Townsend Harris High School - Crimson Gold Yearbook (Flushing, NY)

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I KWSN f a.+.. ffiff Y... , , tggii ll l .lg lllu f Q I , A i , W in tfllf i I 4 f i ifffafuvv --lf lll l -tu if I in Eg i lflfll I I ', V sl, 1, ,- x K' I N, is 1 i f ' gf ' ' if Qx I' 1 1 11 if f HISTORY OF TOWNSEND HARRIS HALL Description , : urn N 138th Street, fronting Amsterdam Avenue, flanked on one side X-f-RX by the sand-piled, rock-studded fields of the future stadium, on Xi,-7-X on the 'rear the historic Campus of the college with its stone S lg' benches and its enormous flagpole, stands a building, one of a whole group, called Townsend Harris Hall. The building is in the English- Gotliic style, massive and impressive, yet leaving room for an intricacy of Terra Cotta ornamentation, on the natural greystone ground peculiar to this style alone. There are the gargoyled entrances, the almost monastic pannelling on the doors, the white-trimmed edges with outcroppings of fantastic figures. girdling the entire edifice. No one can deny that in conjunction with the other City College Buildings it is one of the City's art treasures. Its location commands here the silvering expanse of the Hudson, there a cluster of mist- enshrouded houses, and seems to isolate it from the rest of the city, with only the hum of the street cars, and only the insistence of grey steeples and spires and slender factory chimneys, spiralling smoke from invisible mouths, to remind it of the city and that it is one of the petals on the Hfiower of the city's educational system, City College. 9 'ss A xx- . the other shadowed by the Mechanic Arts Building, and facing xy 5 fb, , Origin No one, I presume, has read a biography without some mention of the liero's parentage, a history without a preface of prehistoric life, a story without a mass of antecedents. Townsend I-Iarris.I-Iall is peculiarly prolific in its ante- cedents. It grew out of the City College. lt is one of the City College buildings: substantially it is only a link in the chain of The City College education. Townsend Harris Hall cannot have a separate history. Its history must, therefore, begin with a summary of The City College history. In the sixty-seven years of its existence, the City College has known no more notable year than that of l907. The old buildings on Twenty-third street with their gloomy interior and their distracting outlook upon one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city, were abandoned for the new buildings on Vxfashing- ton Heights. The College became practically a new college. New and mag- nificent quarters produced a regeneration that the City College was little aware of. It was an unconscious refreshening. There was infused a new and nobler spirit in the student body, a new student consciousness.

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T. H. H. shared in everything. One of the handsomest of the new buildings was devoted to it. As for T. H. H. the changes were crystallized in a name. The name chosen for the school by a happy choice rested on Townsend Harris. No name could be more appropriate. As an educator noted for his ambitions and ideals, as a public servant famed for his integrity and broad-mindedness, finally as one of the founders of City College, he is peculiarly acceptable to the School and what it aims for. He has become an ideal for T. H. H. Studentsg his actions have become precedents. The prototype of T. H. H. was the Sub-Freshman Class, a one-year course that prepared students for entrance into college. In 1901 it was extended to two years and a year later it had grown to its present proportions. In 1905 T. H. H. opened under Professor H. Thompson. In 1906-07 Prof. Sim took charge, while Professor Thompson had sections in the main buliding of C. C. N. Y. The college moved to its present home in 1907. Prof. Sim took charge in the present T. H. H., while Professor Thompson moved again back to the Twenty-third Street building. Previous to 1907, T. H. H. occupied quarters in the Cass Building, 23rd Street, between Znd and 3rd Ave., a building now devoted to the technical training of girls, under the name of Manhattan Trade School for Girls. The T. H. H. thus established in 1907 met with an immediate and widespread approbation. The number of students who applied for admission was so large that, had not the precautions been taken of providing an annex for the surplus, there might have arisen insurmountable difficulties. Students living on the VVest Side above 100th Street, and on the East Side, 110th Street, went to T. H. H. uptown, the others to the Annex. The Annex The annex was the old City College building, on 23d and 22d Streets and Lexington Avenue. Only one who has been an Annex man, who has heard the echo on its sepulchrally hollow walls, who has paced its gloomy corridors with their dusty pictures and mustier trophies, who has tread its creaky staircases, with a heart-beat for every foot-fall, can know the esoteric secret of it. Outside was the world, the clangorous tolling in a hundred towers, the screaming from a hundred ferry-boats, the wrangling of the car with its own tracks, the shouts and rumblings that make up the audible world, inside there was the droning of study and the fusty mustiness that make study studious, and the inscrutable silence of it all. I remember passing from the recitation building of 22d Street to the office building on 23d Street over the strip of yard with its bare fences that separated them, to settle the petty delinquencies that are the spice of the student's life. And I remember the lingering over the old pictures and old banners, that seemed to bind a for- gotten world in their cob-webbed being, the sobriety and aesthetic gloominess that flickered in with the dim light through the windows. I was always impressed and constant familiarity did not diminish the awe in which I held it. The old building is down and, in a manner, what I have written is a requiem for it, and a memorial for the memories that went down with it. On the site, a College of Commerce, the plans of which are on file, in most respects a department of City College with another calling, is to stand. Prom that point on everybody is familiar with the T. H. H. history. Clubs rose and fell, teams developed a transient brilliancy and fell to a self-extinction. Upper A classes with their pother of dances and class days came and went,