Category Archive: News Wire Services
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Hartwood mansion ceiling falls down, 76-year-old home closed indefinitely
By Jerome L. Sherman,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Saturday, August 13, 2005On Thursday afternoon, Susan Gallant was one of 14 people admiring two rare antique European card tables from the 1800s during a tour at the Hartwood mansion in Indiana Township.
About 20 minutes later, those card tables and dozens of other priceless objects in the mansion’s Great Hall were crushed when two tons of plaster fell from the ceiling in one piece.
“I was terrified,” said Gallant, 46, of Boston, who was on the tour with her father and her 9-year-old daughter. “We were upstairs and we heard this really strange crackling sound.”
No one was injured at the mansion, which is owned and operated by Allegheny County and is located in Hartwood Acres Park.
The 31-room English Tudor is closed indefinitely, but all other facilities at the park are open.
The county parks department won’t be able to start estimating the extent of the damage until Monday, when representatives of the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation visit the mansion.
Sylvia Easler, recreation superintendent with the parks department, said county workers need to wait for preservation experts with the landmarks foundation to examine the molded plaster, an original part of the 76-year-old structure, before they remove it.
Yet many antique items likely were destroyed or heavily damaged, including a Steinway piano, a handmade needlepoint sofa, a Flemish tapestry from the 17th century, and a brass chandelier that fell with the ceiling.
“Our goal is to get the building opened again as quickly as possible,” Easler said.
The mansion was built in 1929 for John and Mary Lawrence, whose father, William Flinn, was a powerful state politician and owner of a construction company that completed the Liberty Tunnels in Pittsburgh and the Holland Tunnel in New York.
In 1969, Mary Lawrence sold the mansion, most of its contents, and 400 acres to Allegheny County for a little more than $1 million. It opened to the public in 1976.
The mansion is a popular destination during the winter holiday season, when it gets as many as 400 visitors a week, Easler said.
It’s also known for hosting weddings and the occasional high tea in the Great Hall, the largest room.
Andy Baechle, county parks director, said the hall’s ceiling hadn’t received any restoration or repair work. No one had noticed any problems that needed repair.
“It was a complete surprise to the county,” he said.
When the tour passed through the hall on Thursday, some people saw a bump in the ceiling, Gallant said.
“Our knees were trembling” after the collapse, she said.
“We are counting our blessings that no one was in there,” Easler said.
(Jerome L. Sherman can be reached at jsherman@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1183.)
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Historic landmark in Fayette for sale
By By Judy Kroeger
Daily Courier
Saturday, August 6, 2005The historic Isaac Meason House is for sale.
Owners Terry and Diane Kriss have given up the fight to have the acreage surrounding the 1802 mansion along Route 119 in Dunbar Township rezoned agricultural.
Terry Kriss recently took out a half page advertisement in “Maine Antique Digest” offering the house for $750,000.
“This is not a joke,” the ad reads, and specifies that Kriss, who restores antique cars for a living, would trade “for quality Corvettes, Mustangs and muscle cars.”
Kriss does not believe that anyone wants to purchase the property, which consists of four acres surrounded by an auto body shop, Laurel Mall and a strip mine, and is counting on someone wealthy enough to dismantle the 20-room house, brick by brick, window pane by window pane and reassemble it somewhere else.
This is not the first time he has taken an unconventional route to sell the house. In 2003, he marketed it on the Internet auction site eBay, but no buyers met the $1 million minimum bid.
Kriss has tried to attract preservationists to the landmark, which he opens to tours by appointment, but has given up on saving it at its present site, hemmed in by development that makes the mansion hard to see and access.
The house is surrounded by commercial property, with a 15-foot driveway as the only access.
“I am not even allowed to have a business sign at the bottom of my driveway,” he said.
Kriss’ father, Peter Kriss, bought the house in 1977. Terry and Diane have spent more than $250,000 to restore it and an additional $100,000 in legal fees to preserve the site from encroaching businesses and a cellular phone tower. They were successful in stopping the tower’s erection.
The zoning is another matter.
“The Kriss property is zoned A-1, agricultural,” said Tammy Shell, executive director of the Fayette County Office of Planning, Zoning and Community Development. “The properties around it are zoned B-1, general business. The Kriss property is about 4 acres and the surrounding properties are about 30.”
