A Troubled Centennial : It Once Enjoyed Good Standing in the Community, but Relations Between the Elite Marlborough School and Its Neighbors Have Cooled Over Plans to Expand the Campus.

When Mary Caswell moved her private girls school from the Marlborough Hotel near downtown Los Angeles to what is now Hancock Park, the girls had trouble studying because of noisy plows in the surrounding barley fields and chattering sea gulls overhead.

“Don’t trail across the field like the tail of a kite, with your coats and books streaming behind you!” the exacting widow from Maine enjoined her students, most of whom missed the new school’s opening in 1916 because heavy rains had churned unpaved roads into thick mounds of mud.

This year, as Marlborough School celebrates its 100th birthday, the rumble of farmers’ plows has long ago given way to the rush of passing cars. Girls at the exclusive college preparatory school have exchanged sullied walking boots and full-length coats for shiny saddle shoes and argyle sweaters. Large homes--some selling for more than $1 million--surround the white brick school, with the nearby Wilshire Country Club offering the only reminder of the once expansive countryside.

In nearly three-quarters of a century on South Rossmore Avenue, Marlborough’s good standing among its moneyed and influential Hancock Park neighbors has assured it a steady flow of students and what school officials and most nearby residents characterize as cordial relations.

With rare exceptions, Marlborough graduates go on to college, with about a quarter of them attending Ivy League schools. Last year, the average Marlborough student--who pays $6,950 a year tuition--scored 1,160 on the standardized SAT exam. By contrast, the average score at nearby Los Angeles High School, a public school, was 717.

But it is exactly Marlborough’s stature in the community, some neighbors say, that led to a public relations blunder by the school and a dramatic cooling of relations with its neighbors this fall. In September, Marlborough unveiled a plan to expand its cramped campus by converting eight homes it owns along Arden Boulevard into school facilities, turning their back yards into a courtyard and replacing the former headmaster’s residence on Rossmore Avenue with a parking lot.

“This used to be a country school with a beautiful inner courtyard,” said Susanne Donnelly, a Marlborough graduate and president of its board of trustees. “It is our dream to once again have a courtyard. We want to make a center of campus life other than Rossmore Avenue and its speeding traffic.”

Scores of neighbors, stunned that the school had commissioned the plan without consulting them, rallied to oppose the expansion. Some accused Marlborough officials of arrogance and of taking the neighborhood for granted. Several complained that the school had violated years of trust and was abusing its special status in the community. Deluged with complaints, beleaguered school officials announced this month that they have abandoned the plan--at least until they can restore relations with their neighbors.

“I have a lot of problems understanding the mental set that led to this catastrophe,” said Julie Hill, a professor of anthropology who lives a block from the school. “The neighbors to a person feel that Marlborough School is a great asset to the neighborhood . . . but the neighborhood is totally opposed to the school moving outside its current boundaries.”

Packed Meeting

At a packed homeowners meeting in a bank in nearby Larchmont Village last month, Beatrice Ward Challiss, a 1919 graduate of Marlborough, warned her neighbors that the Marlborough plan threatened the single-family character of their community. Challiss echoed her sentiments in a letter to the school.

“As Marlborough celebrates its 100th birthday, the class of 1919 will be observing its 70th anniversary of graduation,” she wrote. “It should be a time of double rejoicing for our 15 ‘survivors,’ but instead it is a time of anxiety.”

The “big explosion” over the plan, as one Marlborough official described it, was an untimely example of good intentions gone awry. Marlborough is in the final year of a $5-million endowment campaign for teachers’ salaries, and the school kicked off a year of birthday celebrations in September.

On the opening day of school, students wore centennial T-shirts, an airplane scribbled “Marlborough” across the sky and officials received letters of congratulation from President Reagan and Gov. George Deukmejian.

A week later, as the school prepared for a centennial concert by the Los Angeles Pops Orchestra, neighbors held a potluck dinner and formed the Arden Rossmore Conservancy, a group with the sole purpose of blocking the expansion plan.

“It is strictly a coincidence that this has occurred during our centennial year,” said Headmaster Robert A. Chumbook, who has led the school for the past 19 years. “Frankly, we would have preferred if it happened next year.”

Patrick J. Cronin, an actor and former teacher who serves on the conservancy’s steering committee, agreed.

“I hate to see the 100th anniversary tied into this,” he said. “I don’t see them as the enemy. The educator side of me feels bad.”

School Sets Committee

Donnelly said the board’s decision to back off the plan was made in part to prevent the controversy from spoiling the school’s celebration. The board voted to set up a committee, which will include representatives from the neighborhood, to study the plan and possible alternatives. She said, however, that the group--which will be headed by trustee Wayne Ratkovich--will not meet until “well into” next year.

