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In 1989, former President George H.W. Bush held a luncheon for regional editors and broadcasters at the White House. An attendee from Pittsburgh asked Bush about the crowded Allegheny County Jail, in which a population cap was mandated by court order and suspects arrested on drug charges were being turned loose. In his reply, Bush noted several options for existing facilities, which became a prophetic statement for Pittsburgh; he said, "There are innovative programs - in terms of jail construction - of lease backs. And so there is a lot of new thinking going on." This concept became one of the keys to the adaptive reuse of one of Pittsburgh's most historic buildings, and with it, the dramatic improvement of the Allegheny County Family Courts System.
This article explores the problems the Allegheny County Family Courts System faced during the 1990s and how the county determined what to do with an important, but vacant and deteriorating, jail in downtown Pittsburgh. The solutions to both problems intertwined to produce a model family courts arrangement and a successful building restoration project. The project and process described illustrates a creative solution to a functional problem that many family court systems in older cities could face and encourages revitalization of former correctional facilities that have the potential to be viable for related functions.
The Old Jail
In 1995, six years after the presidential luncheon, Allegheny County opened its new jail in Pittsburgh. The former jail, which was 109 years old, sat vacant, unheated and deteriorating. Besides having been crowded in the past, time had rendered the jail woefully out of date as a correctional facility. A court order requiring it to be upgraded or closed and vacated was issued, but the cost of upgrading was far too high. However, this particular jail is designated a national historic landmark. Designed in the 1880s by H.H. Richardson, one of America's well-known architects, it is part of a complex that includes a courthouse and is considered a crowning achievement of Richardson's career. To simply demolish the facility was not an option.
The county, in anticipation of eventually vacating the old jail, began working with architectural firm IKM Inc. in the late 1980s to determine what could be done with the structurally sound...