From Brooklyn, Queens, Jersey, and Mahhattan
generations of students have traveled to Xavier High School

by Anthony Andreassi

In November 1996 I attended my first parent-teacher meeting as a new teacher at Xavier High School in New York City. Many parents I met that evening spoke with foreign accents; judging by the roughness of some of the hands I shook, several of the fathers made a living by manual labor.

This came as a surprise to me. Like many others, I had associated Jesuit education with elite prep schools and liberal arts colleges in grassy suburbs, institutions educating children of the upper middle class. But after researching the history of Jesuit education in the United States, I learned this was only part of the story. The Jesuits have had a long history of providing education for the sons of the poor and working class, including those of New York City.

A New York Times story in 1866 describes the graduation exercises at a Jesuit college in Manhattan. After mentioning the speakers and prize-winning students, the reporter added:

During the past year, there have been 504 students attending the College, 60 of whom have received education without charge. The expense to other students, including board, lodging and all the necessaries of life, is but $60 per annum. The College has recently inaugurated a system of scholarships whereby young men without means can be educated without cost to themselves.

The New York Times reporter was correct in all facts except one. None of the boys at Xavier was a boarder. One reason tuition was so low was that Xavier, located on West Sixteenth Street in the heart of a rapidly expanding New York, was a day school. Most of the students at Xavier came from lower middle-class Catholic families who were not exactly poor, but they could not afford the Jesuits' more prestigious St. John's College in rural Fordham (the future Fordham University), where tuition and fees were $200 a year.

The College of St. Francis Xavier was not the first Jesuit attempt at a school in New York City. The school had been preceded by two others that had closed after brief periods prior to 1847, when Fr. John Larkin, a Jesuit at St. John's College, was sent to start a church and school in Manhattan; he opened the School of the Holy Name of Jesus in the basement of a former Protestant church on Elizabeth and Walker Streets.

Less than four months after opening, both church and school were destroyed by fire. The school moved to two other locations before 1850, when Larkin's successor, Fr. John Ryan, SJ, purchased ten lots in the middle of Fifth and Sixth Avenues between West Fifteenth and Sixteenth Streets. He used a third party to make the purchase lest neighbors discover that the purchaser was Catholic, let alone Jesuit. It was here that the school found its permanent, present site and was renamed for St. Francis Xavier.

From its very beginnings, Xavier appealed to a cross section of New York Catholics. Its location enabled it to take advantage of the city's rapidly expanding mass transit system. In anticipation of the first World's Fair in 1852, rails for horse-drawn streetcars were laid on Sixth, Eighth, and Ninth Avenues from downtown to what is now Central Park South. By 1860 the New York and Harlem Railroad was also in operation on the East Side from downtown at City Hall to the Harlem River. Students from Brooklyn, Jersey City, and Hoboken could travel to Manhattan via one of the many ferries that plied the waters around New York.

As transportation improved, the college grew, and by 1886, over twenty percent of the school's 500 students were commuting from Brooklyn and New Jersey. While the college at Fordham was limited to those who could afford the expensive commute or room and board fees, Xavier's central location contributed to its success, enabling it to serve the Catholic population of a rapidly growing city.

But by the turn of the century, one urban improvement had a negative effect on Xavier's college department. In 1901 the Third Avenue El crossed the Harlem River and established its northern terminus at Bronx Park, adjacent to Fordham College. Now parents could send their sons to Fordham for the same five-cent train fare it took to get them to Xavier. By 1910, Fordham's enrollment of 571 was more than twice what it had been twenty years earlier.

Also leading to the demise of Xavier's college was the increased desire for a clear demarcation between college and high school. Diocesan officials wanted more Catholic schools that could provide a strictly secondary education for those students who had no intention of pursuing higher education.

In 1905, after negotiations between the Jesuits and the archbishop, it was agreed that Xavier would close its college department and reorganize as a Catholic boys' high school. Although some argued for moving the college department to Brooklyn or to a less-congested section of Manhattan to permit expansion, the last college degrees were awarded in 1912. Today, though the legal title of the school is still "The College of St. Francis Xavier and Xavier High School," the college lived on in name only.

The high school, however, prospered. By 1929, Xavier's 1,120 students (an enrollment that made Xavier the largest high school in the state) could study biology, chemistry, or physics instead of Greek, and physical education came to take on a greater importance in their overall formation. Despite the economic hardships brought on by the Depression, stairwells were fireproofed, science labs were modernized, and a student chapel was added (students were the models for the cherubic faces of the angels that graced the sanctuary).

The postwar period was one of continued prosperity at Xavier High School. The school celebrated its centenary anniversary in 1947 and received a handwritten note from Pope Pius XII sending his benediction.

The changes that the 1960s brought to American society and to the Church affected Xavier as well. In the spirit of Vatican II, Fr. William Wood, SJ, Xavier's president in 1967, inaugurated a school advisory board composed of lay people; the students themselves had gotten a student council three years earlier. During this time many Jesuits gave up cassocks for black suits, lay teachers put aside the Oxford gowns they traditionally wore, and minority enrollment, then about ten percent, began to grow to the point where now African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians make up 40 percent of the student body.

Today, Xavier High educates about 850 boys per year from the New York area, over 98 percent of them going on to college. They share many characteristics with their Xavier counterparts of 150 years ago. During the school's early period, most of the parents ran small businesses or worked in skilled or semiskilled trades; less than 20 percent of them were in white-collar positions. Now, about 40 percent of Xavier parents have a college degree. Although many of today's students come from middle-class families who pay full tuition, over one-third receive scholarships or financial aid. While most of today's students are second- or third-generation Americans, many come from families in which at least one parent was born abroad. (In one of my sophomore religion classes I had students who spoke Italian, French, Spanish, Romanian, Chinese, or Polish as their primary language.) Over 90 percent of the students travel to school every day by subway, just as their predecessors came on horse-drawn streetcars. Much has changed in the last 150 years, but the original commitment New York City Jesuits made to educate the sons of the poor and working class continues at their high school on West Sixteenth Street.

Anthony Andreassi, who taught religious education at Xavier High School from 1996 to 1998, is studying for a PhD in American history at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.