Alden & Harlow were the architects of this classically symmetrical school, which was built in 1926. Alden had died in 1908, and Harlow had only another year to live (he died in 1927); it seems that by this time much of the design work in the firm was done by Howard K. Jones. The school now is kept in good shape as the home of various community services.
The 1920s were in the middle of the golden age of terra-cotta ornament.
The architects had a typically Pittsburghish lot to deal with, so the school has four floors above ground on the Wallace Avenue front and two in the rear on North Avenue.
In 1915 the city of Pittsburgh was on a school-building binge and could hardly find architects to keep up with the demand. Thus there are schools from that era in widely different styles. Here we have a fine example of Collegiate Gothic with just a touch of Art Nouveau. The architects were Vrydaugh & Wolfe, otherwise best known for churches and millionaires’ mansions.
In 1916, when the school was a year old, the architects showed their design and this photograph at the Pittsburgh Architectural Club’s annual exhibition, so we can see that very little has changed about the exterior of the school. The most obvious change is to the windows, which have been replaced with modern windows, the same size as the originals but without the multiple small panes. (The very dark shade of the brick is the result of the film stock of the era, which was not very sensitive to red light.)
The school was built first, in 1926, so we begin with the school. The architect was William P. Hutchins, who chose the “collegiate Gothic” style to send the twin messages that this was a school and it was Catholic.1
The congregation, meanwhile, worshiped in a small frame church for more than twenty years. After the Second World War, Leo McMullen was hired to design a new church and school expansion.2 Both the era and McMullen’s taste dictated a simpler style, but the new building fits well with the school to which it is attached.
The pictures of the church are from back in March; the pictures of the school are from last week. Yes, it does sometimes take old Pa Pitt that long—or longer—just to complete a set of pictures.
The Venerable Bede was the great light of the Dark Ages, the author of the Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, which is the best source for very early English history. Here he is depicted pausing to think while writing one of his books. Bede was exceptionally good at thinking, which set him apart in the early 700s.
“Tremendous Building Program Looms in Pittsburgh Diocese,” Pittsburgh Catholic, March 28, 1946. “St. Bede’s, Rev. John F. Enright, pastor: Combined school and church building; Leo A. McMullen, architect.” ↩︎
A. E. Linkenheimer was the architect of this tiny school,1 which appears to have had two classrooms. Tiny as it was, he still made it into a splendid fantasy castle. It is now well preserved as a funeral home.
The city counts “Spring Hill–City View” as one neighborhood for planning purposes, but the street signs at major intersections do make the distinction, identifying the neighborhood as either “Spring Hill” or “City View.”
For forty years this school stood abandoned and rotting. The main building, put up in 1896, was designed by Ulysses J. Lincoln Peoples, who also designed an addition in 1904 for the rapidly growing neighborhood. An auditorium-gymnasium addition was designed by George M. Rowland in 1931. The school closed in 1980, and then it just sat while the neighborhood crumbled around it.
Photo by Leepaxton at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
This is how the school looked in 2011, when the indefatigable Lee Paxton, who photographed nearly every Pittsburgh landmark for Wikipedia, stopped to snap its picture. But look at that same Larimer Avenue façade today:
Doesn’t that make you happy?
The restoration was done as part of the huge Cornerstone Village housing development, a mixed-housing community that has brought attractive new housing to long-neglected Larimer. All the beautiful details that Mr. Peoples, Mr. Rowland, and dozens of nameless craftsmen left for us have been scrupulously preserved, cleaned, and made to look almost new.
This is the Larimer Avenue end of the building, which has a grand entrance—but not the grandest entrance.
Around the corner on Winslow Street is the original main entrance to the 1896 building.
But even this is not the grandest entrance.
In 1904, an addition was built to the southeast of the main building. A new entrance was built linking the main building to the addition, and this is the grandest entrance.
When he was heading for Larimer, old Pa Pitt somehow walked out of the house without any long lenses. He will have to return soon to pick out those very amusing bracket heads, which he suspects were done by the same sculptor who did the whimsical decorations for the Western Theological Seminary. But the picture above is 20 megapixels, so if you enlarge it you will see a fair amount of detail. You will also see raindrops, because it was raining by the time Father Pitt got to the school, but he was not going to let mere weather deter him.
The child on the right is regrettably not the first or last to have lost his head when he went to school.
In 1931, an auditorium and gymnasium addition was designed by George M. Rowland. By that time styles had changed considerably. Rowland stuck to the classical idiom, but chose the simpler Doric order rather than the more florid Ionic and Corinthian of the original school and addition, and flavored the front with a dash of Art Deco.
The newer Saint Joseph School was built just after the Second World War; this one, however, predates St. Joseph’s Church. Old maps show a frame building here in 1882, and a brick one of the same dimensions in 1890; either this building replaced an older one at some point in the 1880s, or the frame building was shrouded in brick. The restrained classicism is unusual for the era; old Pa Pitt does not know how much the building has changed from its original state.
Edward J. Hergenroeder, who prospered in the years after the Second World War as a designer of Catholic schools and churches, was the architect of this handsome little modernist school for the German parish of St. Joseph.1 It is in use as coworking space now, so it will remain when St. Joseph’s Church is demolished.
This snappy-looking modernistic school was designed by Button & McLean (Lamont H. Button and Paul F. McLean), who were taking bids in November of 1938.1 It was later bought by the Steel Valley Council of Governments, an association of boroughs and cities in the Mon Valley, which has turned it into a shop where you can take your humans to have them serviced.
When old Pa Pitt took these pictures, there was a band rehearsing somewhere in the building that included a pretty good vibraphone player.
Proposals, Pittsburgh Press, November 30, 1938, p. 32. “Copies of plans, specifications and other contract documents will be on file and open to public inspection at the offices of the Architects, 119 East Montgomery Avenue, North Side, Pittsburgh, Pa.…” From many other listings we know that 119 East Montgomery Avenue—a street that no longer exists—was the office of Button & McLean. ↩︎
Titus de Bobula designed this school, built in 1904 for St. Michael’s, a Slovak parish. Although it has been altered here and there, enough remains to show us a very unusual mind at work.
For example, who else would have given us the ragtime rhythm of these tall and narrow stairwell windows (later bricked in)?
These abstract pilaster capitals are echoed on the porch columns of the convent next door, also De Bobula’s work.
This building has also been altered (the roof is newer, and the third-floor dormer appeared only about a decade ago), but we can see that its details were calculated to match the school.
Charles J. Rieger, late in a distinguished career (we first notice him in construction listings nearly forty years earlier), designed this Art Deco palace of education, which was built in 1938. It has been abandoned for years. In a trendy neighborhood, the building would make fine luxury apartments, and it could have a rehabilitation that would make the most of its classy Deco streamlining. This part of Braddock, however, is not likely to require luxury apartments in the near future.
