My Old Schools
Donald Fagen of Steely Dan, referring to Bard College, sang, “I’m never going back to my old school.” In my case, it’s increasingly impossible, as my old schools from the 1960s-1990s have closed or been repurposed or demolished. I have mixed feelings about all my old schools and workplaces: they shaped me, and I made friends I have to this day, but in many ways they were disappointing.
As a parish, St. Anselm in Bay Ridge was founded in 1922 and this combination church and school building went up in 1926 at 4th Ave. and 83rd St. (many older parishes around town still have this combo arrangement). Besides the altar boys, I was involved in Scouting; I was never athletic, so never got on any of the sports teams. My grades were good at first, but flattened out as I reached my level of expertise, or incompetency, around the seventh or eighth grade. I came to a greater recognition that I wasn’t getting treated with the human respect by some of the nuns. When I graduated I resolved to never darken its halls again, a promise I kept.
The former Cathedral Prep is a magnificent Flemish Gothic pile at Washington and Atlantic Aves., festooned with concrete spires, crosses, gargoyles and two magnificent spires reminiscent of the ones at Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby in Louisville. An intimidating iron gate protects what looks like a moat. Set in concrete in the cornice above the third floor is a cardinal’s hat.
The Catholic iconography indicates it one had an intimate connection with the Church. Cathedral Preparatory Seminary was built by the Brooklyn Diocese in 1914-1915 and was originally a six-year seminary where young men would be trained for the priesthood. Decades later, it became a four-year school, with the institution of Cathedral College in Douglaston, Queens. Latin, the primary language in Catholic services until the Vatican II reformations in the early-1960s, was taught throughout the school’s 70-year history.
Cathedral Prep was my high school. Although I never had any thoughts of a vocation with the Church, my parents and I couldn’t argue with the four-year scholarship the school gave me because of my decent marks at St. Anselm’s School in Bay Ridge. I kept my lack of ambition for the priesthood quiet. After three years of fitting in fitfully, I hit my stride somewhat in senior year when I felt greater acceptance.
Though my years at Cathedral were pleasant and productive ones, when I was a teenager I didn’t have nearly the enthusiasm for New York City ephemera, architecturally and otherwise, that I do now. I took little note, for example, of Cathedral’s magnificent marble sculptures and floors, and heavy oak doors. The acoustics in the hall were such that you could whisper into one corner and a person in the opposite corner could hear you, much like a phenomenon at an archway outside the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal. Cathedral’s gym was so small that the steps led directly from the main hall down to the court itself; the benches were flush on the wall facing the court, while there were two pillars on the court at the far end. Our senior lounge, on the third floor, was the size of a couple of coat closets.
As David Maraniss reports in his biography When Pride Still Mattered, Vince Lombardi, who led the Green Bay Packers to four titles including two Super Bowl victories in the 1960s, attended Cathedral Prep for nearly four years, between 1928 and 1932. During Lombardi’s time, John “Jocko” Crane was baseball and basketball coach, and by the time I arrived at the school 43 years after Lombardi, Mr. Crane was still there, as a physical education teacher. Lombardi, in his fourth year, realized he didn’t have a priestly vocation and moved on to St. Francis Prep on Butler Street in Cobble Hill. Besides, Cathedral didn’t have a football team and, as Maraniss reports, the school was opposed to football, citing the numerous injuries, “questionable ethical practices,” the “evasion of rules,” “trickery” and “lack of courtesy.”
Despite not having a football team while I was there, Cathedral had a game sports program; our basketball team won more than it lost, and a regular opponent was Power Memorial Academy, which, just before my arrival at Cathedral, boasted a lanky kid named Lew Alcindor who’d go on to the NBA, convert to Islam and become Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Power closed its doors in 1984. Our handball team was nearly championship caliber: but St. Francis Prep never lost a game to anyone in those years. My contributions were limited to intramural wiffleball and basketball games both indoors in the gym and outside next to the parking lot.
During Lombardi’s time, Maraniss describes the Brooklyn Diocese as “overflowing with aspiring priests,” but some six decades later, it would be a completely different story; my graduating class in 1975 numbered 35, and Cathedral’s last class, in 1985, comprised only 16 students as vocations dropped off sharply over the school’s final two decades.
Happily, in the years after the school closed, the building was spared the wrecker’s ball and was converted to residential units. Sadly, the priests’ rectory (Cathedral’s faculty was an even split between lay teachers and priests) stood abandoned for nearly 20 years after its closure.
In 2021, my alma mater, St. Francis College, which I attended from 1975-1980, announced it would move out of its longtime home at #180 Remsen St., Brooklyn Heights, and occupy three floors of the Wheeler Building on Fulton and Bridge Sts. (with an entrance at #118 Livingston), which is an addition plopped on top of the Art Deco building constructed for Abraham & Straus (now, of course, Macy’s) in the 1930s. SFC and A&S share a characteristic: they’re not one building, but an amalgamation of different buildings. One of the Remsen St. buildings is no younger than 16 years old, as seen on this Forgotten NY page on SFC and vicinity from 2012.
Brooklyn Heights contains some of the crown jewels of Brooklyn and NYC architecture. I didn’t go on very many spelunking expeditions during lunch hour. After I graduated, I had a girlfriend still attending SFC and in 1982, she gave me a book for my birthday: Clay Lancaster’s Old Brooklyn Heights: Brooklyn’s First Suburb, first written in the early-1960s and considered a major work of its genre. So, by 1982, things coalesced and I was beginning to show interest in chronicling the city in which I live. It would still be 16 years, and the popularization of the internet, before I began to do anything about it.
St. Francis College was founded as St. Francis Academy, a school for Irish immigrant boys, in 1859 at the direction of Bishop John Loughlin (for whom Rudy Giuliani’s high school, Bishop Loughlin in Fort Greene is named). The first school was located on Baltic St. in Cobble Hill. It became a college in the early-1880s, while continuing as a secondary school; the two were sundered in 1902 and today’s St. Francis Prep, which moved to Williamsburg in 1953 and then Fresh Meadows in 1974, is a completely different entity from the College.
In 1960 the College purchased buildings belonging to Brooklyn Union Gas (the descendant of which is National Grid as of 2012) and tore down older structures and construct new facilities, such as the main building, in 1968. When I attended SFC, we referred to the “old building” and the “new building” of which this was the latter.
The new SFC is described as having less overall square feet of space, and will lack a gymnasium or pool; supposedly, SFC will have to rent those facilities from other schools. SFC fields an NCAA Division I basketball team, which has never made the postseason “big dance.” Its swim, volleyball and handball teams have fared better, but they’ll have to find somewhere to play. At length, SFC decided to drop competitive sports altogether. The Remsen St. buildings were demolished in 2024 and a mixed use office tower will soon be rising there.
In 1988 I felt my work life had come to a dead stop. I was proofreading and typsettting non-Cyrillic material for a small type shop on W. 29th St., ANY Phototype, run by two brothers and an associate. Its main selling point was that I could work days instead of overnights as at my previous workplace at Photo-Lettering in Midtown.
Enter the Center for the Media Arts. I enrolled for a two year program in which I learned layouts and mechanicals, drafting, computer typesetting and the beginnings of computer animation. I was best at computer typesetting and layouts, and that helped me embark on a 12-year career with Publishers Clearing House in Port Washington and a side career with the Times Ledger chain of newspapers in Queens for 13 years.
The New York Auction Company building at #226 W. 26th is the former home of my old school, Center for the Media Arts. Here I learned software like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator as well as page composition software QuarkXpress. All confused me at first (like WordPress, which I use to create Forgotten NY) but there were generous lab hours and I sat in front of screens for hours, self-teaching. The goods auctioned here were furs.
Directly across the street from the former school/fur auction house is Chelsea Television Studios, which is a modified armory constructed in 1914. Film producer Adolph Zukor rebuilt it into a movie studio for his Famous Players company. In the 1950s two soundstages were built, and parts of several well-known films were shot here including Twelve Angry Men, Butterfield 8, and the Mel Brooks farce The Producers; and TV soaps like As The World Turns and Guiding Light; as well as network fare like The Patty Duke Show. In recent decades it’s become a TV talk studio staple. Currently it’s home to the syndicated Sherri Shepherd show.
I worked for CMA as a parttime typesetter after my schooling ended, but the school suffered from money trouble and competition for the larger School of Visual Arts. CMA shuttered in 1992 after a failed merger with Mercy College.
Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)