Father Pitt

Tag: Schools

Oakdale Public School

High-school dropout James E. Allison would go on to have a long and distinguished career as an architect, much of it with his younger brother David in California as Allison & Allison. When he designed this little school,¹ though, he was 24 years old, and he had just set up his own practice. Although he had no diplomas, he had worked for the Pittsburgh office of Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge (the successors to the sainted Richardson), and then for Adler & Sullivan in Chicago. No one needs more education than that.

The Romanesque style was all the rage in 1894, and Allison made sure his clients got their fill of round arches, emphasizing them with darker brick. It looks as though he had a lot of fun drawing the belfry.

Whoever designed the inscription—possibly some high-school dropout—made an elementary mistake in Roman numerals that has persisted for 131 years. There is no sane way to read the date “MDCCCICIV.” But change the incorrect subtractive notation to MDCCCXCIV, and it gives us the date 1894, which matches our source.

The school has been turned into apartments, but the exterior appearance has been kept close to original. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Olympus E-20N; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

The rear section seems to have been a later addition, carefully matched to the original in style and materials.

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August 7, 2025
Harding School, Carnegie

In 1922, President Harding was popular—just about as popular as any president since Washington had ever been. He was a little less popular a few years later, after he had died and members of his circle who had not shot themselves began serving prison terms. But the name seems not to have been enough of an embarrassment to change the inscription on the school. It retains that inscription in its new life as a retirement home more than a century later.

The first school on this site was the old Chartiers Public School (we assume the date 1878 refers to the building of that school). In 1922, this much larger building went up around the old school—for it appears that the original school may still exist, invisible under a layer of 1922 construction.

The architect of the new school was Frank M. Crooks, the M. standing for McCandless, who was a lifelong resident of the little town of McDonald west of Carnegie.

Olympus E-20N; Samsung A15 5G.

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August 1, 2025
Ingram Public School

Press C. Dowler, who designed several other schools and public buildings in the Chartiers Valley, was the architect of this school, which was built in 1914. It is no longer in use, but the building is in good shape.

Throughout his long career, which went from Romanesque through classical through Art Deco to modernism, Dowler used simple materials to weave interesting geometric decorations.

Olympus E-20N; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

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July 19, 2025
St. Mary’s R. C. Schools, Lawrenceville

Built in 1881 for St. Mary’s, an Irish Catholic parish in Lawrenceville, this old school is now neatly restored as apartments.

Much of the original woodwork is preserved, including incised folk-art decorations typical of the period.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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June 14, 2025
St. Mary’s Academy, Lawrenceville

This building was put up in about 1854, well before the adjacent church, making it one of the very few surviving public buildings in Pittsburgh from before the Civil War, and one of the small number of buildings in the Greek Revival style. It is stable but vacant, and its future is questionable. The rising value of Lawrenceville real estate might make it profitable to convert it into a house or a duplex, but that same rising value would make it much more profitable to replace it with a few townhouses or a small apartment building.

The ornate metalwork support for the porch roof is a later addition, we assume, but it ought to be preserved as well. The stock wrought-iron railing on top of the porch roof can go to the recycling plant.

A good summary of the history of the parish, including this building, is in James Wudarczyk’s Faith of Our Fathers: Religion in Lawrenceville.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

Map.
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June 10, 2025
Clark High School, Scott Township

Just outside Carnegie on Washington Avenue, this school opened in the fall of 1935. It was designed in a bracingly modern style by Mount Lebanon architect J. Lawrence Hopp, who designed a number of other schools in nearby suburbs. It has been an office building for quite a while now, but the alterations to the exterior have not been severe, as we can see from a 1950 photograph of students trying their hands at rescue techniques.

Photo by Post-Gazette photographer Paul Slantis, from Historic Pittsburgh (go there to see it in full resolution).

A certain number of students were probably lost every time these drills were performed, but that is the price we pay for preparedness.

