Demolition of century-old school bittersweet

By JUSTIN WIER

jwier@vindy.com

AUSTINTOWN

Jack Kidd remembers the first time he saw the old Austintown Fitch School on Mahoning Avenue. It was the winter of 1954, and his family was preparing to move to Austintown in the spring. They drove through town on a Sunday, and Kidd’s dad showed the kids where they would be attending school.

“I couldn’t wait to move and go to that school,” said Kidd, who would graduate in 1962. “From the day I saw that school, I always wanted to be a Falcon.”

The children of Austintown filed in and out of the building for more than 90 years.

When the building opened as Austintown Centralized School in 1916, eight horse-drawn carriages transported students who couldn’t walk to the school. Later it was a fleet of Ford Model Ts.

It was rechristened Austintown Fitch School in 1924. The district added several additions, and when the current Austintown Fitch High School opened in 1968, the building became Austintown Middle School.

It finally closed in 2007 after at least five years of complaints about plaster falling from the ceilings.

This week, more than 100 years after the building opened, backhoes and bulldozers razed parts of the school and loaded the debris into tractor-trailers.

“It’s a sad thing to see it come down,” Kidd said. “But I know it’s progress, and it has to come down. It was becoming an eyesore.”

NEW DEVELOPMENTS

Meijer Stores Limited Partnership purchased the property from the school district in January, with plans to open a 192,000-square-foot grocery store on the site.

“It’s been a long time coming,” board member David Ritchie said at the time.

The property had been on the market for about a decade. The township zoning office received increasingly frequent calls about the state of the building as it stood vacant.

Meijer has told the township demolition will be done in July, but construction of its new store is at least two years away, with a plan to open in 2021.

In the meantime, grass will be planted and the lot will be maintained.

Despite the delay, township Zoning Inspector Darren Crivelli said residents seem relieved to finally know what’s happening with the property. He said the township has urged Meijer to move the project up if possible, but the best-case scenario is a 2020 opening.

MULTIPLE Generations

School board member Ken Jakubec said three generations of his family spent time in the old Fitch building. His dad graduated in 1939, he graduated in 1964, and his kids attended middle school there.

“I spent a lot of years in there,” Jakubec said.

He remembered when enrollment increased and classes were held in the old football stadium.

Kidd attended one of those classes, he said there was a potbellied stove for heat.

Jakubec had other memories of things that wouldn’t fly today. He said he would work in the summer cleaning windows, which had a 15-year-old Jakubec hanging out the window without any safety equipment. A picture of the school from 1923 has kids sitting in the second-floor windows.

Still, Jakubec is excited about the property’s future. There are a lot of memories associated with the school, but he said progress needs to be made, and the Meijer store will be a boon to the community.

“I don’t feel sorrow that it’s going to be torn down,” Jakubec said. “It’s time; it’s long overdue.”

His father voiced a similar sentiment when Jakubec told him the board was discussing tearing it down.

“My dad said it should have been torn down after he left,” Jakubec said. “It was old then.”

PIECES OF The PAST

Parts of the school have found a second life. Kidd got permission to go into the old school in 2013 and took wood from throughout the building. Kidd and the Class of ’62 sold 550 pens made from the wood to people as far away as Alaska to fund a veterans’ memorial.

The memorial itself, which sits outside the football stadium, contains pieces of the old high school as well.

The brick monument is constructed around an engraved limestone sign reading “FITCH” from the front of the building. Kidd said the group used some bricks from the building in the memorial as well.

Joyce Pogany, president of the Austintown Historical Society, has the building’s cornerstone and two bricks in the school exhibit at the Austin Log Cabin. She said she spent a lot of time in the building as president of the PTA council.

“It’s hard to see it go because of all the good memories,” Pogany said. “But it’s an eyesore, and it’s something that has to go.”

Even with demolition in progress, the building will continue to live on in a sense.

Mal Culp, the district’s supervisor of operations and facilities, said Meijer plans to leave some bricks near the Fitch Boulevard entrance to the property for community members who want to keep a piece of the old school. They aren’t out yet, but Crivelli said they’ve received several requests for bricks, so they’re likely to go fast.