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Answer:
The second successful school for the deaf in the United States was founded in 1818. Its first location was in the in Almshouse on Chambers Street behind City Hall, in lower Manhattan, where its founder, Rev. John Stanford, was chaplain. A steadily rising enrollment led to a series of moves to rented quarters—41 Warren Street, then 117 Monroe Street for boys and 74 Leonard Street for girls. In 1829, the school leased and purchased 11 acres of virgin land on 50th Street between Madison Avenue and 5th Avenues, near the present sites of Saks Fifth Avenue and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. (Columbia College—later University—began a 40-year sojourn on the site in 1857.)
In 1853, the school purchased a 37.5-acre wooded estate on the bank of the Hudson River, from President James Monroe’s nephew, Col. James Monroe. This estate was known as “Fanwood,” and became the school’s nickname. (The original name was “Fanny’s Woods,” after President Monroe’s grandniece Fanny Monroe Robinson [1824-1906].) The new campus, consisting of seven buildings, was located between 162nd and 165th Street, extending eastward to St. Nicholas Avenue, in Washington Heights. The site is now part of the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital campus.
In 1934, the School purchased a 77-acre hilly apple farm on Knollwood Road in White Plains, 20 miles north of the Washington Height campus. After seven new buildings were constructed, the school relocated here in 1938. Even though deaf people were exempted from military service, Fanwood was then a boys’ military school. The military component was dropped in 1951, and Fanwood became coeducational in 1954. New buildings have since been constructed on the White Plains campus. The old nickname endures.
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