History
Regis High School was founded in 1914 through the financial bequest of a single formerly anonymous benefactress: Julia M. Grant, the widow of Mayor Hugh J. Grant. She stipulated that her gift be used to build a Jesuit high school providing a free education for Catholic boys with special consideration given to those who could not otherwise afford a Catholic education. The Grants' former home currently houses the Vatican Observer to the United Nations, which is where the Pope stays when he visits New York City.
The school building was built to the designs of the Boston firm of Maginnis & Walsh.
The identity of the school's founding benefactor was officially kept secret for decades, though the large portrait in the school's first floor conference room titled "Julia Grant" contradicted the official policy. The online announcement of an auction that included items related to the school's founding did so as well. Finally, on October 26, 2009, a documentary film revealed her identity and detailed the circumstances of her gift. Following her husband's death in 1910, Julia Grant met with Father Hearn, S.J. and, with a stipulation of strict anonymity, gave him an envelope with the money needed to start a school to educate bright Catholic boys. When Mrs. Grant died, her children took over the funding of the school. When Lucie Mackey Grant, a daughter-in-law of Julia Grant, died in 2007, none of the Grant heirs remained to fund the school. Since then, Regis has relied primarily on the original endowment and alumni donations to keep the school tuition free. Following Lucie Mackey Grant's death, at an auction of historic items held by the Grant family, Regis bid successfully for the original golden chalice used in Mass when the school was founded in 1914.
On Saturday, May 14, 2011, a two-alarm fire destroyed the school's principal gymnasium and did some peripheral damage. The school re-opened the following Tuesday.
Read more about this topic: Regis High School (New York City)
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“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A people without history
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)