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SIXTY-PLUS YEARS LATER--The Lycée RevisitedBy Gabrielle Griswold© ('44) It must be axiomatic that an attractive environment is an inducement to learning. When I first entered the Lycée in September 1938 at the age of twelve, I was thrilled to be there for a multitude of reasons, and the beauty of the building soon became one of them, in itself a joy and a motivation. My first year there was the Lycée’s fourth and its very first in its own building, at 3 East 95th Street. It was also, for everyone across the globe, the last year of peace before the outbreak of World War II. In 1936 and 1937 I had lived at Cannes with my beloved French godmother and had come back from that experience a committed Francophile. When my parents moved our family from Riverside, Connecticut, to Manhattan, I was exhilarated at the prospect of again attending a French school. From the first, I loved everything about the Lyçée: its courses, its textbooks, its teachers, its bilingualism, my classmates—and yes, the elegance of its architecture, its marble staircases, crystal chandeliers, high ceilings, tall windows and bright classrooms, its gilded ballroom, its intimate 18th-century charm. At a time when the school’s entire student body probably numbered little more than one hundred of us altogether, we were able to know (at least by sight) students in grades other than our own. Among them, when I entered the Classe de Sixième, were Hilda Beer, two grades above mine; her older brother, Martin; her older sister, Lise; and their younger brother, Jean. While Hilda went on to complete the full Lyçée curriculum and pass her baccho, the other Beers eventually transferred to American schools. For my part, I left the Lycée in end-November 1941 while still in Seconde, when my family moved to Garden City, Long Island, just nine days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Fast forward sixty-five years to November 2006. After an interesting and active life, I left my long-time home in New Hampshire and moved to a retirement community outside of Philadelphia. I had been at Kendal less than a week when, to our mutual amazement, I discovered all four Beer siblings already ensconced as residents here! In all the intervening years there had been no contact between us. What a surprise for all of us therefore that, out of so small a school as the Lycée had been when we knew it, five of us should turn up in the same place six-and-a-half decades later. From that moment on, Hilda Beer (now Grauman) and I had talked periodically about some day taking a trip to New York to visit the brand-new modern Lycée, all steel and glass, of which we’d seen pictures, showing it to be not only larger in size than our old school but also endowed with all sorts of amenities our Lycée had not possessed. Finally on Tuesday 13 July 2010, we joined a Kendal day trip headed for Manhattan, having taken the precaution beforehand of ascertaining that someone would be at the school to tour us through it. That someone was Claude Aska (Assistant Director of Development and Alumni Relations) who greeted us upon arrival, and guided us through a building that proved to be, as we’d expected, in dramatic contrast to the one we remembered. Here was a structure as modern and sleek as our Lycée had been vintage and intimate. But, as we immediately realized, here also was an attractive learning environment that must be as motivating to today’s students as ours had been to us, and beautiful in altogether different ways. To house a much larger student body and teaching staff, the new building is not only many times bigger than the original one, it also incorporates features that accommodate vastly expanded programs, including some we never knew, such as athletics, drama and music programs. In our day, outdoor recreation took the form of recess periods in an open courtyard, where we played our own games at will. For additional exercise, the older boys were sometimes taken out to Central Park for a pick-up game or two, but the girls never were, and no real sports program existed for either sex. Music and art were equally minimal, taught alternately, once a week, in the same room. Art never amounted to much, and music took the form of weekly lessons in solfeggio and singing. Drama might, at best, include a short play performed once or twice a year on the ballroom’s raised stage, but all of this was small stuff compared to the facilities available to today’s Lycée students. Hilda and I marveled that the new building boasts not only one but two large gymnasiums, and a large, stunningly appointed auditorium/theater/concert hall. In Hilda’s and my time, the original Lycée had been converted to school use from a private mansion designed to replicate an 18th-century town house, with the result that many of our classrooms were former bedrooms, complete with rococo wall sconces and marble fireplaces! A few classrooms, up under the roof, had doubtless once been servants’ quarters. A latticed solarium at the top of the house served as classroom for the very youngest children (with twin terraces at either end which the lower grades visited at mid-morning récréation for a breath of fresh air and a snack of milk and graham crackers). Older students in the graduating classes enjoyed the luxury of the mansion’s former library, a high-ceilinged room with period boiseries, glassed-in bookshelves, and tall balconied windows overlooking the street. In the new Lycée, architect-designed and purpose-built to house this particular school, we were particularly impressed with the banks of spacious classrooms overlooking a grassy patio, all of whose window walls let in natural light and can be retracted in fair weather to open the rooms to fresh air and sunshine. How delightful that must be to the students who inhabit them! Today’s airy, sunlit Lycée cafeteria contrasts dramatically with the basement eating areas where we lunched at 3 East 95th Street. In that subterranean space, a long corridor opened onto the boys’ and girls’ cloakrooms. plus a kitchen, a dining-room that served students who took hot, school-cooked meals each noon, and a sort of refectory that held tables and benches where those of us ate who brought lunchbox meals from home. (Needless to say, those underground rooms, the only part of the building that was not really beautiful, required electric lighting during every hour they were in use.) Of course the new Lycée’s state-of-the-art technology impressed us, including its multi-media ‘smart boards’ with their Internet connectivity replacing the old blackboards, chalk and dusty felt erasers so long featured in earlier schools. Also new to us was the existence of Lycée libraries (not just one, we were told, but two), separate art and science rooms, and a students’ lounge, none of which had existed in our day. Even our teachers had only a tiny cubby-hole of a room in which to deposit or pick up their textbooks when changing classes—nothing one could remotely call a teachers’ lounge, which doubtless the new Lycée also has. Despite these lacks, I am certain that none of us ever felt in any way deprived; on the contrary, we loved the elegant interiors through which we moved and felt privileged to be attending school there. For our day and our use, they provided a far better than average learning environment. In addition, our glorious ballroom (substituting for the present school’s auditorium) served as venue for Christmas caroling, any dramatic performances we might present, for our weekly social dancing lessons, and for the annual Distributions des Prix held at each school year’s end. It also inspired me to organize the first-ever Lycée ball, a masked, costumed affair held on Friday, 14 March 1941. Having obtained then-principal Monsieur Brodin’s permission, I enlisted the help of my best friend, Eleanor Cramer. She and I planned everything ourselves, from the program to the music to the refreshments. We arranged for teacher chaperones, hand-wrote and distributed invitations to students in all the upper grades, and charged attendees 25 cents admission “for the benefit of the Allied Relief Fund.” Everyone turned out in colorful fancy dress, and, as I had known it would be, the ball was a spectacular success. Toward the end of Hilda’s and my recent Lycée tour, Scott Hunt, Director of Development, joined us in a conference room to answer any further questions she and I might have. Shortly thereafter, we left with an armful of mementos, a head full of happy memories both old and new, and pleasure in the thought that, like us, today’s Lycée students have such a bright and positive space in which to pursue their education. ________________________________________________________________________ |
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