Brooklyn Friends School began its 148th school year this month with its traditional convocation. Our opening assembly for older students, held at the Brooklyn Meeting House on Schermerhorn Street, came to be known as convocation in the early 1990s, yet this year’s largest-ever student body required separate convocations for the middle and upper school divisions. […]
1902 saw one of the biggest moments in Brooklyn Friends School history, our third expansion which created the school building still standing today at 112-114 Schermerhorn, now rented by New York Quarterly Meeting to the NYC Board of Education for Brooklyn Frontiers High School. Today it seems amazing that any building could take only about eight […]
It proved to be a false alarm the morning of March 1,1971, at our historic home of 116 Schermerhorn, when BFS received a ominous phone call threatening, “There is a bomb planted in your building.” The fire alarm was soon activated and the buildings were evacuated, searched, then given the all-clear and BFS was able […]
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 […]
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 […]