The first request for the business rezoning was in 1968 and some of the land owners asked in 2000 to have their property rezoned general business, he said. The zoning hearing board and the county commissioners granted that request.
Shell said that the revised zoning maps under the county’s new comprehensive plan are not yet available. However, she said that any changes in zoning will likely not affect the property around the Meason House.
“The commissioners are working on the text, but anything legally operating, Cellurale’s Auto Shop, for example, will be permitted, even if the zoning has changed.”
Kriss has given up. “I have fought for 29 years. I’m 49. This house has taken all my adult life. All I want to do is save the house. I have shopped the home to be dismantled and moved. I’m saving the house. It will be rebuilt somewhere.”
He approached Commissioner Joseph Hardy, who has bankrolled a number of restoration efforts.
“I got no response,” Kriss said.
Long the home’s biggest advocate, Kriss now characterizes himself as “its biggest threat. It’s hard to say, but I want to move forward with my life.”
Two years ago, Kriss was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He’s now disease-free.
“I beat it. I’m still here, but the problems are still here. It’s been a real privilege to live here, but there’s pain and grief and an embarrassment to the historic and preservation community.”
Lynda Waggoner is vice president of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy and director of Fallingwater. She understands Kriss’ frustration.
“We’ve been involved with trying to preserve the Meason House for a number of years,” Waggoner said, “but the Pennsylvania Conservancy is more interested in nature conservation. Fallingwater is an example of man living in harmony with nature.”
But she has tried to help preserve the Meason House. “We’ve been looking for a win-win situation, but we haven’t been able to make it work.”
As for moving the house to erect it somewhere else, “Houses are moved all the time, even castles at the turn of the century,” Waggoner said. “But, I think it would be a shame for Fayette County to lose this building.”
Kriss estimates that dismantling the house and rebuilding it in a more accessible location will cost between $2 and $4 million. “Even out of its historical context, it would be an instant tourist attraction.”
The mansion and its outbuildings were built for Isaac Meason, who, in 1791, built the first commercially successful iron furnace and forge west of the Alleghenies. He also built the world’s first iron suspension bridge and owned 20,000 acres, including all of New Haven, which is now a part of Connellsville.
The Meason House was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1990. Kriss has compiled a history of the house and its significance to local and national history at www.isaacmeasonmansion.com, which also includes information about the sale.
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Baltimore-style revitalization eyed for Pittsburgh
By Sam Spatter
FOR THE TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Thursday, August 4, 2005Pittsburgh leaders should look to the southeast for a guide on redeveloping Fifth and Forbes avenues Downtown, the president of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation said Wednesday.
The Murphy administration’s plan to enlist one developer hasn’t worked, said landmarks President Arthur P. Ziegler Jr., so the city should consider copying Baltimore’s continuing effort that has revitalized part of its downtown.
“If that single developer steps forward, that would be fine,” Ziegler told members of the Pittsburgh Rotary Club. “But so far, it has been an elusive goal. We believe the Baltimore plan that worked there very well should be examined again.”
Ziegler referred to Baltimore’s $800 million project driven mainly by private investment and fueled by historic preservation tax credits that has renewed a 26-block area over the past several years.
The city packaged buildings, determined specified uses and quality levels, and offered the packages on the open market, he said.
If Pittsburgh officials adopted a similar plan, national and local developers might be persuaded to take a look at redeveloping pieces of Fifth and Forbes, Ziegler said.
Three developers have considered becoming the master developer for Fifth-Forbes, only to walk away. Dranoff Properties of Philadelphia is the most recent.
Ziegler said he’s been approached by at least two local developers interested in Downtown redevelopment, but not the entire Fifth-Forbes corridor.
“If a major developer can’t be located, then obviously other options would have to be considered,” said Herb Burger, who is leading a private effort to revitalize the corridor. “But I believe a major developer will participate in Downtown renewal.”
The Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, founded in 1964, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to preservation.
One of its major successes is Station Square on the Monongahela River on the South Side. The entertainment and office complex was developed in a former Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad warehouse site.
The redevelopment, which began in 1975, owes much of that success to nearly $12 million in private money provided through the Allegheny Foundation, Ziegler said. Richard M. Scaife, owner of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, chairs the Allegheny Foundation.
