Stepping Back into BFS History

STEPPING INTO BFS HISTORY

By Brett Topel

Director of Communications and Marketing

Ever since I started working at Brooklyn Friends School—11 whole months ago—I have been fascinated by the school’s history. I have spent hours looking through old photos, in the archive room going through boxes and boxes of items, listening to stories from alums. However, I am a very hands-on person and love to think of yesterday and today at the same time, using the same lens.

Several months back, I had the opportunity to tour the Brooklyn Meeting House and see where all of the original classrooms had been. Still, it was not until June that I was able to gain access to the building adjacent to the Meeting House, which was once a brownstone. That version of the school housed the expanded BFS from 1914–1972. Currently, the former BFS is home to Brooklyn Frontiers High School, an alternative school run by the New York City DOE. Thanks to Neil Pergament, the Vice Principal of Brooklyn Frontiers, we were able to gain access to take some photos and tour the old building.

I am not exactly sure what I was expecting to find inside, especially since the building has been open and used by the Department of Education for one school or another since BFS moved out in 1972. The nostalgic part of me was hoping there would still be remnants of BFS in some way, shape, or form. Would there be an old plaque on the wall that the DOE didn’t bother to take down? Or perhaps the curtains in the windows of the library would be the same? Was Head of School Stuart Smith’s desk left untouched, waiting to be re-discovered a half century later? Well, no such luck. There were, however, some really interesting parts of the building that were as interesting as I had hoped they would be.

There was no place I wanted to see more than the old, iconically—and comically—small gymnasium. It was, as advertised, iconically small. Carrying some old photos from the early BFS days, I was able to walk around the gym and match up many of the same items—pipes, air vents, specific designs in the brick walls. Those BFS plaques I was hoping to see were long gone. The gym floor was original from 1920 and there is no question about that. While some structural changes had been made over the years, the gym is basically the same gym it has always been—including the extremely low ceiling. The ceiling that Jim Yglesias ’66 described to me by joking: “You could not even go up for a layup without hitting your hand on the ceiling.” Check out the cool now and then photos.

Another area I was looking forward to seeing was the roof, where the youngest children used to play, and athletic teams posed for team photos. When I asked about the roof, I was informed that no one had access, but was instead taken outside to what they currently call the “backyard.” Immediately, I realized that this was, indeed, the “roof” that I was hoping to see. As you can see from the now and then photos, the steps leading to the school from the “roof” are the same and the railings are the exact railings dating back to the 1920s.

Back inside, it was harder to identify what is and what was. Some of the rooms on the first floor seem to match up with old photos, but some simply do not. It is hard to know exactly how much structural work has been done over the past 50 years, although the age of the building itself is certainly evident, and if I was able to return when the building was empty, I am sure there are some permanent residents from times gone by.

There was one last stop on my tour that I found very interesting. When I was given a tour of the Meeting House months earlier, I asked about a door that used to go through to the school building. I was told that it was no longer connected. It made sense, though, that the two buildings were at one point connected from the inside. However, when I was in the school and came upon the other side of this “no longer connected” door, it looked like a locked dungeon door, never to be spoken about. However, one thing about that door that has stuck with me, and is clear from the photos. There are a lot of locks on a door that leads to nowhere… just saying.