By Jessica Presler From The Cut

en you buy a home in Brooklyn Heights, you aren’t just purchasing real estate, you’re purchasing a lifestyle. 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.

They’re also enormous, which is one reason that, 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” with their “Wall Street–whatever careers” that came after, the neighborhood has always been considered “a good place to raise children,” as Capote said.

Capote didn’t have children himself, though if he had, they would likely have attended the Grace Church School on Hicks Street and Grace Court. Located behind a bright-red door adjacent to the landmarked Episcopal church, the school is known as “the oldest preschool in Brooklyn.” And until recently, for as long as anyone in the neighborhood could remember, the school was run by Hope Prosky, who was something of an original fixture herself. Over the course of her 37-year tenure, Prosky gently encouraged generations of Brooklyn Heights children to “expand the cocoon of the little world of home to include and trust in the community.” So familial was the environment that a good number of graduates returned with their own broods to partake in the same whimsical traditions they had as kids: the Japanese Kite festival, the annual Holiday Sing. Of course, New York being New York, many families also left, making room for new families, who paid ever-higher prices for the same handful of properties. But even as the bankers got more bankerly and the wives got more fashionable, the neighborhood remained much the same. Insulated by its status as a historic district, it was unable to grow up, only out, and this Peter Pan quality was part of its charm for transplants from places like Manhattan. To them, Prosky and the fellow teachers at Grace Church — who played “Oh! Susanna” on guitars and dressed up as Pilgrims every year on Thanksgiving — were exemplars of the kind of authenticity they sought in moving to Brooklyn in the first place. “It was this sweet neighborhood school with this kind of loosey-goosey atmosphere,” recalls one.

Then one morning in 2015, one of the school’s 3-year-old charges walked several blocks to her home, surprising her parents, and loosey-goosey started to seem like a liability.

Not long after, Prosky announced her retirement and the rector of the church, which oversees the school, met with the Grace Church School Advisory Board, a volunteer body made up of parents and members of the church, and formed a search committee to find her replacement. Under Prosky, Grace Church had functioned as a “glorified playgroup,” as one parent put it. The children pressed leaves into paper, explored textures, and danced the Wiggle Worm. The atmosphere had often been compared to a “warm bubble bath,” and while this was lovely, there were some who felt the school could turn up the temperature a notch. The ideal director, the board noted in its advertisement, would “embrace our traditions” while being “informed and guided by current research regarding best practice in the 21st century.”

After all, the world wasn’t a warm bubble bath.

The world was a simmering, seething cauldron, one that was only going to get hotter and harder to survive in. If this felt true in general, it felt especially true to the residents of Brooklyn Heights, whose small universe had recently gotten a lot more crowded. The glass towers that sprung up along the waterfront had filled up with families, yet the number of schools remained the same. In the past, parents could pay their way into Grace Church, which traditionally served as a feed to St. Ann’s and Packer Collegiate, one of the two private schools traditionally favored by Brooklynites with $40,000-plus a year to spend on setting their children on The Correct Path. Now this privilege, like all others, seemed in jeopardy.

The wait-list for Grace Church started practically in utero, and even if children were lucky enough to land a spot in one of the coveted morning sessions, it was no longer a guarantee of future success. “You’ve got all of Dumbo, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Cobble Hill, and parts of Manhattan vying for the same number of spots there always was,” said one Grace parent. “The intensity is fierce.” On a clear day, looking out at the towers along the East River, you could practically see their tiny handprints smeared on the glass: the competition.

Of the ten candidates the search committee interviewed for the director position, Amy Morgano seemed like she best understood the parents’ predicament. As the founding director of Kaplan Nursery School, an upstart preschool overseen by the Sutton Place Synagogue, Morgano had done an impressive job of getting the students into competitive institutions like Dalton, Chapin, and Spence. She had attended the prestigious Bank Street College of Education, where she’d done a specialization in child and parent development, and spoke wisely about the “whole child” philosophy. Perhaps best of all, no one could accuse the board of trying to “Manhattanize” Grace because Morgano was from Brooklyn.

But not this Brooklyn. “Real Brooklyn,” as Morgano would put it. She’d been born on the border of Canarsie and Flatbush, a world away from Brooklyn Heights, which in its contemporary iteration felt, to Morgano, almost like a parody of an upper-crust enclave. The women on the board — and it was almost all women — reminded her of some of the women she’d encountered at Bank Street, who had taught for a year, then gotten married. The “diamond-ring crowd,” she’d called them. They had names like Courtney and Blake and Hatsy, and their families sounded like they’d come straight off theMayflower. Among them were Ashley Phyfe, married to a descendant of furniture-maker Duncan Phyfe; Vicky Schippers, whose family had been in the area since land was going for wampum; Christie Coolidge-Totman. As inPresident Coolidge.