Ziegler said that many of the Downtown developments subsidized by taxpayer money — such as the Lazarus-Macy’s department store and the conversion of the former Mellon Bank headquarters into a Lord & Taylor store — have failed.
He said tax credits have helped finance the Heinz Lofts on the North Side and the Cork Factory redevelopment in the Strip District. Tax credits also could help transform the former Nabisco plant into housing in East Liberty.
Staff writer Ron DaParma contributed to this report.
Sam Spatter can be reached at sspatter@tribweb.com or .
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review © Pittsburgh Tribune Review
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Time is running out on historic Meason house
By Patricia Lowry,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Sunday, July 31, 2005Somebody do something, quick.
Because if nobody does anything, one of the most important historic houses in the country could be taken apart stone by stone, sill by sill, and sold for parts.
“To Be Dismantled,” reads the headline of a half-page advertisement in the June issue of Maine Antique Digest. Beneath it is a photograph of Fayette County’s Isaac Meason House, with the following caption: “This is no joke! I want to sell you this architecturally significant, ‘one of kind,’ 18th-century, cut-stone Palladian mansion, located in southwestern Pennsylvania. Accepting offers on stone, millwork, hardware, etc., etc.
“Please visit our website to view the many details. Quality Corvettes, Muscle and Classic Car Trades Considered. no dreamers please.”
It has come to this. Terry Kriss, the man who has performed painstaking research and restoration on the 20-room house, the man who has spent more than $100,000 in legal fees to protect it, now seems to be the No. 1 threat to its preservation.
How can you dismantle a house that you have loved so well for so long? “Nowhere in my wildest dreams would I ever think I would be advocating for the demolition of this home,” Kriss said recently at his kitchen table, next to the massive stone fireplace where a kettle hangs from its original crane.
“People who see my ad are appalled, but when they hear my story, they understand.”
Decades of battling encroaching commercial interests and two years of battling prostate cancer have left Kriss, a classic car and antiques dealer, ready and willing to do the unthinkable: Take apart the house he and his father saved from certain ruin.
But is Kriss serious, or is this just a ploy to get the attention of the media and preservationists? Articulate and passionate, Kriss is convincing when he says it’s time for him and his wife, Diane, to move on.
Two years ago, they listed the house on eBay and hired a public relations firm to promote it. That move garnered national media attention and rankled preservationists who had worked to save it.
At the end of the monthlong auction, the Krisses had interest from two men, but neither of their offers met the million-dollar reserve. Kriss estimates it would cost the buyer another $2 million to $4 million to disassemble and relocate the house.
With the fortune that built the house long ago dissipated, his prayers “for that one Meason descendant” to come to the rescue are unlikely to be answered.
A learning lab
Diane Kriss places a stack of studies, appraisals and plans almost a foot tall on the kitchen table.
“The house has been studied to death,” her husband says. “We know its paint colors throughout its history. Do something with all this knowledge!” Six years ago there was an idea, a good one, and it came from Fallingwater’s executive director, Linda Waggoner: Make the house a laboratory where students from a local university could learn restoration techniques in a new program designed to train master craftsmen.
Waggoner was a member of the Meason House Working Group, which also included representatives of the National Park Service, Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission, Preservation Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, as well as historian Eliza Smith Brown, philanthropist Lea Hillman Simonds and lawyers Hannah Leavitt and Harley Trice.
The group’s plan was to give the Krisses a nonrefundable $45,000 for a yearlong option on the house, during which time members would try to raise $1.5 million. From that kitty, it would purchase the house for $450,000 and give a university the million-dollar endowment it would require to establish the new program.
But Kriss, whose parents bought the house in 1977, thinks it’s worth $750,000, and that’s the figure he held out for.
“I take offense to being low-balled out of my house,” he said in rising tones.
“It’s very hard for a nonprofit to justify paying more than an appraisal, and he just never seemed to appreciate that,” Waggoner said.
But $300,000 isn’t all that separated the preservation groups and the Krisses from coming to an agreement. Terry Kriss, under siege from illness and in a nonsupportive community environment, felt that a year was too long to wait.
