Many know that Brooklyn Friends School began in the “social room” of Brooklyn Monthly Meeting at 110 Schermerhorn Street in 1867. Lesser known is the fact that our school gradually expanded, from 1877 to 1925, to the adjacent lots at 112, 114, and 116 Schermerhorn. The New York Times published a lovely article on […]
Some may remember that we published an article about the 1931 Football Team in 2006, honoring the 75th anniversary of their incredible feat, A Perfect Season – The Football Team of 1931. I recently discovered that there had once been a plaque at BFS honoring the acclaimed football team of that 1931-1932 school year. The […]
Examining the history of Brooklyn Friends School means also examining the history of education in Brooklyn and New York City. Brooklyn Friends School has a long history of educational innovations, but it also has a long history of allowing innovative educators to implement their ideas at BFS. Ella Frances Woodward exemplifies our long-standing commitment […]
BFS celebrated Martin Norregaard’s 50 years with BFS with much fanfare at Reunion 2011. To jog your memories, Martin taught Middle School English and Social Studies from 1961 to 1991, then retired although he taught part-time for the next two years. After 1993, he remained in close contact with BFS and soon became a […]
In 2001, Brooklyn Friends School and its students were featured with Alanis Morissette and other celebrities in a public service announcement for Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. The video runs five minutes, and it consists of six PSAs which range in length from 60 to 10 seconds. To learn more […]
Always fun to find playbills from BFS theatrical performances, so we are making some available as they emerge from the school’s archives and from personal collections. While more playbills are in the archives, we have scanned only a few programs from the personal collections of The Price Family and The Garrell Family at this […]
I typically hate surprises, but some are always appreciated: there is nothing quite like finding a BFS historic treasure in either a traditional or electronic mailbox. Every once in a while, kind people find BFS-related items among their personal collections and choose to share them with BFS, thinking (correctly) that BFS might wish to have […]
Editor’s note: since the publishing of this article in 2013, the School celebrated its 150th anniversary and published Brooklyn Friends School: 150 Years of Light. Some of us will remember that BFS did publish a book about its history, Seventy Five Years of Brooklyn Friends School, in celebration of the school’s 75th anniversary in 1942 […]
In 1914, Friends School – as it was then called – was expanding at all levels, with its young high school program being one of them. Our athletic program had only just gotten off the ground and it was soon clear that the school needed athletic facilities to go further. Our second athletic director, […]
The paper of record at BFS was once known as The Life. An award-winning student publication, The Life was published continuously at BFS from December of 1919 until, we believe, 1995. For its first 50 years or so, The Life was made available to the entire BFS community for a small annual fee because it […]
The second school song written for BFS is The BFS Alma Mater. The lyrics were written by noted sci-fi author and BFS alum Edgar Pangborn ’24 and the music was composed by BFS music teacher J. Trevor Garmey during the 1920s. Read also Our School Songs, Part 1. To read more about Brooklyn Friends School’s history, visit […]
