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.
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