Frustrated, he put the house on eBay in May 2003. On May 22 of that year, representatives of Preservation Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation issued a tersely worded press release stating that if the Meason house is lost, “it will not have been for lack of effort on the part of Pennsylvania’s preservation community.”
A standout building
When Isaac Meason’s house was completed in 1802, Thomas Jefferson was president, Meriwether Lewis was preparing for his cross-country river trip and iron manufacturing was the largest industry in Pittsburgh, a village of about 2,000 people. Blacksmiths made tools, kettles, pans and other objects for immigrants to take west, using iron smelted in outlying regions by iron masters like Meason.
The richest man in nearby Fayette County, Meason also owned two saw mills, a grist mill and 6,400 acres of the finest coal and iron land in Western Pennsylvania that once were part of the short-lived plantation of George Washington’s guide, Christopher Gist.
The house Meason built was an expression of that wealth, a building that rivaled the best houses of the British Isles. Likely also influenced at least in part by Philadelphia’s Cliveden, it went one better, with cut sandstone and limestone on all four sides; Cliveden is rubble stone on all but its facade.
But while Cliveden today is operated as a historic house museum by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in serene Fairmount Park, the Meason house is surrounded by an auto body shop and a shopping center. For years a strip mine operated just a stone’s throw from its back yard.
The house outlasted the mine, but the damaged chimneys are in danger of tumbling down. The Krisses won a court battle with a cell phone company that wanted to erect a tower near the house, but he lost a zoning fight. The county permitted a change from agricultural to commercial zoning to allow the auto body shop to continue to operate just yards from the mansion’s iron gates, and in the process expanded the commercial zone from half an acre to 29 acres.
Yet within the bounds of its 4-acre site, the house remains a breathtaking example of Palladian architecture in a Georgian landscape. Cliveden has lost its dependencies, but the Meason house is flanked by six: carriage house with slave quarters, kitchen, pantry, hall, office and smoke house. The house and four dependencies are set on a raised, circular lawn enclosed by a stone wall.
“I know of no other such feature in America, and have only seen it a few times in the very greatest houses of Britain, notably [Robert] Adam’s Kedleston,” wrote preservation consultant and University of Pennsylvania architectural historian George Thomas in a report on the house in 1990. With workmanship that “may well be the best in America of that time,” the Meason house is “the standout building of its time” in the United States.
“Many Georgian double-pile houses [with four rooms of equal height on two floors] were built after Meason’s mansion, but none exceeded this masterpiece in sophistication of design,” write Deborah S. Burns and Robert J. Webster in their 2000 book “Pennsylvania Architecture,” which documents the work of the Historic American Buildings Survey and features the Meason house on its front and back covers.
Its architect and builder was Scottish-born Adam Wilson.
“It is regrettable that we do not know more about Wilson; but if the spirit and quality of his one remaining work, the Meason House, are any true reflection of the man, he was a person of rare good taste, who conceived his scheme ‘in the grand manner’ and executed its detail with exquisite refinement,” architect Charles Stotz wrote in his 1936 book “Early Architecture of Western Pennsylvania.”
What now?
Today, preservationists who worked to rescue the Meason house are as burned out as the Krisses and at a loss for what to do next.
“If I had that magic answer, we might be well on our way to saving it,” said Susan Shearer, president of Preservation Pennsylvania. “But as we say, preservation really is a local activity. There has to be that local will to care about place.”
Waggoner agrees. “Given the lack of interest in the community, maybe the best solution is that it be dismantled and moved to somewhere where people will appreciate it.”
“I wish I knew” what to do next, said Arthur Ziegler, president of Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation and a vice president of Preservation Pennsylvania. “I think it’s one of the most important houses in Western Pennsylvania, and I think it is that in its setting, with the Chestnut Ridge to its back. I have never been in favor of moving the house.”
The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, which operates 26 historic sites and museums and has a history of advocacy for the Meason house dating to 1987, has no plans to purchase it due to a lack of funds, said spokeswoman Jane Crawford.
The situation “is very disappointing to us,” said Bonnie Halda, manager of the Preservation Assistance Program of the northeast regional office of the National Park Service, which also has had a long involvement with the house. She believes the preservation trades program is still the most viable re-use of the house, because it involves a university as a long-term partner and because, by training future preservationists, “the benefit would extend beyond the preservation of the house.”
