Elizabeth Seton College
[2] Elizabeth Seton College was opened in 1961 by the Sisters of Charity of New York in the Alder Manor, former home of copper magnate William Boyce Thompson.
The mansion was purchased by Archdiocese of New York in 1951, and served as a girls' high school for ten years before being upgraded to a junior college.
[4] By 1966, the school had grown to the point when it employed 55 persons, including 29 Sisters of Charity, two diocesan priests, and 24 lay employees.
[6] Seton was still a women's college as of 1971,[8] but by at least as early as 1973 it was coeducational, and had opened an experimental female dormitory where males were allowed to come in to intermingle.
[9] Her tenure was marked by advances in the college's academic offerings, including new career programs in radio and television and medical laboratory training.
Also introduced during her presidency was the LINK, or Leap Into Knowledge program, which gave high school students the opportunity to receive college credits.
She also began a policy of awarding credit based on life learning,[9] and during her tenure, Seton was one of the first three colleges to offer a weekend classes program.
According to Seton President Mary Ellen Brosnan, the path to the merger had begun "several years ago", amidst declining enrollment and growing competition from "the public sector".
[12]Seton's "handsome and well-groomed" campus, Driscoll noted, contained a dormitory for 200 students and significant academic space.
[12] Brosnan insisted during the negotiation process that "if this consolidation goes through, the name of Elizabeth Seton will be preserved in whatever this place is going to be called.
[But due to economic decline], rather than come to us, our student population was choosing less expensive programs at city and state community colleges.
"[14] When Iona College merged with Seton, it did not purchase its assets, but assumed them as liabilities, according to Driscoll, and major repairs were needed for several campus buildings as well as the electrical plant.
[14] Driscoll announced that Iona's board of trustees was hiring an appraiser and broker for the campus, which was to close after the second semester of 1993.
The Sisters of Charity who founded Elizabeth Seton College still lived on the property, in the top floor of Alder Manor.
[12] This trend was accelerated by the opening of the branch campus Manhattan, located in a Catholic high school, which held Friday night and weekend classes for adult students.
[19] The main building and focal point of Elizabeth Seton College's 21-acre[12] campus was Alder Manor, alternatively known as the W. B. Thompson Mansion.
[14] Several academic buildings, an auditorium, and a residence hall with capacity for 200 students existed near the manor on campus grounds, many of them built in the 1960s and 1970s.
The 19th-century building was an active Catholic girls' high school, St. Michael Academy, located on West 33rd Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues.
