Barbara Louise Christen

SALISBURY — Barbara Louise Christen (née O’Connor), 85, known to many in the Northwest Corner as Barbara Christen-Cook, loving wife, beloved mother, adoring grandmother and visionary educator, passed away peacefully on Feb. 7, 2014. Born on July 12, 1928, in the Bronx, N.Y., Barbara was a lively and energetic New Yorker, in tune with the rhythm and opportunities of the city of her birth. As a teenager in the early days of television she worked for the DuMont Television Network at its New York studios on Madison Avenue, then as a children’s book editor for Living for Young Homemakers magazine. She graduated with a major in English literature from the College of Mount Saint Vincent, Riverdale, N.Y., in 1950. She was introduced to her future husband, Robert Jay Christen, in the summer of 1952, while she ran a soda fountain with a close friend at a Spring Lake, N.J. resort, they were married on June 6, 1953. Barbara began her career in New York City’s public schools that autumn as a junior high school science teacher, concealing the evidence of her first pregnancy beneath a billowing lab coat. The principal breadwinner of the family — as her husband completed his graduate studies in history — she was keen to avoid the otherwise inevitable requirement of an early departure from the profession due to her impending motherhood. Maternity leave after the birth of her first child, Barbara Hall, in April 1954, ended in September at the start of the new term. Returning to her academic passion, as a high school teacher in English Literature, Barbara and Robert’s family grew as her career advanced, with the birth of Suzanne Pate in 1958 and Catherine Ann in 1962. Awarded an MA from the City University of New York (CUNY) in 1967 while serving as acting chair of English at Walton High School, her promotion to the post of assistant principal and chair of English at the High School of Art and Design moved the focus of Barbara’s working life into Manhattan in 1970. Appointed the founding principal of the Murry Bergtraum High School for Business Careers in 1975, she oversaw the physical completion of its unique triangular building. Bergtraum’s first students initially attended classes on the nearby Pace University campus, where Barbara or an assistant principal would ring the Christen family’s dinner bell up and down the halls to signal the change in class periods. The students knew how lucky they were to have secured a spot in this new citywide school whose popularity was instantaneous, with about 3,000 applicants for the few hundred slots offered that first year. The jointly academic and business-focused program she created and led as Bergtraum’s principal developed a unique partnership with the corporations and businesses near the school’s lower Manhattan location. Students completed all the requirements of a regular high school program in addition to majoring in one of the school’s nine business streams and participating in corporate internships. Well before earning her Doctorate in Education (D.Ed.) from Teachers College of Columbia University in 1987, Barbara’s success in educating New York City students for both college admission and entry-level positions in business gained national and international recognition with Bergtraum’s ranking as “A School of Excellence” by the U.S. News & World Report. Even maintaining this record for her 14-year tenure as principal did not eclipse her special pride in the Bergtraum Lady Blazers, 13-time New York City girls’ basketball champions. She also reveled in the successes of the school’s double-dutch jump-rope team; she knew quite a bit about that sport from her own youth, particularly the summer she’d run a play street in northern Manhattan while still a college student at the Mount. Barbara guided numerous younger supervisors and teachers into the ranks of the next generation of effective principals, assistant principals, and senior educational administrators, and for a time, served as president of the NYC High School Principals Association. In 1989, shortly after her retirement from Bergtraum, Barbara’s remarkable record of success as a high school principal in an era marked by education ills led the search committee for the chancellorship of the NYC schools to put her name forward as the first female candidate for that post. Joining the business community in 1989 as president of the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association (DLMA), in 1995 Barbara transformed that three-person organization into a much larger entity, the Alliance for Downtown New York. In designing the new organization, she worked closely with Downtown real estate developer Richard Kennedy to formulate a unique method of financing this “business improvement district.” With its establishment, she chose to become the alliance’s vice-president of education and workforce development, drawing upon her experience in the worlds of business and education to pioneer a model for business/education partnerships. These partnerships embodied her belief that “investment in human capital is as important for the business community as any other long-term investment.” The program she headed, Futures and Options, became an independent nonprofit in 1999, focusing on providing underserved youth with the education and economic mainstream exposure they needed to become productive citizens of the 21st century global economy. Despite the destruction of its operational offices at One World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, Futures and Options still secured approximately 50 internships by late that autumn, and was named a model workforce development program by the U.S. Department of Labor in 2002. Simultaneously, Barbara brought to fruition other initiatives benefiting the entire Downtown Lower Manhattan community, such as the nighttime decorative lighting of the historic Trinity Church facade. Barbara retired in 2007. Today, Futures and Options’ students maintain their 100 percent high school graduation and 95 percent college acceptance rates while working in partnerships with more than 300 small businesses, nonprofits and multinational corporations each year.Barbara’s husband, Dr. Robert J. Christen, was a tenured associate professor of history at Manhattan College, also held a permanent faculty appointment at Columbia University, and was a member of the New York City Board of Education from 1974 to 1981, serving as its president during 1976-1977. In the midst of busy professional lives, Barbara and Robert still enjoyed many vacations with their daughters in the mountains and at the seashore. Barbara and Robert also enjoyed travelling in the U.S. and Europe. After Robert’s death in 1981 at age 53, as her daughters launched their own professional careers, Barbara often traveled to visit with them on overseas sojourns in Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, and Central America. Barbara met her second husband, lawyer Charles D. Cook, in 1985. From the start, she delighted in his musicality and loved nothing better than to listen and sing along as he played popular tunes on the piano. After several years commuting between Lakeville and New York City, Barbara’s 2007 retirement freed her to indulge fulltime in the beauties and social life of Lakeville and Salisbury, accompanying Charles to Music Mountain concerts, applauding his participation in HousaTonic performances, and enjoying the company of her fellow members of the Hawthorne Society. She loved to garden, watch the birds and other wildlife, and to welcome the couple’s children, grandchildren and other visitors to their lakefront home.Barbara is survived by her husband, Charles D. Cook, Esq., of Lakeville; by her three daughters and their families: Barbara H.C. and L. John Reeve and their son, daughter-in-law, and grandson, J. Edward, Katherine M, and William D. Reeve; Suzanne P. Christen, Scott A. Park and their son, Alexander C. Park; and Catherine A. Christen, Peter Leimgruber, and their son Nikolas R. Christen; by her two stepchildren, Ian Cook and Kendra Cook, their spouses Hallie Cook and William Perkins, two step-granddaughters, Natalie and Abigail Cook.A memorial service will be held at the Congregational Church of Salisbury on Saturday, Feb. 15, at noon, with a reception and lunch immediately following in the Parish Hall. Another memorial service will be held in New York City this spring. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that contributions in memory of Barbara L. Christen be made to the Barbara L. Christen Founder’s Circle at Futures and Options, (www.futuresandoptions.org) or to the Brain Injury Alliance of Connecticut (www.biact.org) or to any state affiliate of the U.S. Brain Injury Alliance.Arrangements are under the care of the Newkirk-Palmer Funeral Home in North Canaan.