The Meason house has been a National Historic Landmark since 1990, one of fewer than 2,500 in the county. If it were to become a national historic site owned and operated by the National Park Service, the process must begin in Congress, with the commissioning of a study that would examine its suitability as a site, Halda said. But such a study is not in the works.
A few local philanthropists, including Fayette County Commissioner Joe Hardy, have been approached, but no one has made a direct appeal to Gov. Rendell or former Gov. Ridge for emergency funding to save the house. “Without a clear plan for its future, I doubt [the governor] would be interested,” Waggoner said.
Yet the importance of the Meason house cannot be overstated. If its present circumstances seem tragic and hopeless, look beyond the present acrimony and consider the long view. The auto body shop and shopping center must be seen for what they are: temporary intrusions on a historic landscape that can be restored. The Meason house, on the other hand, was built for the ages. It should still be standing 200 years hence to tell the story of the region’s early iron and steel industry, of slave-holding in Western Pennsylvania, of the Gists’ occupation and the land’s association with the English conquest in the 1750s.
If the Meason house were in Philadelphia, Virginia or South Carolina, it would have been rehabilitated and opened to the public long ago, and it’s an embarrassment to Fayette County, the region, the state and the nation that it has not.
When the National Trust for Historic Preservation and co-sponsoring Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation hold the trust’s annual conference in Pittsburgh next year, will the Meason house be a must-see stop on its tour list, or will it be forgotten and ignored? Waggoner’s plan deserves to get further than it did, and only a sale can make that happen. In the spirit of compromise, perhaps the Krisses can accept less for the house and the preservation community can find a way to re-engage and offer more. Having a new caretaker in the house will buy time to work out the details of a plan.
Somewhere, somehow, the money must be found to save this house and its landscape.
Is anyone listening? Does anyone with the will and the wherewithal to make a difference care?
(PG architecture critic Patricia Lowry can be reached at plowry@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1590.)
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Time running out to meet under Kaufmann’s clock
By Tony LaRussa
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Friday, July 29, 2005For many of Kaufmann’s most devoted customers — especially those who frequent the Downtown store on Smithfield Street — the change to a Macy’s moniker likely won’t change shopping habits that, for some, have been decades in the making.
Some business experts believe customer loyalty and a new association with a retailer that has a strong history of its own could ease the transition.
“Certainly, some people will see the change in names as the loss of something that is a major part of Pittsburgh’s history,” said Marc Jampole, of Jampole Communications, a marketing company Downtown. “But the fact that Macy’s is a well-known and respected name in retailing is a plus that should make the transition a little easier.”
Federated Department Stores Inc. announced Thursday that Kaufmann’s and many other regional department names will disappear next year, after it completes its deal for May Department Stores Co. The landmark Downtown Kaufmann’s and several suburban stores will become Macy’s.
Cathy McCollom of the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation believes that because the Downtown store will remain open, it could play an important role in Pittsburghers’ acceptance of the name change.
“The memories that are triggered when people talk about Kaufmann’s — meeting friends under the Kaufmann’s clock or going to see the window displays during the holidays — are very much attached to the building itself,” McCollom said.
“Sure, the name is a big part of it because it’s been around so long,” she said. “But in a sense, the building is the source for many of those fond memories. The fact that people still will be able to see it, and still be able to shop there, is very important in minimizing whatever sense of loss they may be feeling.”
People who view the Downtown Kaufmann’s as their primary shopping destination said they will continue to patronize the store when it becomes a Macy’s.
“I’ve been coming here to shop since I moved to Pittsburgh in 1971,” said Catherine Thomas, 87, of Shadyside. “There’s still something special about coming Downtown to shop, and the store has a nice selection and the service is good.”
Maryann Finotti, of Emsworth, said she began shopping at Kaufmann’s when she was a child and still thinks it’s one of the region’s better retailers.
“Oh, I have wonderful memories of when I was a little girl, and my mother and aunt and I would dress up to come shopping Downtown,” said Finotti, 62, who worked at the store while she attended Duquesne University in the mid-1960s. “I still come down to shop here every Saturday and sometimes during the week. I’ll keep coming as long as they don’t change things too much.”