Some history of the building and all the yearbooks are at the Chartiers Valley Historical Society page on Clark High School.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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June 5, 2025
Church of the Epiphany, Lower Hill

Edward Stotz was the architect of the building for Epiphany Church, with considerable interior work done by John T. Comès. It was built in 1903 to replace the old St. Paul’s Cathedral downtown as the downtown parish church after Henry Frick made the Catholic Diocese an offer it couldn’t refuse, and Epiphany served as the temporary cathedral for three years while the new St. Paul’s was going up in Oakland.

When the Lower Hill was demolished for “slum clearance,” Epiphany and its school were the only buildings allowed to survive. Thus Pittsburgh accomplished, here and at Allegheny Center, what Le Corbusier had failed to do in Paris: we created a sterile modern wasteland punctuated by a few ancient landmarks pickled in brine.

These Romanesque columns and arches strongly remind old Pa Pitt of organ pipes.

Christ stands at the peak of the west front.

On Christ’s right hand, St. Peter with his key.

On Christ’s left hand, St. Paul with his book.

An angel with plenty of anti-pigeon armor prays for worshipers as they enter.

The school is built in a simpler Romanesque style that links and subordinates it to the church.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

Officially the Lower Hill has ceased to exist. It is counted as part of downtown in the city’s administrative scheme. But it has never been integrated into downtown, and indeed was forcibly cut off from downtown by the Crosstown Boulevard—a bad mistake recently ameliorated somewhat by building a park on top of the boulevard. With the new FNB Financial Center and other developments, there is some hope that this neglected wasteland may become city again. Meanwhile, Epiphany, now part of Divine Mercy Parish, still serves downtown worshipers, and perhaps will be there for new residents as the neighborhood grows and changes.

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May 4, 2025
McNaugher School, Perry Hilltop

The lot is a steep and complex slope, but this is an Ingham & Boyd design, and therefore it is symmetrical at all costs. The style is the usual restrained Ingham & Boyd classicism with no columns (they disliked columns) done in white brick, their favorite material for schools, with terra-cotta accents around the entrance.

Much effort has been put into keeping this landmark building in good shape and in use, and we wish success to the enterprising community members who are trying to find tenants for it.

Olympus E-20N; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

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April 30, 2025
St. Richard’s School and Church, Hill District

St. Richard’s parish was founded in 1894 and immediately put up a temporary frame church. Two years later, a rectory—obviously meant to be permanent—was designed by J. A. Jacobs in a restrained version of the Queen Anne style.

In 1907, the parish started building a school, which would also have temporary facilities on the ground floor for the church until a new church building could be built. It was partly financed by “euchre and dance” nights.

Father Pitt has not yet succeeded in finding the name of the architect, but he has found a lot of newspaper announcements of euchre and dance nights.

The permanent church was not yet built in 1915 when this convent, designed by Albert F. Link, was put up. Although the second-floor windows have been filled in with much smaller windows, and the art glass has been replaced with glass block, the proportions of the building are still very pleasing.

We note a pair of stained-glass windows in one of the filled-in spaces on the second floor. If Father Pitt had to guess, he would guess that they came from one of the central windows that are now filled in with glass block.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

It turns out that the permanent church was never built. The dwindling congregation continued to meet for Mass on the ground floor of the school until the parish was suppressed in 1977. The school became St. Benedict the Moor School, and the ground floor was finally converted into the classrooms it had been designed for. Later the school moved to larger facilities at the former Watt Public School, but the parish kept up the old building as an events center.

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April 27, 2025
Third Ward School, Dutchtown

Designed by Frederick Sauer, this school was called the Latimer School after Allegheny was conquered by Pittsburgh. It was built in 1898.

In the 1980s it was converted to apartments under the name “The School House.” As far as old Pa Pitt knows, this was the first major conversion of a disused school to apartments in the city, and it showed that the idea was viable.

The school was converted to apartments in the age of Postmodernism, and the designer of this canopy cleverly made it a kind of abstracted projection of the original entrance. Father Pitt caught the fabric part of the canopy on a bad hair day.

Nikon COOLPIX P100.

The North Avenue side.

Map.

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April 7, 2025