Morgano was intimidated and not a little envious. She’d married young and raised three children before getting her master’s degree at 40. Now she was in her 50s and had answered the ad in part because the commute would be easier from her home in Park Slope, but the idea of a new challenge — a school that needed to be brought into the present — intrigued her, and she was pleasantly surprised that the salary it offered was commensurate with Manhattan. And while she wasn’t sure about these Diamond Ring Girls, with their shiny hair, perfect teeth, and scallop-edged Chloé flats, looking into their worried faces, she saw vulnerability she recognized. Money can shield people from a lot of things, but no amount stops parents from worrying about their children.On a clear day, looking out at the towers along the East River, you could practically see their tiny handprints smeared on the glass: the competition.

And it wasn’t like the moms of Brooklyn Heights were all Stepford clones, Morgano discovered at the cocktail party the parents threw for her after she was offered the job. It was held at the home of a family where the mother was a managing director at Goldman Sachs, in a renovated triplex on Schermerhorn Street with a roof-deck overlooking the Manhattan skyline. “You know, I actually like them,” Morgano told her husband later. “They seem like a good, progressive group of people who have some of the very same ideas as me.” The board was enthusiastic about the changes she’d proposed. They just had one major request: The school wanted Morgano to keep Hope Prosky on as an adviser. Morgano thought this arrangement sounded a little bit claustrophobic. But she said yes, of course. After all, she’d agreed to embrace tradition.

When the Grace Church School librarian, who we’ll refer to as Mary Smith, arrived in September, she found the place transformed. Over the summer, Morgano had cleaned house. The tall, heavy bookcases had been replaced by lighter, lower ones. A teepee anchored the Twos room; the stained-glass windows filtered light onto an otherwise spare space. The kitchen, formerly a clatter of tea mugs and shortbread crumbs, had been wiped clean. Everyone was oohing and aahing, but it gave Smith an uneasy feeling. Over the summer, she’d requested a meeting with the new director, who’d said she was too busy for one. Now, she wondered if the director intended to replace more than just furniture.

Fortunately, the library was still the same. Perched on the very top floor of the building, the Hope Library had been designed and built by a former Grace parent, an architect, and it was a magical little place with warm wood balconies and cozy window seats overlooking a rooftop playground. “An oasis of tranquility,” Prosky had called it at the ceremony where it was named in her honor, “where children’s imaginations can soar on a boat of endless discovery.”

Smith might have believed her fears about Morgano were the result of imagination running wild, except the entire month of September came and went before she and Morgano had a proper conversation. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” the new director said.

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Smith replied pointedly.

Morgano looked at the books Smith was holding. “I love books,” she said, as Smith recalls it. “I would always pick a Caldecott winner to read to my classes.”

Later, the librarian repeated the conversation to the head Threes teacher, whom we’ll call Pat Jones. “Who says that?” Smith said, aghast. “You wouldn’t say, ‘Caldecott winner.’ You would say, ‘I love reading Make Way for Ducklings.’ ”

But Jones was calm. Jones was always calm — she spent her days wrangling mobs of 3-year-olds, so she had to be. She urged her to give the new director a shot. “I think she has a lot of great ideas, and I am excited about learning from her,” she said. “Change is hard,” she said. “You have to sometimes accept change.”

Illustration: Joana Avillez

Smith was not so optimistic. Neither, it turned out, was Prosky, who’d found Morgano not to be as grateful for her advice as she might’ve expected. Things had gotten tense between them, especially after Morgano decided to do away with certain Grace Church traditions, like the Thanksgiving and Medieval Feasts. While it may have been true the Pilgrim garb was problematic and the Middle Ages were perhaps not developmentally appropriate material for 3-year-olds, some of the other choices she’d made felt ill-considered to longtime teachers at the school. “She took away our ability to go to potluck dinners,” said one. “Some teachers didn’t like them, but I loved them because you get to know the parents, and you get to see their little world, these tiny kids in these gargantuan houses.”

Morgano, who put a stop to the practice of listing teachers’ home numbers in the school directory and told teachers they could no longer babysit students in their off-hours, felt parent-teacher socializing was unprofessional. “She was like, ‘I want a wall,’ ” said one Grace parent, and while this sounded reasonable, it was confusing for some teachers from the Hope era, some of whom had been Grace Church parents, lived in the neighborhood, and belonged to the same institutions, like the Heights Casino, a preppy tennis club on Montague Street, which, Morgano would often point out, didn’t allow Jews like herself to join until the ’50s. “She used to call us ‘incestuous,’ ” recalls the former teacher. “I think she was referring to nepotism.”

And, they noted, Morgano herself seemed to have trouble with boundaries. Her fawning over celebrities (like Keri Russell) whose children attended the school had become a subject of discussion in discreet Brooklyn Heights. “There was a night to meet her, and she only talked to Maggie Gyllenhaal,” says one parent. (In reality, the conversation may have been five minutes, but five minutes is an eternity to an anxious parent).

Hope Prosky, in contrast, had never been impressed by celebrity. Once, when Paul Giamatti came into her office at the height of his Sideways fame, she’d squinted at his name and asked, “Are you related to the president of Yale?”