Jampole believes maintaining or improving the quality, service and selection of merchandise will be critical to easing the transition to the Macy’s name.
“It’s always a risky business when you change a name, especially when there are so many years invested in a brand,” he said. “The Kaufmann’s name is so much a part of Pittsburgh, and it has long been associated with a certain level of quality. Any changes will have to be focused on providing the same, or better, experience for the customer.”
Jackie Snell, professor of marketing at San Jose University in San Jose, Calif., predicts that Pittsburghers will grow nostalgic about the Kaufmann’s name, but will “get over it.”
“It’s difficult to predict what will happen when there is a collective loss of something that has been associated with a community for so long,” Snell said. “But Macy’s has a pretty solid reputation as a retailer, so I think there is a great chance that the name change will not have a deep negative effect.”
Tony LaRussa can be reached at tlarussa@tribweb.com
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review © Pittsburgh Tribune Review
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Turtle Creek High School alums reunite before building is razed or remodeled
By M. Ferguson Tinsley,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Thursday, July 28, 2005Salt and pepper hair, laugh-crinkled eyelids, poodle skirts and a 40-year-old mystery converged Saturday afternoon.
About 250 alumni, or “Creekers,” gathered inside what used to be Turtle Creek High School. The building was renamed Woodland Hills East Junior High when the Woodland Hills School District was formed in 1981.
Some of the grads had not been in the building since their graduation days decades ago.
They came because in several months, despite the protests of some, the interior of the 86-year-old building at Monroeville and Penn avenues could be revamped beyond their remembrance, or it may crumble under the wrecking ball.
Last winter, the Woodland Hills school board voted 5-4 to spend nearly $52.7 million to build or renovate school properties. The plan called for the demolition of East Junior and for a new school to be built on the site.
Christopher Baker, Woodland Hills facilities coordinator, said there is a possibility that portions of the building’s exterior could be salvaged. Planners could save some “architectural pieces” of the building, such as the huge stone columns on the facade,
The district is looking at spending $17.3 million to construct a new junior high school on the razed site, Baker said.
On Saturday, the school’s halls echoed with: “I know your face.” “I can’t remember your name.” “How is she?” “It’s nice to see you.”
A couple of the voices belonged to people who went to Turtle Creek nearly 50 years ago. One had traveled from Charleston, S.C.
Several alumni stood chatting in the hall outside the library when someone called out, “Hey, Ellen! Let’s go to the bathroom and have a cigarette!”
It was Peggy McKinney Gonano, class of ’67, joking with her sister.
High school was packed with “the emotions, the excitement, the fun” of being a teen, said Gonano, who still lives in the borough. She called it “the growing up part.”
Back then, “growing up” may have included enduring a teacher’s unorthodox, if not comical, method of discipline.
Filing a lawsuit or making a stink in public never occurred to Gonano when she was punished for talking in Don Cifra’s English class.
The class was held a couple of doors away from the library. One day, Gonano, who is still a talker, just couldn’t stop during class.
She said Cifra told her, “If I didn’t stop talking, he was going to tape my mouth shut. … I still didn’t stop talking, even under the tape.”
A wry smile playing across her lips, Gonano said Cifra shook his head and sighed, “Another McKinney!”
Her three sisters were Creekers, too.
Today, Cifra’s classroom is furnished with modern green and pink Formica-topped desks, different from the wooden ones Gonano remembered.
Bob Russell, class of ’64, had the same impression as he walked the halls and peered in classrooms.
“I remember some of the auditorium, but the rest is all new,” the Turtle Creek resident said. It almost seemed like a different school already, he said. “But it was nice … to see it one last time.”
Although they have homes in Monroeville now, Nancy McCleland Puskar, class of ’61, and Rick McGrath, class of ’62, headed the reunion committee.
Puskar said a visit to the school a few months prior to the event made her aware of how changing times are reflected already in the building.
“They have metal detectors now,” she said. “I just wasn’t ready for that.”
Passing rows of light-blue lockers, some noticed that the trophy cases in the halls were empty. Where are the football awards? Where are the basketball laurels?
Jeanne Flaherty, class of ’62, said, three years ago, she’d rescued 125 trophies that had been destined for the trash bin.
“There were girls basketball trophies, baseball trophies, football,” she said. “There was one from the [Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League] championship.”
