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Reflections on the history of the 110-year-old building as it prepares for tenants after 23 years empty
By Cassandra Harris
It served the community as a prominent school since 1914. Thousands of young learners filled its hallways and classrooms. It witnessed riots and racial violence in the ’60s. It narrowly escaped closure in the ’70s and persevered into the 21st century. After sitting empty for 15 years, it was sold in 2016 and is now approaching the realization of a community vision to repurpose it as affordable housing.
This is what Gladstone Residences’ neighbors have to say about its past and future.
Gladstone School was built to serve the neighborhood as an elementary school. Over time, it expanded to include a junior high school. It eventually became a senior high school and then a middle school before closing in 2001.
After the Hazelwood Coke Works owned by LTV Steel closed in 1998, the neighborhood’s population declined and Pittsburgh Public Schools announced plans to close Gladstone School. Residents like Reverend Michael Murray fought and advocated for the school to remain open. Fighting for the school felt rewarding, he said, especially because he lives across the street at 208 Hazelwood Ave.
When the school board finally voted for the school to close, Mr. Murray said he and others in the community didn’t see it coming. They had been confident and optimistic until the board’s final decision.
Mr. Murray called what happened next the school’s “disenchantment.” The building, once full of life and bustling with students, would remain empty for 15 years.
Road to redevelopment
In 2016, the school was jointly purchased by two nonprofits, developer The Community Builders and community development corporation Hazelwood Initiative. Together they planned to transform one of the two vacant buildings into a mixed-income housing development offering 43 affordable and eight market-rate units.
Mr. Murray and other residents were hopeful when they heard that life would be brought to Gladstone once again.
But a year after the purchase, one of the other bidders on the property sued the school board and contested the sale, alleging that the school board had not followed the proper procedures.
At the time, neither the developer nor Hazelwood Initiative knew that the lawsuit, an approaching pandemic and supply issues would push the project’s completion back for years, said Sonya Tilghman, Hazelwood Initiative executive director.
Everything stopped. The project partners couldn’t get financing to renovate a building with a lawsuit pending.
When the plaintiff’s final appeal was dismissed in 2018, the project partners could finally apply for low-income housing tax credits. But by 2020, COVID-19 price increases and supply delays had driven up the project’s total cost. Additional funds had to be raised.
In November 2022, the long-awaited groundbreaking took place. Although the project has faced supply-related construction delays, the developer expects the project to be complete this fall.
Looking back
As Gladstone becomes something new, former students still remember the school’s tumultuous times.
In the 1960s Pittsburgh schools like Gladstone were rife with racial violence. Mr. Murray was there.
He was in ninth grade when the riots started, but the students getting into fights were older, he said. He stayed out of them, but said the fights were often fueled by a rivalry between Greenfield and Hazelwood.
“They would say, did you hear about the fight yesterday when the blacks and whites were fighting?” Mr. Murray said.
In December 1975, the school district announced it would close Gladstone as part of a plan to reduce segregation. But the neighborhood pushed back and Gladstone stayed open as a middle school.
Mr. Murray does have happy memories of Gladstone School as well. He recalled moving up from middle school to high school through the sky bridge. It was unique.
“When you crossed that bridge, it was almost like a little initiation,” Mr. Murray said. “The older guys would kind of cup you in the back of your head.”
Mary Sullivan was in fifth grade when the riots occurred. She didn’t see a lot of the fighting either but remembered hearing students running across the bridge and teachers locking sthe bridge’s doors. By the time she hit tenth grade the fights had stopped.
In high school, Mrs. Sullivan took cooking, sewing, accounting and sheet metal, she said. The school also offered woodshop, drawing and childcare classes, and even had a garage to teach auto mechanics. A career, not college, was seen as the students’ key to a brighter future.
New and longtime neighbors
The school’s brighter future is almost here and its neighbors are all in. The Adams family moved into 4564 Gladstone St., just up the street from the Gladstone construction site, two years ago.
Rachel Adams came to Hazelwood from New York. Apart from the long stairway from the street to her doorway, she loves her “fixer upper.” She repainted the house and cleaned up the side lot, which was full of tires and glass, she said. Her daughter plays in the upper yard away from traffic.
“It’s like living in the country in the city,” Ms. Adams said. “It’s very quiet, I love all the trees.”
She is excited about Gladstone Residences because the building will look fresh, and she looks forward to meeting new neighbors.
During the pandemic, Holley Tillman and her husband John Levesque moved from the Slopes to 4457 Gladstone Street. They are originally from Virginia.
“It’s a good change that they’re working on that building, at least it’s getting reused,” Mr. Levesque said.
Unlike Ms. Adams, the couple said they love the flight of stairs leading to their front door. They bought the home for that and the nearby trails, where they walk their dogs.
Mr. Levesque said he was hopeful that, in time, the construction of Gladstone Residences and the flow of new residents would prompt the city to fix the steps leading to Sylvan Avenue and Parnell Street.
Kristina DiPietro moved into 4555 Gladstone St. with her husband, Carl, in 1968. She is a former Hazelwood Initiative board president and played a key role in leading the community process that resulted in the plan to repurpose the building.
Ms. DiPietro has lived in Hazelwood all her life, attending kindergarten at Gladstone and putting four of her five children through the school’s pre-K and kindergarten programs in the ’70s and ’80s.
In her youth, she walked up Gladstone Street to visit friends. On one side of the street, seven or eight houses disappeared over time, left unoccupied or demolished, she said.
Before the DiPietros bought their home, Gladstone Street had a raised sidewalk and the street was a mixture of cobblestone and dirt road. Shortly after they moved in, the road was paved and the sidewalk removed. She said she and her husband joked that the road getting fixed was their moving-in gift.
“When we moved here, we were just recently married,” Mrs. DiPietro said. “We were the young people on the block. Now we’ve grown, we’re the old seniors on the block.”
With the Gladstone Residences project nearing completion, Ms. DiPietro said she wants to see more intergenerational housing and hopes for more children to live in the community.
She said living on Gladstone Street was a bonus to the project, a front-row seat to watch the neighborhood revitalize itself.
For more information about Gladstone Residences or to request a pre-application, email gladstone@tcbinc.org, call 412-200-7966 (TTY users call 711), or visit the office at East Liberty Place, 115 N. Beatty St. Pittsburgh, PA 15206, Monday through Friday 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Send requests by mail to this address at Attn: Gladstone Residences Management.
Cassandra Harris is a junior at Point Park University where she serves as the editor-in-chief of The Globe. She wrote this article as a Pittsburgh Media Partnership summer intern at The Homepage.
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