The school for Neville Township, the municipality whose borders are the shores of Neville Island, was built in three main stages. The little school above, with four or five rooms, was the first.
Some time later, a two-storey building in a matching Jacobean style was built around the corner. (Addendum: Father Pitt has some reason to believe, but no definite proof yet, that the architect of both the prewar school buildings was John H. Phillips of McKees Rocks, who designed many schools for suburban boroughs.)
Finally, a postwar modern section was added, probably around 1960 to judge from the style. It was not in use for a long time: old Pa Pitt had a very pleasant conversation with a neighborhood resident whose wife was a member of the last graduating class of this school in 1971. Neville Township and Coraopolis merged their school systems into the Cornell School District, whose name is a portmanteau of the two municipalities. Fortunately, the buildings have found other uses.
Awnings used to be a big business in Pittsburgh. The awning men would come to your house in the spring and put canvas awnings over your doors and windows for summer shade, and then in the fall they would come around and take down the awnings and take them away to be cleaned and put in storage, and then in the spring you would get fresh awnings again. (You can still find one or two services that will do that for you.)
Obviously you have to spend some money on this service, and that limited it largely to the upper middle classes and above. When someone had the brilliant idea of making awnings out of cheap aluminum, however, the floodgates were opened, and every working-class house could at least have a little awning over its front door to shelter the residents while they fumbled for their keys in the rain.
On some streets—as here on 24th Street—you can still pass one aluminum awning after another, often a bit bedraggled but still clinging to its house.
These awnings were made by a number of different manufacturers, and they came in a wide variety of shapes.
Aluminum awnings were supposedly open to the objection that, when the sun was beating on them, they created a pocket of hot air under them. (How much of a worry this really is old Pa Pitt could not tell you, but it sounded plausible in the mouth of a salesman.) The problem was supposedly solved, however, by the ingenuity of the Kool Vent Metal Awning Corp. of America,1 which invented and patented diagonal louvers on the sides of the awning that were supposed to allow the hot air to escape from under the awning—an invention described thus:
An awning adapted to be fastened to a wall or the like support, including a curtain comprising a series of spaced overlapping parallel vertical depending plates, angling outwardly from the awning toward the wall at not more than ninety degrees.
Here we see the diagonal arrangement, designed so that the “vertical depending plates” still provide reasonable shelter from blowing rain but allow air to escape between them. Other awning companies imitated this arrangement, but Kool Vent successfully sued them, enforced its patent, and became the king of the aluminum-awning companies.
The architectural historian Franklin Toker facetiously suggested that the South Side should be declared a Kool Vent Awning historic district, and although other neighborhoods—Bloomfield, for example, and South Oakland—also have large Kool Vent infestations, the South Side probably preserves Kool Vent awnings and their competitors in greater numbers and density than any other neighborhood. All the awnings in this article were found in one block of South 24th Street.
At various times the name seems to have been spelled Kool-Vent and Koolvent as well; here we adopt the spelling used in court documents. ↩︎
A small but very rich classical bank still in use as a bank.
The clock suggests that the bankers will consult an astrologer before investing your money.
Stock-photo sites will charge you good money for patently metaphorical pictures like these. Yet old Pa Pitt gives them to you for free, released with a CC0 public-domain donation, so there are no restrictions on what you can do with them.
One of several round banks Mellon Bank built in the modernist era. It is still a bank, now belonging to Citizens Bank, Mellon’s successor in retail banking.
Now the Coraopolis United Methodist Church. The father-and-son team of T. B. and Lawrence Wolfe, part of a century-long dynasty of Wolfes in Pittsburgh architecture, designed this church, built in 1924.
The building this one replaced is also still standing—a typical late-1800s Pittsburgh Rundbogenstil church, and one with the sanctuary upstairs if you come in by the front door. It was a short block away, and it is still in use as a church, now Coraopolis Abundant Life Ministries.
St. Paul of the Cross, founder of the Passionists, was an Italian, and the architect John T. Comès gave the Passionists on the Slopes a bit of Italy to live in.
A Passionist monastery is called a “retreat,” but the neighbors just call this one a monastery: the streets around it are Monastery Street, Monastery Place, and Monastery Avenue.
There’s that name again: Charette, indicating to the initiated that something architecturally interesting is going on. A “charette,” as we mentioned when we visited Charette Way downtown, is architects’ slang for a session of intense work to meet a deadline, and the magazine of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club for many years was called The Charette.
Charette Place is a small one-street subdivision in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, developed by the firm of Ackley & Bradley in 1941. When it was new, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette described it as “unique in that the plot is owned and the homes are planned, built and sold by the architects.”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 13, 1941.
These are pleasant little houses, not towering works of genius. They do what they’re supposed to do: they make up a street of economical homes where each house is different, but all go together. Though most of them have gone through various alterations, the neighborhood keeps its unified character.
A simple but pleasingly proportioned telephone exchange that was almost certainly designed by Press C. Dowler, who got all the telephone company’s local business in the Art Deco era.