Flaherty, also from Monroeville, said she has catalogued them and plans to turn them over to the borough’s fledgling historical society.
Gloria Rogulin Blake, class of ’63, hadn’t seen her class ring for about 40 years.
As the tour was winding down around 4:30 p.m., just as Blake and her sister, Kathy Rogulin, class of ’58, were about to stroll out into the late afternoon sun, McGrath made an announcement to the handful of stragglers that included Blake.
“We have a surprise for you,” he said, turning his gaze on her and reaching for a small white box. “There’s a lady who has been looking for you for … years. She couldn’t be here, but she wanted us to give you something.”
Maureen Duffy Maniccia, 55, of Monroeville, formerly of East Pittsburgh and McGrath’s barber for 20 years, had been searching for the owner of a 1963 Turtle Creek High School class ring with the initials G.R. etched on it.
Maniccia said she found the ring in front of her Sunnyside Avenue house in East Pittsburgh, shortly before her family moved to Monroeville in 1966.
But once she had children and other adult responsibilities, she couldn’t find the time to hunt down the owner. She’d stuck it in a jewelry box until McGrath mentioned the upcoming reunion a month ago. He did the legwork for her.
Turns out, Blake had left the ring on a sink in the girls bathroom at Turtle Creek High a few days after her mother Mary Rogulin, now 90, had given it to her.
She’d also given her a warning: “Don’t you take it off.”
“My mother worked in the Westinghouse [Electric] cafeteria,” Blake said, slipping the gold and onyx band on her finger. “She worked so hard to buy it for me. This will be like giving the ring back to my mother, too.”
But how the ring landed in front of Maniccia’s former East Pittsburgh home remains a mystery.
Correction/Clarification: (Published August 4, 2005) Although she got her class ring back after it was lost for 40 years, a 1963 Turtle Creek High School graduate’s correct last name was missing from a July 28 story about a reunion at the school. Gloria Rogulin’s married name is Blake.
(M. Ferguson Tinsley can be reached at mtinsley@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1455.) -
Landmarks group aids in Wilkinsburg
By Ron DaParma
TRIBUNE-REVIEW REAL ESTATE WRITER
Wednesday, July 20, 2005The Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation has joined an effort to preserve a number of older, abandoned buildings in Wilkinsburg.
The local foundation and community leaders say the wrecking ball is not the best way to deal with some Wilkinsburg structures that may be architecturally noteworthy or historically significant and able to be restored to worthwhile use.
Such efforts are favored by Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato as a way to help rebuild the tax base in Wilkinsburg and other financially struggling “ring” communities just outside Pittsburgh such as Braddock and Rankin, said Dennis Davin, the county’s economic development director.
“This is a very valuable and exciting relationship,” said Denise Edwards, a Wilkinsburg councilwoman and a participant in the Wilkinsburg Neighborhood Transformation Initiative. “This is an effort to retain the integrity of the community and make it economically feasible to restore this neighborhood.”
Patterned after a program used in Philadelphia, the effort is focused on revitalizing a six-block area near St. James Church known as the Hamnett Place neighborhood, said Cathy McCollom, the foundation’s chief programs officer.
As an alternative to demolition, plans are to rehabilitate six abandoned buildings along Jeanette Street and offer them for sale to create opportunities for new single-family housing.
The foundation, which is acting as developer and project manager, hopes to acquire the properties in the next several months and start work by early next year.
Two of the buildings — 520 and 522 Jeanette — will be completely restored, including interior finishes, while two others — 508 and 516 Jeanette — will undergo “shell rehab” including an exterior renovation and installation of utility connections. Interior finishes will be left for a new owner, McCollom said.
The remaining two — 517 and 524 Jeanette — which are in the worst condition, will be cleaned and their structures stabilized, with repairs for the roof, foundation and windows.
The hope is to convince other developers or individuals to acquire or restore other properties and spark additional revitalization in Wilkinsburg.
The buildings targeted for restoration have been abandoned for some time and their condition is detrimental to the rest of the neighborhood, said Wilkinsburg resident Zita Ann Berry, a member of a project steering committee comprised of about 40 to 50 people.
“There are some lovely restored houses already in Wilkinsburg,” she said. “We’ve had an influx of young people who have been updating and done wonderful things with some old Victorian houses here.”
