Harlem’s first new public school in nearly 50 years — but also by an 11-story residential tower for subsidized tenants along with a new park.

In this case, architecture is the issue and the engine of renewal. With its triple-height library and exalting, barrel-vaulted classrooms with huge punched windows overlooking Manhattan, the redesigned ice plant becomes one of the most spectacular school buildings in the city.

“It was a dark, dank mess,” Crader told me when I asked about the building in its former state. “The entrance was a hollow metal door, the interior a relentless boxy grid of columns. But we could see the arches and the triple-height space.”

In lieu of that metal door, Adjaye and his team have carved vestibules at the front and back, adding outdoor benches and a glassed-in storefront space that make what had been the ice plant’s mute brick facade along Bruckner Boulevard more welcoming, transparent and a public respite on the street.

Bringing light to the middle of the building was a major headache and involved yet more excavation. Two mirrored light wells, or solar chimneys, now drill down from the roof, with wide stairs and corridors circulating around them. They’re like giant kaleidoscopes, suspended midair, inside a glorious relic from the turn of the last century.

I visited the morning the school opened. Tenth graders congregated in a new cafeteria that wouldn’t look out of place in Silicon Valley. It’s flanked by bleacher seats with marble stairs, simulating an indoor stoop. Seniors played tug of war in the new gym, regulation size and sunny, with peekaboo windows providing passers-by in the hall glimpses of aspiring LeBrons and Giannises trying to dunk. On the roof of the gym, a necklace of trees now surrounds a new outdoor playground.

Adjaye is most famously the architect of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. Its tiered, warm bronze facade, whose color shifts with the sun, riffs on Yoruba caryatids and ironwork designs by a former South Carolina slave, playing off a phalanx of white marble mausoleums lining the National Mall. An 800-foot-tall luxury tower by Adjaye at 130 William Street in Lower Manhattan, which has just opened, is clad in dark, handcrafted concrete arches, the color of Manhattan schist — a similar kind of foil to the city’s expanding proliferation of anonymous glass skyscrapers.

Adjaye is a contrarian, showman and stylistic chameleon whose work hasn’t always been embraced. In 2014 he completed a mixed-use apartment complex on the crest of Coogan’s Bluff in the Sugar Hill section of Manhattan: a striking but not-universally-loved citadel of pitted, slate-gray, cantilevered boxes built to house with dignity some of the city’s poorest residents.

All of his best work is allusive, steeped in research and context, materially creative, humane. Leaning on an adult color palette, the Dream school finds drama and beauty in sudden shifts between old and new, light and dark. The building is full of clever, artful juxtapositions and still lifes of excavated bricks and new beams, weathered concrete and new fixtures. Its premium on architecture makes an obvious statement about the value of Dream’s students.

The building’s landlord is Drew Katz, a philanthropist who runs an outdoor advertising company and is a donor to Dream. His real estate partner, Jorge Madruga, was in charge of the building’s reconstruction. As my colleagues Dan Barry and Karen Zraick have reported, three workers perished during that process. No construction site in the city registered as many separate fatalities since the Department of Buildings started keeping electronic records in 2003.

I didn’t begin this column with that information because Assemblywoman Septimo is right. Stories about the South Bronx invariably start with trauma, casting the community as victim. For students, the new Dream school is a place of hope and opportunity — a new chapter and good news for the neighborhood.

That said, the historical arc of 20 Bruckner, as the building is called, is instructive and tells a larger tale about the Bronx, change and renewal. The ice plant was built when the borough was booming, at the turn of the last century. Its owner, Colonel Jacob Ruppert, was the Knickerbocker Beer baron, and a United States congressman. Brewers needed ice to make beer. Ruppert’s construction of the plant dealt a blow to the notorious Tammany bosses who monopolized the city’s wildly overpriced ice business, helping to break up what was then known as the “ice trust.”

Beer drinkers also loved baseball. In 1915, Ruppert bought the struggling New York Yankees, four years later acquired Babe Ruth’s contract, then moved the team across the Harlem River from the Polo Grounds in Manhattan, constructing Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, a brisk hike from the plant.

The rest is history, as far as the Yankees go. As for the building, by the 1960s Knickerbocker had shut its brewery, and a variety of tenants cycled in and left. By the ’70s, like much of the rest of the neighborhood, 20 Bruckner had fallen into ruin, a victim of Robert Moses and urbicide — avoiding demolition only because the billboard profited the landlord.

A decade ago that was Drew Katz’s father, Lewis Katz, a lawyer and philanthropist who made money in billboards and parking lots. Lewis Katz died in a plane crash in 2014, leaving his son in charge of 20 Bruckner. Around that same time, Port Morris, especially the blocks near the building, started to gentrify. Katz and Madruga saw an opportunity.

So Madruga hired nonunion teams to clear debris from the interior and sought a tenant who might pay to revamp the building.

By the time Dream signed its lease and Adjaye delivered his plans, two hired laborers, Marco Martínez, an 18-year-old undocumented immigrant from Ecuador, and Michael Daves, a 58-year-old homeless man who spent nights in a Bronx men’s shelter, had both died on site. The city issued a stop-work order that shut down the site for two months.

The order was lifted. Then a young Guatemalan, Yonin Pineda, and his Mexican foreman, Mauricio Sánchez, were on an elevator that plummeted 75 feet. Pineda was hospitalized. Sánchez became the third man to die.

At that point, Dream had also contracted with Madruga and several other developers to lease 100,000 square feet for a future 800-student school that will occupy the bottom two floors of an affordable housing development being built near Yankee Stadium.

Civil suits by relatives of the dead laborers are now pending against the developers and the contractors, who have denied any negligence or wrongdoing. At least one workers’ compensation claim has been settled.

Dream’s founder, Richard Berlin, declined my requests to comment on the record about his dealings with Madruga.

Getting anything meaningful built in New York these days is a struggle at the least. Sometimes it involves compromises that can seem unconscionable.

But once they’re up, buildings contain many lives.

Adaptive reuse is the architectural term of art to describe what Adjaye has done with the ice plant. It’s how great cities have always balanced preservation with progress, decline with opportunity. It’s what turned Rome’s Pantheon into a Catholic church and the Farley Post Office across from Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan into Moynihan Train Hall. In part, it is how pioneering South Bronx resident groups like Banana Kelly spared their neighborhood from tabula rasa schemes by outside politicians and planners when the neighborhood was burning.

Reuse honors the past by giving what’s troubled or outmoded a fresh face.

In New York, we all live with ghosts.

As I left that first morning, I heard teens stomping and cheering in the gym and watched them pin brightly colored drawings and posters around the classrooms, into tomato-red niches along the corridors and on Adjaye’s darkly painted walls. They were making the building their own.