Academy of Mount St. Ursula

In 1854, the Rev. John Casper Metzler, C.Ss.R., the first pastor of the German-speaking Church of the Immaculate Conception, requested that a group of Ursulines from St. Louis, Missouri, come to his new parish in Melrose, then the southern tip of Westchester County, to teach girls. The nuns, who had arrived in St. Louis in 1848, had originally come from Ödenburg (now Sopron), in the Kingdom of Hungary, and Landshut, in the Kingdom of Bavaria. As their first missionary community had grown quickly, the nuns visited the village of Melrose and accepted the invitation with the permission of their archbishop, Peter Kenrick. On May 15, 1855, Mother Magdalen Stehlin, O.S.U., set out again for Melrose with three companions to establish a new monastery there.

By the end of the summer there were 11 Ursuline nuns in the area living with the Hennings and other families while the monastery was being built. It is said that Archbishop John Hughes himself chose the site in the village of Morrisania, near what is now the intersection of Cauldwell and Westchester Avenues.

By October 1, 1855, the monastery had been completed and occupied by the Ursulines and began to offer classes. Almost immediately, the school students and the young girls choosing to enter the monastery came from both the German-speaking community of Immaculate Conception and beyond. The academy and monastery were incorporated together by the New York State legislature in 1868 as the Ursuline Convent.

At the time the nuns arrived, Morrisania was a sparsely populated, brand new suburb of the City of New York, the result of a series of decisions by members of the Morris family to open their estate lands for development. The population grew rapidly, and so did the industrial base: foundries, breweries, carpentry shops, tailoring establishments and slaughterhouses. With the rapid population growth and a change in the demographics, more demands were put on the charitable works of the nuns. The Ursuline nuns branched out to begin other academies and staff other parochial schools in New York and beyond.

Eager for clean Croton water and city services, voters chose to bring the Bronx into New York City in 1874. Meanwhile, the nuns were already considering relocating northward to escape the encroachment of industry right at their threshold and the projected purchase of their property for streets. The actual move, however, did not occur until 1892, when the Ursuline Monastery and the academy (under the protection of St. Joseph), moved to Bedford Park Boulevard; with the relocation, the school began using the name Mount St. Ursula to reflect the hilly topography of the new site. Before 1900, the New York State curriculum and Regents examinations were introduced and the Alumnae Association was founded.

With the changes in the life and structures of Roman Catholic religious institutes in the 1960s mandated by the Second Vatican Council, the Ursulines began to shed many of the monastic practices which had been imposed on them in the 16th century. They began to explore living in small, non-institutional settings and non-traditional ministries. In addition to these changes, a sharp decrease in the number of applicants to the Order led to the numbers of nuns in their communities to decline sharply during that period.

By the start of the 21st century, the nuns at the Mount had been so decreased in numbers through retirement and death, that the community chose to transfer to their regional headquarters located in New Rochelle, New York. As of July 2014, the principal is an Ursuline sister and two other sisters serve the school through Service Coordination and Mission Effectiveness. In 2011, a piece of the monastery section of the property was developed into Serviam Gardens, an affordable senior housing complex with 243 units, planned also to serve as a model of green energy architecture.[3]