The Lost Washington Institute - 13th Street and Third Avenue

 

The district around the facility was decidedly rural.  In the background is the city's new reservoir.  Views in New-York and its Environs, 1831 (copyright expired)

Twenty-one-year-old George Washington Hall graduated from Yale College in 1803.  In 1815, he began teaching in Georgia, then in Boston, and, then in 1818 opened the Mount Vernon School for boys in Harlem.  Hall's health was frail, and after operating the facility for two years he had to go South for a year.  Upon returning, in 1821 he founded a collegiate boarding school "for the instruction of young gentlemen," as worded by Theodore S. Fay in his 1831 Views in New-York and Its Environs.

Hall acquired 16 building lots that spanned the Third Avenue blockfront from 12th to 13th Streets.  He erected a three-story-and-attic, Federal style edifice flanked by walled gardens and playgrounds.  The commodious attic level under a peaked roof featured four dormers each on the front and back, and arched and quarter-round windows on the sides.  

In his The Cyclopedia of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, W. R. Murray called the school (which sat upon "a moderate eminence") as "an ornament and an honor to the 'Empire' city."  He said:

Though within the city, as surveyed and laid out, it is just out of the present compact and populous part of it; and thus combines the advantages of a vicinity to the city with a pure air and a fine prospect of the surrounding country.  From the piazza of the building, there is a good view of both the Hudson, on the west, and of the East river (so called) in the opposite direction.

Decades later, on March 4, 1868, The College Courant would say that Hall "opened a school on Thirteenth street, which he named the Washington Institute."  Almost every other reference, however, insists that Marquis de Lafayette named it in 1824, three years after its opening.  In his 1908 biography of John Watts de Peyster, Frank Allaben wrote, "It is said that Lafayette paid it a visit, and, on being requested to name it, gave it this title, which it always afterwards bore."

The school differed from the other preparatory institutions.  The 1833 Treasury of Knowledge and Library of Reference said that Hall, "successfully introduced the celebrated Pestalozzi's system of teaching into this country."  Swiss educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi stressed the development of the "whole" child, intellectually, morally and physically.  An advertisement in 1842 read in part, "health and vigor of constitution, refinement of manners, the cultivation of the intellect, and amendment of the heart, are the objects to which the conductors of the Institute devote their unremitting attention."

The Cyclopedia of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, 1853 (copyright expired)

W. R. Murray explained, "It was proposed to furnish a Seminary and teachers, where the classics were not so much taught as is necessary to prepare for College...but where they might obtain a complete knowledge of English Grammar, modern languages, geography, book-keeping, mathematics, &c."  In short, the school readied its students for professions as clerks, accountants, and such.

In 1876, General John Watts de Peyster dictated his "personal reminiscences."  A full chapter was devoted to "A New York Boarding-School."  De Peyster was sent to the Washington Institute in 1829 where, he recalled, "we were all compelled to wear the uniform which, it is said, Lafayette selected when he gave it its title."  Among his numerous recollections were the punishments meted out to students who violated the rules.

The great punishment of this school was the "bread-and-water table."  At this the delinquent fasted on bread and water, while the rest feasted at the long tables, on three sides.  It was a humiliation worse, to a spirited boy, than a really painful punishment.

De Peyster would have boarded with students from far-flung lands.  Theodore S. Fay noted that in addition to American pupils, "A large number of young men also from the West Indies, Mexico, Guatemala, Columbia, and other divisions of Spanish America, have here received their education."

An example of that was Francisco Zerega, Jr., who arrived from Venezuela in 1825.  Two years later, his father stopped payments.  Court papers in 1833 said, "The boy remained at school until July, 1830, at which time [his] bill amounted to $1000 and upwards."  (The unpaid tuition and board would translate to $38,500 in 2025.)  The boy's father said he would pay half that amount.  If not, he would not take his son back.

Emily Johnston De Forest, in her 1914 A Walloon Family in America, recalled the time Lockwood de Forest and his brothers spent here from 1832 to 1834.

They were at a boarding school, at the "Washington Institute," which was far away from the town in the open country at Thirteenth Street near Third Avenue.  They had already been there for a couple of years and had acquired a first-rate grounding in English, though they received very slight instruction in Latin and none in Greek.

George Washington Hall's health continued to be poor and in 1829 he partnered with Dr. Joseph Dresser Wickham in running the school.  In 1834, the men turned over the operation to Wickham's brothers-in-law, Timothy Dwight Porter and Theodore Woolsey Porter.  Both had been instructors here, and both were graduates of Yale.  (The New York Teacher would explain later that George Washington Hall's health "so completely failed as to render him unfair for any continuous employment."  He died on February 24, 1868 at the age of 86.)

By 1841, the city, with its temptations and bad influences, was approaching the once remote grounds of the Washington Institute.  On February 10, an announcement of upcoming property auctions in The Evening Post included, "Two marble houses and 16 lots of land, known as the Washington Institute, situate [sic] on 12th and 13th streets."

The school continued in the complex, apparently renting, through the 1845 session.  An advertisement in The Evening Post on April 26 somewhat smugly said, "Of the general character of the institution it is deemed unnecessary here to speak."

When the school year opened on September 1 that year, it had moved to Murray Hill, on Lexington Avenue and 36th Street.  An advertisement said, "In situation if affords full country privileges, while retaining the advantages that belong to the town."  

Before long, the bucolic grounds of the Washington Institute were developed with store-and-flat buildings.