Still in use, with modern additions, as Crafton Elementary School, this Jacobean palace was built in 1913. The architect was Press C. Dowler, already well into a career that would last another half-century. His assignment here seems to have been to make up in spectacle for what the little borough’s high school lacked in size, and he came through with the goods, festooning the building with crenellations and terra-cotta ornamentation. But although the decoration may be a bit extravagant, it is done with good taste, making a balanced composition outlined by the sharp contrast between the red brick and the white trim.
The original school had two identical entrances—probably, as was common in those days, one for boys and one for girls.
The South Vocational High School was designed by Marion M. Steen, who gave us many impressive schools around here. His father, James T. Steen, was a distinguished architect as well; Marion followed in his father’s classicist footsteps, but gradually adopted more and more Moderne mannerisms until he became one of our leading Art Deco architects. This school was a kind of vocational annex for the South High School across the street. Construction began in 1939, and it opened in 1940, just in time to be adapted to round-the-clock wartime training for mechanical trades.
This is Steen’s most aggressively modern design. He seems to have imagined a building that would look like a cross between school and factory.
This composite picture is huge: if you click on it, expect more than 18 megabytes of data.
Here is the Sarah Street front. As in all Steen’s other schools, the decorative details are imaginative and appropriate. These suggest a new world of technological wonder.
Now let’s walk around to the Tenth Street entrance, where we’ll find a remarkable decorative aluminum panel in the transom.
We have many public buildings with inscriptions in Latin. But is this the only school in North America with a cuneiform inscription over the entrance? Father Pitt would love to have any others pointed out to him.
Do not suppose, by the way, that old Pa Pitt is fluent in Akkadian, much as he would like to be able to read the adventures of Gilgamesh without a translation. It was, however, easy to trace the character and feed it into an image search, and although Google did not come up with the exact character at the top of the list, it took only a bit of scrolling to find the character we were looking for. Father Pitt wishes he could say he had thought of that solution to the problem himself, but, having recognized that this was a cuneiform character, he got no further until a cleverer friend suggested the way forward.
The building is in use as the Pittsburgh Online Academy (which needs a building for some reason; perhaps our school board has only a fuzzy notion of what “online” means), so for the moment it is well kept and externally in original condition.
This is the most magnificent work of an architect who specialized in magnificent schools: Edward Stotz, whose son was the noted preservationist Charles Stotz. The building occupies a triangular sloping plot, which certainly challenged the architect. Mr. Stotz responded with a triangular building that looks inevitable on its site.
When it opened in 1916, Schenley High was a shrine of culture and art, an idealized version of what high-school education could be in an enlightened city. It closed as a school in 2008, and it has now, like every other substantial building in a desirable neighborhood, been refurbished as luxury apartments.
Curiously, Edward Stotz was also responsible for another famously triangular building: the Monongahela Bank Building, which is now the Wood Street subway station and the Wood Street Galleries.
A kind of cartoon castle, the main building of Central Catholic is technically in Squirrel Hill, though most Pittsburghers would probably say “Oakland.” The building was put up in 1927; the architect was Edward J. Weber.
Central Catholic High School in Oakland is a fantasy medieval castle out of a German fairy tale. This is a view from the east side of some of the odd turrets and projections.
