A Brooklyn Heights Preschool Is Locked In Parent-Teacher Drama

What happened when the oldest nursery school in Brooklyn decided to become a little less old-fashioned?

- Jessica Pressler

When you buy a home in Brooklyn Heights, you aren’t just purchasing real estate. The stately townhomes and converted carriage houses, with their window boxes of Algerian ivy winking over splendidly preserved original details—the Grecian columns, the soaring Romanesque windows offering a glimpse of curated furniture— connote a certain level of not just wealth and taste but respectability. These are houses not just for people who have money, but people who have values.

From the 19th-century sea captains with their “great broods of future bankers and fashionable brides,” as Truman Capote put it in his famous essay “A House on the Heights,” to the “urban, ambitious young couples” that came after, the neighborhood has always drawn families. “It’s a good place to raise children,” as Capote said.