The Campus as a Subject: Describing a Place You Can No Longer Visit

The ground is still there. It lies in Highland Falls, New York, a few hundred yards south of Thayer Gate at West Point, and what used to be the Ladycliff campus is now the academy's South Post. Rosary Hall is Olmsted Hall, the West Point Museum. Mary Hall is the Five Star Inn. The chapel is gone, and so is the building torn down to make room for the Visitors Center. What cannot be visited is the campus as it was between 1933 and 1980, with a college on it. That is the subject the alumnae kept returning to on the old website, and it is the subject of this piece, written by the archive's editors.

Hotel, cliff, river, gate

The fixed facts are few and should be stated once. On January 1, 1900, the Franciscan Sisters of Peekskill bought a summer hotel on the cliffs above the west bank of the Hudson, on land next to the United States Military Academy, and named the parcel Lady Cliff. They moved their school there and called it Ladycliff Academy. A chapel went up in 1904, Lady Hall in 1913 and Rosary Hall in 1933, the year the college opened. Mary Hall followed in 1951, Spellman Hall in 1967 and the Library in 1969. The whole property sat in the village of Highland Falls, about fifty miles north of New York City and, as a West Point column put it, a few hundred yards south of Thayer Gate.

Even these facts have edges. The college history on the original site names the hotel as Cranston's. The West Point column calls it Cozzen's, and says that one building believed to have been part of that hotel, by then Regina Hall with its attached chapel and auditorium, was torn down for the Visitors Center. A guestbook writer who boarded in the eighth grade in the 1940s remembers it as the Cranston Hotel. The archive does not resolve the name, and neither should a writer. The disagreement is part of the description of the place.

How the women described it

The alumnae rarely describe the buildings. They describe where they sat. Lyde M. Newman, class of 1963, writes that one of the most beautiful aspects of the college was the view of the river, and that she spent too many hours watching the traffic on it. One winter the Hudson froze and an icebreaker came up from New York City making a racket, and during that time a hungry striped cat appeared at the window and became, for a few months, the class cat. Verna C. Bryant, class of 1945, recalls a senior year spent not in the dorm but in a house on the road up to Rosary Hall, with a back porch and a small gazebo on the cliff as the quiet spot for studying and letters, and a large gazebo on the front campus for socializing. That large gazebo, she says, was torn down when a second road to West Point was paved. Mabel Callahan Galu's reply about the gazebo in Ladycliff Park completes the account.

The guestbook adds the rest in fragments. Smokers rock, with the path to it now so overgrown that reaching it takes determination. The smell of lilacs in May behind Mary Hall. Tar Beach, the roof where students lay in the sun while Army helicopters buzzed overhead. A little path behind the dorm where a freshman in the last year could sit on the cliff and look at the river. These writers give a fixed point, a season and a sense, and the campus assembles itself around that. This is the practical lesson for anyone trying to set down a place from memory. A guide to writing a descriptive essay will put it in terms of choosing dominant impressions and concrete detail over inventory, and the Ladycliff pages are the worked example.

A watercolor and a box of postcards

Two kinds of picture survive. The photo gallery holds early twentieth century postcards of Lady Cliff Academy on its cliff, the terraces, a gazebo above the river, the Highlands shoreline, Buttermilk Falls at Highland Falls, and later campus views of the chapel interior, the towers, Constitution Island and the Hudson in late winter. Postcards were made to sell a view, and they show the place as it wished to be seen, often from the river.

The other picture came by a stranger route. A reader in Maryland, signing herself Norma, wrote to the site about a framed watercolor signed Farley 1905 that she and her husband had bought about 35 years earlier at a house auction in West Virginia. When she took it to be reframed, she and the framing shop deciphered writing on the backing board: an order for one hundred copies of the picture, to be sent to E. H. Dickey of Highland Falls, with a note that it would sell like hot cakes there and at the convent and could advertise a booklet yet to come. She asked whether the site knew anything about the booklet or the artist, and whether the building still stood. The archive cannot answer her, but her letter shows what a single object can do for a description of a place: it fixes a date and a purpose, and it adds the small commercial fact that someone expected a picture of the convent in Highland Falls to sell well there and at the convent.

The village was part of the campus

Highland Falls appears in the record as an extension of the grounds. Mabel Callahan Galu's letter about the gazebo lists the stops on Main Street that every student made: the five and ten, Pickwick, the Highland Falls Bank, Dyroff's Drug Store, the movie theater and the Grand Union. The bars, the Venice, the Radio Bar, the South Gate and Galu's, were supposed to be off limits. The college song that she found in her papers and posted on the site, undated and not to be confused with the Alma Mater, puts the village first:

In a thriving little village,where the lordly Hudson flows, Stands a white historic building, one that everybody knows.

Her request on the song page, for anyone who knows when it was first sung, was never answered in the archive. Across the highway from the old campus, the village now keeps a small triangle of land called Ladycliff Park, with a plaque to the Franciscan Sisters, a path of memorial bricks sold at 150 dollars each, old-fashioned street lamps, and a gazebo moved there from Roe Park Lake by the village crew. Sections of the chapel windows, the news page notes, went to a church in Holiday, Florida. The historical society in the village holds a shelf of Ladycliff yearbooks from the 1940s to 1980. The campus, in other words, has been distributed: some of it is across the road, some of it is in Florida, most of it is in boxes and on this site.

What this ground says about educating girls and women

For roughly eighty years the Sisters ran schools on that hill, and the record covers the whole span. A guestbook writer boarded there in the eighth grade with the class of 1944 and describes a lower school from first through eighth grade in the original building. Rose Marie Sellers and her sisters were residents of Ladycliff Academy in the late 1940s. The academy moved to Mohegan in the 1960s to make room for the college, which in the Sisters' own words aimed at the full development of young women so they might be efficient members and leaders of society. The outcomes, as far as the guestbook records them, were teachers, a principal, a librarian, a counselor, a nun honored for work with the poor, and a graduate who now works at a Catholic girls' school in Phoenix. One villager who was never a student, Susie Carter, writes that the student teachers in the Highland Falls schools came from Ladycliff and that a college professor, Joy Conley, led her Girl Scout troop with volunteers from among her students.

A writer working on the education of girls, then or now, has material here that is hard to find elsewhere: the physical setting of a women's college, the rules it kept, and the plain accounts of what its students did afterward. Set beside a contemporary piece such as this essay on girl education, which makes the general case, the Ladycliff pages supply the particular one, down to the schedule that was rearranged so a student with a new baby could finish her teaching practice.

A method for a place you cannot revisit

The editors would offer four suggestions. Begin from a fixed point rather than a map: a window over the river, a porch, a rock. Use the dated facts, the hotel purchase, the buildings and their years, the sale to West Point, once and early, so the reader is oriented, and then stop repeating them. Record what was removed and when, since the chapel, Regina Hall and the large gazebo are as much a part of the campus as what stands. And if you go to the ground today, to the museum, the park or the historical society, keep what you see now in separate sentences from what the alumnae saw then. The Ladycliff writers who did this best, Lyde Newman at her window and Verna Bryant on her porch, were not trying to preserve a campus. They were saying where they sat. That turned out to be enough.

Questions

Also at the Alumnae Desk: Writing About a College That No Longer Exists · Women Who Went Back: Study and Careers in the Ladycliff Record