History
A small group of interested landowners and merchants living on Brooklyn Heights formed a committee "of all the citizens interested in the cause of Female Education." After several meetings, a board of trustees was selected, funds were raised and the new school, named The Brooklyn Female Academy was built on Joralemon Street. It was a financial and educational success, its enrollment increasing steadily as the years went on. On January 1, 1853 the building caught fire and burned to the ground.
A few days later, Harriet Putnam Packer (1820–1892), the widow of William S. Packer, offered the sum of $65,000 to rebuild The Brooklyn Female Academy if the new institution was named in honor of her deceased husband. At this time, Ms. Packer made the largest gift ever for the higher education of women. The new building, designed by the noted architect of Brooklyn churches, Minard LaFever, opened in November, 1854.
Until the late 20th century Packer was primarily a girls school, with boys attending only kindergarten through fourth grade while girls and young women enrolled through high school as well as a two-year college. The chapel is notable for having stained-glass Tiffany windows.
Packer can be seen as a set for the CW television series Gossip Girl in multiple episodes throughout the first three seasons, as both interior and exterior locations.
Read more about this topic: Packer Collegiate Institute
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)