Allen-Stevenson School
132 East 78th Street | also 130 East 78th Street | Upper East Side | built 1910
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1924
The school buys two brownstones and moves into its permanent East Side home
Francis Bellows Allen founded the school in 1883 in a home at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, with a first class of three boys. It later moved to rented rooms on Madison Avenue and to 50 East 57th Street after Allen joined forces with tutor Robert Alston Stevenson in 1904. In 1924 the school bought two brownstones on the Upper East Side for a new schoolhouse and moved to the location it still occupies, after an enrollment that had passed 200 by 1918.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1957
Artist Donald Judd teaches at the school from 1957 to 1961
Donald Judd, who became a sculptor and a founder of the minimalist movement, taught at the Allen-Stevenson School from 1957 to 1961. He taught off and on at several institutions, from the Police Athletic League in 1953 to the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences from 1962. In 1959 he began writing criticism for Art News, and in 1962 he earned a master's degree in art history from Columbia.
Source: encyclopedia.com
- 1967
Future opera director Paul Kellogg becomes assistant headmaster and head of the Lower School
Paul Kellogg began teaching French at the school while a graduate student at Columbia, and in 1967 he was appointed assistant headmaster and head of the Lower School. In 1975 he relocated to Cooperstown, New York, to write, and he later joined the Glimmerglass Opera. In January 1996 he took over the management of the New York City Opera, where he was general and artistic director and announced in 2005 that he would retire in June 2007.
Source: operatoday.com
- 1978
Headmaster Desmond Cole keeps the school open in the snow
On February 6, 1978, headmaster Desmond Cole, a Briton in his third year at the school, told the New York Times that Allen-Stevenson never closes for snow and that staying open was a matter of principle. Calls to six other private Manhattan elementary schools found none planning to stay open that afternoon. Even so, 71 of the school's 297 boys were absent from the five-story red-brick building, a figure that distressed him.
Source: Internet Archive
- 1984
The school orchestra plays on through rain at the White House
In May 1984 eighty members of the school's symphony orchestra, then said to be the sole symphony orchestra at any Manhattan private school, played outside the White House to open its summer Visitors Concert Series. Rain soaked the strings, washed rosin off the bows and blew sheet music onto the grass. One trumpeter, 14-year-old Jonathan Bush Jr., was the nephew of Vice President George Bush, who missed the concert.
Source: Internet Archive
- 2009
The school earns LEED Gold, a first for an elementary school in the United States
In 2009 the school received an Energy Star rating from the US Department of Energy and then LEED Gold certification for Existing Buildings from the US Green Building Council. That made it the first elementary school in the country to reach LEED-EB Gold. The recognition followed a 2007 renovation and expansion of the interior that kept the Classical Revival brick and Victorian brownstone facades within the Landmarks Commission's rules for the Upper East Side Historic District.
“This made Allen-Stevenson the very first elementary school in the United States to achieve LEED-EB Gold status.”
Source: Wikipedia
Further reading
- Allen-Stevenson SchoolWikipedia
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