The academic decathlon team at Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy explored New York City for a week recently to broaden the girls’ studies of the Great Depression for their upcoming competition in late January.

Many of the sites visited related to the team’s knowledge of Depression-era art. They wandered the Metropolitan Museum of Art where they examined works by Norman Rockwell and Frank Lloyd Wright, and studied the Art Deco architecture of the period including the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building.

The girls also visited the Tenement Museum in lower Manhattan housed in an actual tenement building once filled with struggling immigrants; the Apollo Theater, built during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, and they watched the Broadway show “Scottsboro Boys’ about the plight of African Americans during the Great Depression.

A 90-mile excursion north of the city took the team to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Hyde Park home where the girls toured the former president’s library and furthered their knowledge of his government agencies created in response to the Depression.

“It was really fun way to learn and I think the trip taught us a lot by putting our studies from the text into perspective,” said student Kathryn O’ Sullivan.

Provided by FSHA

  Academic Decathletes, FSHA