Reflections of Havergal: 1994-2019

OVERVIEW

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FACI L I T I ES AND GROUNDS

[i]t did not seem within the bounds of possibility that the building could be ready by mid-September. When we moved in two days before the opening, the water was not yet connected, there was only a temporary telephone system outside, no schoolrooms were finished, building material was everywhere, there was no floor in the Assembly Hall, no kitchen stove, no light! To make matters even worse, [m]uddy” seems to have been the most frequent description of the New School grounds. The land was good Toronto clay, hard to transform into lawns and playing fields. The building was said to “stick out like a sore thumb.” Some landscaping was clearly necessary.

But this was the Depression. Application to the Forestry Department produced three hundred four-inch spruce trees and a hundred or so maple and poplar cuttings. These were carefully nurtured behind the school and planted around the property when mature. “The ash tree in the far corner of the upper lawn,” Miss Cleveland [a teacher] recalled, “came from the old Jarvis Street school, a seedling from the big ash tree, under whose shade many a summer class was held.” There were ‘form trees,’ donated by a form and planted by the form captain. The Old Girls gave a cedar hedge and the trees on the south lawn. Two oak seedlings from Windsor Great Park, England, were planted on the day of the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.

Architect’s vision of the New School, 1925.

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