“Wilkinsburg has many fine buildings, houses particularly,” added Arthur P. Ziegler Jr., the landmarks foundation president.
The foundation became involved about 18 months ago after residents became concerned about a development proposal that called for extensive demolition in the area, which also includes parts of Lamar, Rebecca and Whitney avenues and Mulberry Street, McCollom said.
She is a member of Allegheny County’s Vacant Property Commission, which reviews such plans in various communities.
“When I saw some of these buildings had some good bones, so to speak, I realized that rehabilitation was possible,” McCollom said.
After discussions with community officials, including Mayor Wilbert Young, a study conducted by the foundation and community volunteers identified 54 parcels in the area, of which 19 were unoccupied buildings, five were vacant lots and eight were tax delinquent.
In addition to restoration, the study recommended clearing some of those unoccupied properties for new construction, parking or green space.
An overall budget is not finalized, but McCollom estimated the cost to redo the initial six properties could range between $90,000 and $130,000 per unit.
Allegheny County has agreed to provide about $500,000 for the project, said Davin, the county’s economic development director. Matching funds will come from the Landmarks Foundation and probably the state, he said.
Ron DaParma can be reached at rdaparma@tribweb.com or 412-320-7907.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review © Pittsburgh Tribune Review
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Replica of 1770s barn built at Oliver Miller Homestead
By Mary Niederberger,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Thursday, July 14, 2005Since 1973, when the Oliver Miller Homestead Associates took over the management and programming of the historic home site in South Park, the volunteer group has put on numerous displays and re-enactments of various aspects of pioneer life.
Now its members are excited about expanding their work to include more details about 18th-century farm life with the addition of a newly built wood barn, a replica of the original, which was built in the 1770s and razed by Allegheny County after it bought the Miller farm in 1927.
“We have great plans for some of the uses we can make of the barn. We are already deciding upon what sorts of displays and artifacts we can put there,” said Paula Bowman, publicity director for the associates.
A public barn-raising was held on a cold, snowy day in December when Amish Timber Framers, of Doylestown, Ohio, raised the frame with a crane. Construction was finished recently and the barn has been turned over to the Oliver Miller Homestead Associates to manage and program.
The first floor of the barn will be a large, open, unheated space, as in the original structure.
The associates group plans to move the trading post, a gift shop, from the log house on the property to the first floor of the barn.
The group also plans to move the original Miller family whiskey still from the log house to the barn. Along with the still, the group plans to set up a teaching display about the Whiskey Rebellion that would explain the conflict’s significance to the region and nation, Bowman said.
Plans call for the barn to hold a library/bookstore area and a place to sell items that are made at the homestead, such as metal items made at the forge and dolls that are made as part of craft demonstrations.
The basement of the barn will be heated and will serve as a meeting place for the associates group, which has about 40 members. Bowman said the group had met in recent years in the log house, but oftentimes, some members had to sit outside because there was not enough room.
Removing the still and trading post will free up more space in the log house, which will allow the volunteers to furnish and decorate it in a more authentic way.
“We want to turn the log house into a home that is representative of the period,” said Mary Olesky, president of the Oliver Miller Homestead Associates.
The group has items stored in the basement, including a rope bed and a child’s cradle, which it would like to display.
Bruder Construction Co., a North Side restoration company, built the barn using the construction mode of its era: mortise and tenon joints with wooden pegs.
The project was overseen by Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation and was financed with a $500,000 grant from the state Department of Community and Economic Development which was procured more than four years ago by former state Sen. Tim Murphy, R-Upper St. Clair, who is now in Congress.
Most of the funds were used to build the barn, but some were left over to make improvements and restorations to the stone house.
The homestead is open to the public and staffed by the volunteers from 1:30-4:30 p.m. every Sunday from April through December.
Olesky said the group hoped to get some of the new displays and activities operating during the current season, but that it was likely that some would have to wait until the off-season, when volunteers will have more time to devote to them.
“This is going to be a work in progress for a while,” Olesky said. “We have so much we want to share with the public, but it’s going to take awhile to get it the way we want it.”
(Mary Niederberger can be reached at mniederberger@post-gazette.com or 412-851-1866.)
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette