Holy Rosary School – The Bronx We Knew

Holy Rosary School Part 4

The Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary trace their roots back to their founding in Ireland in the late 1700s by a woman whose name every Holy Rosary School student would come to know: Nano Nagle. In the late 1800s a subset of the congregation arrived in New York City to teach the children of Irish immigrants. Establishing a motherhouse upstate in Newburgh, New York, they expanded their presence in the boroughs and beyond.

Many of the young women who joined the Order were natives of the upstate cities and towns. We students could detect their regional accents and when we spoke, they heard “accents” as well. It was not unusual for one of us to become the target of an impromptu speech drill, such as when someone said “trow” instead of “throw,” or “tree” instead of “three,” or when a careless reader said “wuz” (as in, “The Declaration of Independence wuz signed on…”) instead of “waaaas.”

We quickly picked up on their many sayings and quotes, regional or otherwise. They ranged from the classic (Honesty is the best policy); to the visually appealing (I don’t care if every other class is standing on their heads whistling Dixie, you will be on your best behavior at the assembly and You’re slower than molasses flowing downhill in January); to the demeaning (Do you even have a brain cell working? and You’re nothing but a willy-nilly wishbone fishbone jellyfish).

The Order’s association with Holy Rosary began in 1925. In February of that year, Father James Winters had been assigned to this remote region of the northeast Bronx to minister to the growing Catholic population here. By April, a group of neighborhood women had organized a Sunday school program, and that September two Presentation Sisters joined them, traveling over every Sunday from Our Lady of Solace in the Morris Park section.

Expansion of the transit lines around this time brought about a spike in housing construction and an influx of families of Irish, German, and Italian descent. These families, many of them Catholic, wanted more than just a Sunday-school faith experience for their children. With the church and rectory completed over the summer of 1925, the building of a school became the next urgent project.

But it would be more than a year before the Archdiocese of New York granted permission. In January of 1927 work began on a prefabricated structure situated behind the hastily built, “temporary,” prefabricated church. Holy Rosary School opened on September 12, 1927, with four classrooms—kindergarten, first, second, and third grades—and four Presentation Sisters.

As the neighborhood continued to grow, so did the school. Classrooms were added, and in September of 1930 more Presentation Sisters arrived. Holy Rosary School was now complete with eight grades. At its first graduation ceremony on June 27, 1932, the Archdiocese awarded diplomas to 33 eighth-grade students.

Transportation lines continued to expand into the northeast Bronx and the population continued to surge. Holy Rosary had just graduated its first class, yet already the school was inadequate. Besides the lack of space, wear and tear took its toll on a building with a limited life expectancy. Expansion was out of the question—much less construction of a whole new building—for the parish still had debts and these were the years of the Great Depression.

And so the decade of the 1930s passed, as well as the war and post-war years of the 1940s and early 1950s. The old school held up until debts were at last paid off and permission granted, in 1954, to construct a new building across Eastchester Road at its intersection with Arnow Avenue. Soon an impressive structure of orange brick began to rise above the neighborhood.

In the spring of 1956, the eighth graders picked up their desks and carried them across the street to the new building, moving themselves in and becoming the first class to graduate from the new school. The new Holy Rosary School was dedicated that June with the blessing of Cardinal Francis Spellman.

The main structure of this formidable building stood five stories high and as long as the length of two classrooms, with stairwells at either end. Sixteen classrooms and a kindergarten room, along with administration offices, comprised three stories, with the top two floors set aside for the Sisters’ living quarters. A gymnasium-auditorium with a full cafeteria one level below it comprised the wing of the building. The cafeteria level continued along the length of the main structure, a low-ceiling maze of small offices, storage areas, janitor’s rooms, boiler room, and maintenance areas. Off the cafeteria, just below the gym and accessible to it by a back staircase, an extensive locker room complete with a long bank of showers remained locked away. We students of the 1960s never used these spotless facilities for our simple gym classes; they were reserved for the student athletes who participated in the prestigious Catholic Girls High School Basketball and Cheerleading Tournaments, an annual event sponsored by Holy Rosary School.

Holy Rosary School, once a prefabricated country school with four classrooms, was now a neighborhood landmark.

Reference:

Crehan, Rev. Peter M. Holy Rosary Parish, Bronx, New York. South Hackensack, N.J.: Custombook, Inc., Ecclesiastical Color Publishers, 1970.

Holy Rosary School Part 3

We were not entirely oblivious to the fact that changes had begun to take place in the “upper sanctum.” There, we later learned, the thought creeping forward in some minds was: Imagine not being a nun.

During that pivotal summer of 1967, while we wondered whether Sister Mary Pauline or Sister Mary Judith would be our eighth-grade homeroom teacher (there were two classes for each grade) both Sisters left Holy Rosary. Presumably, they had been transferred to other schools served by their order, the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. When school started that September, we found that our seventh-grade homeroom teacher, Sister Mary Laboure, had moved up a grade to fill one of those vacant spots. For unexplained reasons, she would now be known as Sister Mary. Sister Mary Eymard, who had taught seventh grade for generations, remained a seventh-grade homeroom teacher but would now be called Sister Mary Ellen. Sister Joan, new to the school, filled the other seventh-grade vacancy, and Sister Dorothy arrived to become our eighth-grade teacher.

Because of her obvious youth—apparent even to us 13-year-olds—and because of the simpler habit she wore, some thought Sister Dorothy was a novice; that is, a nun who was not yet fully professed. But that was not the case. Sister Dorothy wore what would later be known as a modified habit. This included the same ankle-length black dress the others wore—complete with the belt from which hung a set of keys and yards and yards of rosary beads—but with a small white collar in place of the rigid breastplate. Instead of white wrappings that enclosed the forehead and most of the head, Sister Dorothy wore a simple white headband to hold the waist-length black veil that did not shroud the shoulders but fell in gentle folds down her back. The headband could barely contain her cloud of wavy golden hair that kept inching its way out.

Sister Mary Louise wearing the traditional habit in 1965.

One Sunday in May, Sister Dorothy arrived at the 9:00 Mass dressed in a business suit of royal blue and a short black veil that grazed her shoulders. Boys as well as girls crowded around her to gawk. Never did any of us expect to see a nun outfitted this way. It was as inexplicable as the name change at the beginning of the school year. The other nuns soon followed her lead, and on graduation day, June 22, all were dressed in business-suit habits—some black, others in various shades of blue—and short black veils.

To us the changes we observed in our Sisters that school year of 1967-1968 were monumental. But they were only the first steps of what was to come. By the following year, when we as high school freshmen returned for a visit to our favorite teacher, we learned that several of the nuns had left the order entirely. The few that continued to hang on to their religious vocation eventually discarded the habit altogether.

Something was going on behind the scenes. But what that was, we did not know.

Sister Mary in the business suit habit (without the jacket), June 22, 1968.

Holy Rosary School Part 2

When the dismissal bell rang at 3:00 on the appointed day and the rest of the class stumbled in their haste to flee the building, Lisa, Michele, Julie, and I remained smugly behind, excited at the prospect of following Sister Dorothy up that final flight of stairs.

We took the staircase at the opposite end of the building from the frightening crucifix; on this shadowy landing a less frightening statue of the Blessed Mother stood beside the locked convent door. Jangling through her key ring, Sister Dorothy found the one that opened the secret portal. Cautiously and suddenly timid, we followed her into the convent.

The brightly lit kitchen and the bracing scent of pine cleaner welcomed us, dispelling the gloom of the landing. We glanced around. A long, sturdy table of pale, polished wood, with a large bowl of apples, oranges, and pears in the center, dominated the room. Light from ceiling fixtures spilled across the buffed floor and dissolved down a hallway of closed doors—the nuns’ bedrooms. With deep disappointment we learned we would not get to see them, but we understood. A long school day had just ended, and we imagined the sisters savoring some solitary moments in their sacred space.

Whatever else we saw of the living quarters, nothing made more of an impact than the sight that gripped us as we stepped onto the rooftop patio—their backyard in the sky.

Looking eastward over rooftops and roadways into the distance, we were captivated by the sight of the Hutchinson River and a network of creeks and inlets, peaceful and still, reflecting the blue-violet of the dusky sky. Low stratus clouds floated over the scene, drifting patches of deeper violet. Sage green marsh grasses turning autumn gold arched sideways, their muddy banks exposed by low tide.

Overarching this natural splendor stood a structural masterpiece: the Hutchinson River Parkway bridge. A section of the drawbridge was visible from my bedroom window, but from here at the top of the school we looked down on the breath-catching sight of its full expanse—seven spans, support columns, the control tower, and the yellow warning gates in their upright resting position. Beyond the bridge and the trees of Pelham Bay Park lay Eastchester Bay, Orchard Beach, and the open waters of Long Island Sound—but these were lost in the purple dusk and the distance.

Just south of the drawbridge, the towers of the New Haven Railroad trestle rose above the flat landscape like black steel filigree against the sky. On the New England Thruway and the Hutchinson River Parkway, two ribbons crossing each other and slicing through the marshes, cars caught shards of setting sunlight and shot them into our squinting eyes. All was hushed; the speeding cars made no sound as they slipped along the highways.

Although 205 acres of those marshlands had been filled in a decade earlier for a short-lived amusement park called Freedomland, a good part of the land once occupied by the Siwanoy people was still the habitat of wildlife, birds, and sea creatures. But we knew that construction of a sprawling apartment complex called Co-Op City had recently begun. More of the coastal waterways were being filled in, and the development would not stop with Co-Op City. The marshlands would eventually disappear under a shopping mall.

Later it occurred to me that the splendor we had been privileged to discover that afternoon was what the early residents of Westervelt Avenue had seen from their front doors every day, until the houses on the eastern side of the street were built. For me, seeing this vision from what, at the time, could have been the highest point in the northeast Bronx, was to discover a new facet of my borough’s character, another side to its asphalt personality.

And so our tour ended. What had started out as a quest to uncover the mysteries of convent life ended with another discovery. My friends and I walked home, descending Allerton Avenue in the twilight. We faced east, just as we had from much higher up, and though we looked for the beauty of the landscape, our street-level view ended where the New England Thruway met the horizon. Headlights and streetlights became silver sparks in the violet dusk, creating a different kind of beauty enhanced by the rising round moon hovering above.

Despite the strangeness of the walk home at this late hour, subdued without the usual crowd of other school kids, our spirits were high. We had spent the late afternoon in the private company of the teacher we loved. We had seen that mysterious place at the top of the school, something no other kid in the class had done. Now we could picture where the sisters graded our test papers, where they ate their meals, where they stepped outside for fresh air and sunshine.

I think each of us must have had the same fleeting thought as we headed home that afternoon: Imagine being a nun.

Holy Rosary School, Part 1

By third grade my friends and I were old enough to walk to school by ourselves. We headed for Allerton Avenue and turned left, climbing the gentle incline to Woodhull Avenue. There we turned right, crossing Allerton. In the distance, looming above the houses at the end of Woodhull and tucked between the side streets of Arnow Avenue and Schorr Place, stood a five-story, orange brick building—Holy Rosary School.

Holy Rosary School, 1500 Arnow Avenue, Bronx. This is the back of the school with the schoolyard in the foreground. This side faced Schorr Place and Woodhull Avenue. The front of the school faced Arnow Avenue and looked out onto Gun Hill and Eastchester Roads. That’s the clothesline on the roof.

Most of the kids on Westervelt attended Holy Rosary. The nearest public school, P.S. 97, was way down Mace Avenue on the other side of Eastchester Road, not within easy walking distance for elementary-school kids.

Once the school came into view, I instinctively sought out my classroom windows. Then my gaze rose higher, to the two floors at the top. These floors comprised the convent. The rooftop patio was easy to spot by the clothesline in plain sight, frequently festooned with the sisters’ long white underwear gliding ghostlike on the breeze. What about their habits and veils, I’d wonder? Did they send them out to be dry-cleaned? And what was it like on those mysterious floors, where none but the veiled were allowed?

It didn’t seem likely or even possible that one day some of us students would actually set foot in the upper sanctum which was so close and yet so far removed from our daily lives. At times, one could accidentally—and frighteningly—get too close to the convent. It didn’t happen often, but it happened to almost everyone. As you mindlessly assaulted flight after flight of the broad staircase on the auditorium side of the school, or the narrow staircase on the opposite side of the school, you’d miscalculate.

Although such miscalculations were rare, disorientation resulted from momentarily forgetting which floor you started on. If you were a sixth, seventh, or eighth grader, you would be used to running up three flights of stairs, and you could do it accurately without thinking. But if you’d been sent to a third, fourth, or fifth grade classroom on the second floor, and your mind is elsewhere during your return trip, you might find your gallop slowing. Something’s not right, you think, as your feet grow heavy. It’s the light—the light is diminishing here on this staircase. Why? As you turn in confusion toward the landing above you, your heart leaps with fright at the sight of the large-as-life crucifix at the top. It materializes out of the shadows and sends you bounding toward the landing you just passed so lightheartedly a moment ago, back to the safety of the third floor.

That was the closest any of us ever got to the convent until the autumn of our eighth-grade year—November of 1967.

A small group of us often stayed after school to spend time with Sister Dorothy, our young teacher who was new to Holy Rosary that year. While the other sisters still wore the traditional habit, Sister Dorothy wore a modified headpiece that struggled to control her thick, wavy blonde hair. No wimple enclosed her neck; instead, her long black dress was trimmed with a simple white collar. That her name did not include Mary was another novelty. But on the first day of school that year we had to learn new names for all of the sisters; inexplicably they had reverted from the names given to them at profession to their baptismal names. Sister Mary Pauline became Sister Josephine, for example, and Sister Mary Judith was now Sister Florence. We couldn’t have known back then that these small changes foreshadowed monumental (and for us, unimaginable) changes for sisters everywhere. For now, the sight of a nun’s hair and neck was enough to get used to.

After years of having nuns for teachers, we were acutely aware of Sister Dorothy’s authority over us. But, perhaps as a fortunate combination of our increasing maturity and her cheerful youthfulness, she approached her students less as a drill sergeant and more as a mentor or counselor. With us she was upbeat and kind. While many of these Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary were intelligent women as well as good and fair-minded teachers, others had been more difficult. Corporal punishment was a thing of the past, but heavy-handed threats and humiliating and hurtful words too often were not.

So, at dismissal time, Lisa, Michele, Julie, and I were in no hurry to leave our beloved teacher. With wit and an abundant supply of patience, Sister Dorothy answered our endless questions and advised us when the inevitable adolescent difficulties arose. We liked to think she looked forward to our after-school sessions as much as we did.

During one such gathering the topic of our obsession with the convent came up, and our curiosity about those living quarters finally found a person willing to satisfy it. Sister Dorothy set a date to give us a tour.