The Building That Grew Within

I understand that impulse. My photography journey also began here back in 2016. I was an HSC 2017 student. Harrington was one of the first places where I learned to truly observe.

Father John J. Harrington was a priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross, a Catholic order that had served in East Bengal for nearly a century. Cardinal Valerian Gracias laid the building’s foundation stone in January 1954. In 1955 the college moved from Luxmibazar to its new home in Arambagh, Motijheel. Father Harrington became its first principal, from 1949 to 1954.

He guided the college through its early years in Luxmibazar, mostly by American Holy Cross priests. Seventy years later, his name is still spoken by every generation of Notredamians who passed through the building that bears it.

Built in the spirit of the 1950s, Harrington never tried to impress. Its tall French-style windows opened wide, letting the breeze flow through the classrooms. The staircase carried an unmistakable fifties charm. The green and white walls became the backdrop of a thousand class photos and, in time, the colors of every Notredamian.

Not everyone loved it at first. Siyamun Islam, a student from the 2017 batch, wrote in a memoir that he was disappointed to learn his classroom would be in the old building.

Within months he changed his mind. When it rained, the scent of kathgolap drifted into the classroom. White and pink ones lay scattered across the concrete court. On rainy days, the whole class crowded onto the veranda. The building he had once resented became his fondest memory.

I know those trees well. In the afternoons its leaves scattered the sunlight into shifting patterns across the court and the façade, so the light never looked the same twice.

Students sat beneath it for hours, squeezing in last-minute revision or debating the issues of the day.

What made Notre Dame College truly unique was that in a single classroom you found the whole of Bangladesh. Boys from different castes, ethnicities and economic backgrounds shared the same bench, and no one stood above anyone else. It humbled us and kept us grounded.

We spent only two years here, but those were the years when boys became young men and discovered who they were.

Now, I want to end with a question - When a building is torn down, are its memories buried with it?

I don't believe they are. Harrington will rise again in a new form, carrying its legacy forward, but what it built in us will remain.