Go West, Young Men: with Serendipity and a W By Christine Martin
T
he members of Rivers’ Class of 1961 are marking not only a personal milestone this spring when they return for their 50th Reunion, but also an institutional milestone, as the first class to graduate from the Weston campus. Looking back at the alumni newsletters from the late 1950s, it is clear that the trustees and administration were taking a giant leap of faith by moving The Rivers Country Day School, as it was called then, from Brookline to the suburbs. They were in dire need of a larger facility, but would current students make the trek out from town every day? Could they attract enough new students from the suburbs? The first bit of serendipity occurred soon after the Board had found an ideal location for the campus—a 30-acre farm in Weston. Rivers’ Board President Hathorn Brown was scrubbing in for surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital when he mentioned to his colleague at the neighboring sink that Rivers couldn’t afford the Weston property. On the spot, Dr. Philip Walker, who had no connection to Rivers, offered to buy the land for the school and within days delivered a check for $40,000. Serendipity intervened again on a trans-Atlantic crossing when Ethel Blackwell, wife of then-Headmaster George Blackwell, met Rem Huygens, a young Dutch architect heading to New York City. When Huygens heard about the school’s plans, he made a pitch: He and his partner Allan Chapman should design the new campus buildings. The Board was leery of hiring two thirtysomethings with Bauhaus leanings who had never designed a school building, but decided to give them a chance. Chapman and Huygens designed the cluster of buildings around a connecting walkway to look like low-slung farm buildings. They clad the buildings in yellow brick to blend with the large yellow barn at the entrance to campus. Although they had never seen pictures of the original campus, their design was nonetheless reminiscent of Rivers’ original open-air “bungalows.” Alumni invited to Weston for the 1958 reunion were told to wear their hiking shoes to tour the grounds, and to keep them on for the alumni-varsity baseball game. Plans for the new buildings were on display during the evening’s festivities, although only a portion of the necessary funds had been raised. In 1959, the town’s purchase of the Brookline campus by eminent domain brought an infusion of cash and put the Board on the fast track to begin construction in Weston before vacating the old campus. The official groundbreaking took place on November 14, 1959 and the doors opened in Weston in September 1960 to a recordbreaking enrollment of 222. The rest, as they say, is history.
16 • Riparian • Spring 2011
Breaking ground in 1959
If you thought after-school detention was bad, you probably never raked the lawn outside the Prince Building.
MacDowell Library—same building, different fashions!