Butler Street Campus

View of the Butler Street Campus (Yearbook 1984)

Butler Street campus grotto (Yearbook 1962)

Scenes of the Butler Street campus before it's destruction (Yearbook 1966)

The photos and descriptions of the Butler Street campus in the early yearbooks show the campus as a peaceful retreat; a place of quiet contemplation; "a plot of green in the borough of churches and schools." (Yearbook 1939).

"It is a garden sanctuary in the heart of the city. As one rests on the veranda in the rear of the monastery, the grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, which stands in the center of this garden, gives one the feeling of having been transported to the Old World." (Yearbook 1938)

In 1963, the college moved its campus to nearby Remsen Street. Addressing the final destruction of the Butler Street campus, the 1966 Franciscan describes not just a sense of loss for the physical space but the homey and cloistered spirit this space engendered amongst students. 

"We have lost something, and not just the building, but that atmosphere, and that outlook, and that spirit which accompanied it and was somehow' an inherent part of it. In a sense we have lost our childhood, our security from the immediacy and the energies of the daily world." (Yearbook 1966)