Amid all the stress, exhaustion, and difficulties of this year’s hallway decorating, there was excitement as students rushed to finish in time with the best executions of their themes. This year, however, there was added excitement because thousands of prospective students and their families from across the city arrived to tour the building for the annual Open House right after each grade completed their hall.

According to Assistant Principal of Organization Ellen Fee, having hallway decorating on the same day as the Open House enhanced the experience for prospective students. “There were so many people at the Open House that said, compared to other schools, Townsend Harris had the most festive atmosphere,” Ms. Fee said. “It felt like students actually like coming to school.” 

“It was definitely stressful [with] the Open House scheduled to start right after,” said Sophomore Tajrian Noor, the Student Union Executive-at-Large. Despite the stress, Tajrian said that she enjoyed the experience. Her grade’s theme was Hello Kitty. “[I] was pretty satisfied with the theme,” she said, “even though it wasn’t [the] first choice and it was harder than expected to find decorations.” 

Despite the unique experience of having the hallway decorating being immediately followed by the Open House, students still cared mainly about one thing: victory. 

At the conclusion of the event, the senior class took first place, followed by the juniors in second place, the freshmen in third, and the sophomores in fourth.

Senior Class President Mohammad Nasrallah said, “it was actually great to see this senior class come together.” He said he was really surprised by the uniquely large turnout, and how seniors “took advantage” of their ability to use the entire school day to decorate. “I think that’s one of many things that makes the class of 2026 so special. They take pride in a lot of things other than academics,” he said.

Hallway decorating is one of the oldest and most memorable traditions of Townsend Harris, around since the 1980s. This year, in addition to the sophomores’ Hello Kitty theme, the seniors had a circus theme, the juniors had Hamilton, and the freshmen had Coraline.

Freshman Zoe Roth, a new participant, said that she enjoyed hallway decorating, especially the various roles she could play like being able to work on decorations “at home” and “put those different, personally made small decorations up for display.” 

Zoe said that she wasn’t satisfied with the theme this year but thought that it turned out “pretty good” with the limited theme they had. She said her grade “could have done better organizing here because [they] pretty much did a bunch of random decorations.”

Chris Amanna, a Townsend Harris alumnus, current Program Coordinator, and Latin teacher, discussed the event as he’s seen it in multiple iterations over the years.

He said his favorite aspect of the event is mainly the “sense of community. I like that it has all the students in a grade coming together,” especially with how “[it’s] part of the rubric that you have to incorporate everybody’s name, and it’s harder now. When I was a student, class sizes were smaller, so it was easier to get everybody to participate.” However, he was sad that he “didn’t see that extreme level of participation seen in years past.”

According to Mr. Amanna, “more students participated [in the past], and it was a more popular activity. I think there was this real spirit that we wanted to do better than the other classes.” He said the themes were also simpler compared to things like this year’s Hamilton or Coraline theme. Back then, he said, the grades might simply receive a color as their theme and the rest was up to them.

Junior Class President Jordana Lo said, “We try to choose [a theme] that juniors and the people that are going to help would be interested in. For Hamilton, we chose something that was kind of culturally relevant at the time and something with a lot of visual aspects and elements that we could incorporate into our hallway.”

She said that “this year went really well” because “we knew exactly what to do differently. We made sure to plan everything well in advance… and learned a lot from our mistakes last year.”

Avika Sharma, a sophomore who participated in hallway decorating, said that she found the Hello Kitty theme difficult to match, and that there wasn’t enough time. Regardless, she said she “think[s] it was pretty fun seeing everyone come together and pull off decorating the hallway in an hour, and it turned out pretty decent.”