
Securely set about twenty feet behind an iron fence, the convent and academy occupy two tything lots granted by the City in 1842. Additions were made in 1855 and again in 1869, doubling the length of the original building. Cluskey’s stucco-covered brick building is sober yet sophisticated, with stripped-down colossal pilaster strips on the central and end pavilions and simplified Doric piers on the two one-story entrance porticoes. Between 1955 and 1960 a cluster of modernist structures was attached to the eastern edge of the academy (replacing the original Sisters’ Chapel), extending the building line the entire length of the tything and forming a courtyard on the rear.