Brearley School

610 East 83rd Street | Yorkville | built 1929

Open on the map4 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

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.

  1. 1928

    July 13

    The Times reports that Brearley will leave Park Avenue for a new building at 83rd Street and the East River

    On July 13, 1928, The New York Times reported that the Brearley School for Girls would move from its building at Park Avenue and East 61st Street, which had opened only 16 years earlier, to a new school at 83rd Street and the East River. The new building opened the following year. The old McKim, Mead & White schoolhouse was demolished in 1939 and replaced by the apartment house at 530 Park Avenue.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1930

    Millicent Carey McIntosh becomes Brearley's head and moves the school to full days

    In 1930 Millicent Carey McIntosh, a Bryn Mawr dean with a Johns Hopkins doctorate in English, was appointed headmistress of the Brearley School, a post she held for seventeen years. She switched the school from half days to full days and started a sex education class for sixth graders. In 1947 she moved on to lead Barnard College, the first married woman to lead any of the Seven Sisters colleges.

    Source: Wikipedia

  3. 1942

    April

    Brearley senior Oona O'Neill is crowned the Stork Club's top debutante of the season

    Oona O'Neill, daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill, attended Brearley from 1940 to 1942 and appeared in the society pages with her friends Carol Marcus and Gloria Vanderbilt, who went out with her to fashionable nightclubs. In April 1942, during her senior year, she was named the Stork Club's Number One Debutante of the 1942-43 season, which brought national publicity and offers from film studios and modeling agencies. After graduating she chose an acting career over a place at Vassar.

    “In April 1942, during her senior year at Brearley, she was crowned as "The Number One Debutante" of the 1942-1943 season at the Stork Club.”

    Source: Wikipedia

  4. 1948

    Benjamin Spock is the school doctor and Mildred Dunnock teaches drama for Brearley's class of 1948

    A 1998 Times story on the Brearley class of 1948's fiftieth reunion recalled that when those girls were students, the school doctor was Benjamin Spock and drama was taught by Mildred Dunnock, later a star of Death of a Salesman. The students were daughters of the city's social and intellectual elite, and diversity then meant admitting Catholics and Jews. Evelyn Halpert, who attended in the 1940s, later served as head from 1975 to 1997.

    Source: Internet Archive

Further reading

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