“Our founder realized that women were worth educating long before most people held that opinion,” Donnelly said. “Our priority this year is to celebrate that accomplishment.”

Fearing that publicity about the neighborhood dispute might only make matters worse, Donnelly canceled a tour of the campus and an interview with The Times early this month. Later, Donnelly agreed to the tour and interview, and arranged for a Times reporter to meet with her, Chumbook and two members of the board of trustees.

The group said they hope to assuage any concerns about the future.

“There is no urgency or timetable as to when anything has to be done,” said trustee Peter McCoy, a Beverly Hills developer whose daughter attends Marlborough and whose wife, mother and mother-in-law are alumnae. “What we really did was create a wish list of sorts.”

McCoy, Donnelly, Chumbook and trustee Theresa Bucher said they were mystified by the community’s reaction to the plan. The school, they said, expected the plan to gain a quick endorsement from the neighborhood and then win easy approval from city zoning officials, particularly since it was devised with neighborhood concerns in mind.

The parking lot, for example, was intended to alleviate congestion on residential streets, which some neighbors had complained about in 1980, when Marlborough built a gymnasium on the site of three tennis courts. In the end, school officials learned, neighbors felt more strongly about keeping the stately Rossmore headmaster’s residence than gaining curb-side parking outside their homes.

“I don’t think that houses should be destroyed so 40 girls can drive their BMWs to school,” said Cronin, who lives about eight houses from what he described as “the danger zone.”

Homes in Plan

The plan specifically called for preserving the facades of the homes on Arden to maintain the area’s single-family character. Access to the homes would be from the rear--the side facing the campus--to maintain the residential appearance along Arden. Under the plan, the school would eventually purchase four other homes on the street to create a string of 12 homes, all of which would be incorporated into the campus and carefully landscaped to camouflage their academic uses.

But what Marlborough officials considered careful preservation, nearby residents interpreted as wanton destruction. Neighbors said they feared the plan would turn the street into “a Paramount set” that would be lifeless at night when the school closes. They also said alterations to the homes--such as entrances for the disabled and other requirements for educational buildings--would ruin the houses.

Assemblyman Burt Margolin (D-Los Angeles), who moved to the neighborhood two years ago in part because of its small-town atmosphere, said residents understand Marlborough’s predicament but do not want to lose a dozen neighbors.

“If you don’t have families living in the homes, they wouldn’t be part of the neighborhood as we know it,” Margolin said. “There is a real willingness on the part of the neighborhood to work with the school and see if we can come up with an alternative plan. . . . But I don’t see a basis for compromise when it comes to those homes. They are 60 years old and irreplaceable.”

School officials describe their intentions as well-meaning and reject claims that they somehow ignored the neighborhood when coming up with the plan. In fact, Chumbook said, Marlborough at one time had considered tearing down the eight homes--and eventually the four others it hopes to buy--to make way for new school facilities. That proposal was rejected, he said, because of its impact on the neighborhood.

Seeking Breathing Room

“I thought it was a pretty sensitive response to maintaining the neighborhood’s values,” Chumbook said.

Donnelly said the school began purchasing neighboring homes along Arden in the 1960s with an eye to eventual expansion. The board, she said, has long dreamed about creating more breathing room for its 480 students--harking back to the days of Mary Caswell when the campus served as an escape from the growing city to the east. The original inner courtyard, she said, was eliminated in the late 1960s when most of the campus was demolished and rebuilt because of seismic and other safety concerns.

Chumbook, who described the campus as “a little claustrophobic,” said graduation ceremonies in recent years have been held in a parking lot on 3rd Street because of cramped quarters. Walking around the school during lunch hour can be like navigating an obstacle course. Students eat wherever they can find space--in hallways, along concrete walkways or on small patches of grass.

“We provide a bus for girls from the Westside, and they literally drive by all three schools we compete with,” Chumbook said. “We are trying to create the most attractive campus facility. But it is hard to do that when we are locked in the way we are.”

Nearby residents, while sympathetic to Marlborough’s need for more space, said the school should accept its role as an urban campus confined to its present boundaries and rely on its academic credentials to draw students. Some said Marlborough should sell the eight homes on Arden and concentrate on improving its existing campus.

Donnelly, acknowledging that the school had misread the community, said Marlborough has turned its attention from the expansion plan and is once again focusing on its centennial and on what it does best: educating girls.

“Marlborough is sorry that it didn’t understand well enough the neighborhood pulse,” Donnelly said. “We value our neighborhood and I think our neighborhood values us.”