BFS Commencement and Important AnnouncementsBrooklyn Daily Eagle, June 6, 1914 This week, your friendly historian decided to time-travel back one hundred years to the 1913-1914 school year at BFS. Turning once again to The Brooklyn Daily Eagle at one of my favorite sites, fultonhistory.com, I found this page containing the article, “Friends School to Have […]
Found tucked away in the archives several years ago is this item written by Henry Morris Haviland, recalling his student days at BFS from 1872 to 1876. Such items are quite a find for our school, especially since Mr. Haviland explained the locations of the classrooms in the lower level of the Brooklyn Meeting House. Our school was […]
Dance Concert Rehearsal, probably 1998 Digitizing much of the BFS dance department’s video collection for the BFS Archives video collection yielded unidentified rehearsal videos and one music concert video. Most of these videos seem to have been created after 2000. One dance concert rehearsal video seems to be from 1992 or 1998: that video was […]
1925, BFS Boys Basketball Team, with the Friends School League Championship Trophy It’s a great basketball season for BFS teams, so today let’s look back 89 years ago to February of 1925, when BFS won the Friends Schools national title in boys basketball by defeating Wilmington Friends. The BFS Digital Archives has this photo of our 1925 boys basketball […]
1988 Once Upon A Mattress – Shy From the 1988 BFS musical production of Once Upon A Mattress comes the song “Shy” in which Princess Winnifred the Woebegone expresses her true nature as she tries to find Prince Dauntless the Drab for the very first time. And this after she swam the moat to get […]
It’s a throwback this fine Thursday to the “Mood Indigo” scene from the 1989 BFS original musical A Small Cabaret. A Small Cabaret was a departure from the traditional BFS musical: this ensemble production featured standards like Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” yet it also […]
Celebrating our school having been saved,The Friends School Life, February 16, 1948 This week, I’m following up on last week’s post concerning the discovery of the 1947-1948 Fight to Save BFS Scrapbook which allowed us to finally remember an incredibly important moment in our school’s history. I’d like to share a few items since historical events are deeply nuanced […]
A jaw-dropping BFS moment of my last ten years working at my alma mater occurred in 2006, during preparations to renovate the MS/US Library on the 3rd floor of 375 Pearl Street. I came to work one day to find a large and worn scrapbook on my desk chair, accompanied by a tiny note from MS/US […]
Happy Holidays and Best Wishes for the New Year! A moment from a 1930s Lower School Christmas Pageant. And a moment from this year’s Holiday Sing when, for the first time ever, “The Twelve Days of Christmas” was sung outside. (function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); […]
BFS Centennial in the New York Daily News, September 10, 1967 Click for the full PDF Celebrating our school’s 100th anniversary proved an incredible start to the 1967-1968 school year at Brooklyn Friends School. An item related to our Centennial emerged while I was recently hand-scanning the tattered scrapbook from the late 1940s about the […]
Bayard Rustin Following up to my Gatekeeper No More post of November 7. That post shared the known history of our school’s winding path to integration which helped Brooklyn Friends School become the racially and ethnically diverse school it is known to be today. A few related and important events occurred last month. Bayard Rustin, […]
1987 Dames At Sea Take two minutes to enjoy a charming duet in the BFS Middle School’s 1987 production of Dames at Sea, capturing the moment when our romantic leads Dick and Ruby first meet, she swoons into his arms and they both know it’s true love. You might also get a kick out of […]