Then again, one parent on a school tour back in Prosky’s day recalls the director chasing after a Roosevelt. As in those Roosevelts, so maybe it was just a different kind of celebrity she was impressed by, and those were fewer and farther between these days.

While old-line Wasps still gravitated to the historic district, the demographics of the neighborhood were changing. The Heights Casino was filled with arrivistes, like the family who bought a 12,000-square-foot six-story building on Willow Street, whose ad for domestic help — “Family of six is looking for an energetic, experienced, meticulous, detail-oriented housekeeper familiar with finely curated décor, antique care, silver, and fine china” — became the subject of much snickering after it appeared on a bulletin board at the club.

Perhaps nowhere was this shift more visually apparent than drop-off at Grace Church School, where Preppy Moms in tennis whites and Power Moms on their way to their jobs at white-shoe law firms increasingly found themselves jostled out of the way by Fashion Moms taking Mommy and Me pictures against the backdrop of brownstone Brooklyn. In the age of Instagram, Brooklyn Heights’ Wes Anderson aesthetic had new appeal, and Grace Church in particular had been discovered by Fashion. By the time Morgano signed on as director, the school was lousy with the children of stylists, editors, and designers. Of these, the unequivocal belles of the ball were two former Vogue staffers: stylist Jessica Sailer Van Lith and Sylvana Ward Durrett, the special-projects director in charge of the Met Gala, whose company, Maisonette, a sort of Net-a-Porter for children, elevated the entire Brooklyn Lifestyle to new, well, heights. The site, which was co-founded by Ward Durrett “at her kitchen island” in 2016, had taken to featuring models and “muses” from the Grace Church community in sun-dappled photo shoots. They’d lounge on statement couches while spouting très Brooklyn quotes like this one from Glenna Neece, a former model and the wife of Rag & Bone founder Marcus Wainwright: “A few days ago, Henry cut up an old pair of my jeans and put together a Viking ensemble!”

Unlike the members of the board, this new crowd didn’t seem interested in old-fashioned power and politics: They just wanted followers. In short order, Amy Morgano became one of them. Despite her presentation as a scrappy gal from Real Brooklyn, Morgano was as aspirational as anyone else in Brooklyn Heights, and soon enough she was following the members of the group she called “the popular girls” on Instagram and soliciting wardrobe and shopping advice from its members.

When Town & Country featured the school on a list of “prestigious preschools” favored by “Goyard-bag-toting parents,” its conspicuous mention of Morgano contributed to a growing impression this was a crowd the director was purposely cultivating. “She had a type she gravitated toward,” said one parent. “And in the process, she would gravitate away from others.”

Specifically, the bankers, lawyers, doctors, and assorted other non-sexy professionals who had long been the bedrock of the Grace Church community, who began to feel like they were being shunted aside for more glamorous newcomers. “I heard we had an old-time parent who gave a lot of money to the school — it’s not fair, but that’s what happens — who applied for their grandchild,” one former teacher confided. “Apparently they put in their application a day late, and Amy rejected them.” Morgano was by-the-book, but meanwhile, the daughter of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s stylist was able to “roll in midyear,” according to a parent at the school. While there may have been other factors at work — someone had moved, opening up a spot — the optics rankled. “People were like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ ”

Morgano’s perceived preference for the new and shiny was also worrying some of the longtime teachers. In the winter of 2016, Smith heard something that disturbed the peace in her library aerie: A teacher survey had gone out, asking teachers about their hopes for the coming year, and she had not received one. She soon found out why: Morgano wasn’t renewing her contract.

“Hi, Mary,” one of the office administrators said brightly when the librarian came storming by to get her coat. “What a gorgeous day it is.”

“No, it’s not,” Smith snapped. “It’s horrible. I just got fired.”

For Prosky, this was a call to arms. The following month, both she and Smith wrote long letters to the board detailing the ways they felt the new administration was violating the ethos of the school. “In my 55 years I have never seen such imprudent practices as have occurred in the first year of this director’s tenure,” concluded the six-page missive submitted by Prosky. “I conclude that her job needs to be overseen with evaluations of her work in progress. Please do not reply to this letter, but rather, attend to the above concerns.” (Prosky declined to comment for this story.)

The committee was sympathetic, but not in the way the women had hoped. The letters were perceived as indicative of an inability to accept change. A member of the vestry was dispatched to inform Prosky that her contract was being discontinued, and while the conversation was “cordial” according to minutes from the board, the former director was said to be heartbroken. “She thought all these people on the board loved her,” said Smith. “And they did, but they were two-faced. They got change, but they got more than they wanted.”

Illustration: Joana Avillez

“Hi Grace parents!”read the email. “The gala is now less than three months away and we are finalizing our live and silent auction items. We still have space for a handful of exceptional, mind-blowing items (think villa in italy for a week!), and we know you’ve been waiting until now to send us your best offers. Please please please don’t wait any longer! #Time’sUp!”

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