Harry Scheuch was finishing high school in a small town in eastern Pennsylvania in the spring of 1927; 270 miles away in Pittsburgh, the foundation of the Cathedral of Learning was nearing completion.

"Harry is a steadfast fellow who has worked his entire way through four years of high school," the Tamaqua High School yearbook noted. "While we were having a good time he worked. Drawing and 'tuning in' [to the radio] are his hobbies."

Drawing proved to be more than a hobby; Mr. Scheuch (pronounced shoyk) was a fine arts graduate of Carnegie Institute of Technology by 1933, the year that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched the Public Works Art Project. For seven months, it funded the creation of 15,600 artworks by 3,750 artists who were encouraged to go out and paint "the American scene."

One of those artists was Mr. Scheuch, and two of his paintings show the Cathedral of Learning under construction in the winter of 1934. Now on view at the Frick Art Museum in Point Breeze, they recall a time when the building of the secular cathedral captured the imagination of the city and sparked contributions from tens of thousands of Pittsburgh schoolchildren.

The paintings are among 54 works in the Frick's "1934: A New Deal for Artists" exhibit, assembled by the Smithsonian American Art Museum from works in its collection. There are paintings of women hanging laundry on tenement porches, ice skaters in Central Park, African-Americans picking cotton in the rural South, an Italian-American religious festival in Manhattan's Gashouse District and the Golden Gate Bridge under construction. In the heart of the Depression, both leisure and labor were celebrated.

The Pitt paintings document the few months in early 1934 that construction on the Cathedral of Learning intersected with the New Deal, and not just because the Scheuch paintings were funded by a New Deal program. The construction itself was a New Deal project in early 1934 through two grants from the Civil Works Administration, which revived the building after it had sat incomplete, the first five floors of its steel frame exposed, since April 1, 1931.

When ground was broken in 1927, Pitt Chancellor John G. Bowman knew where most of the estimated $10 million it would cost to build the tower was coming from. What he didn't know was that the Depression would cause many of its benefactors to default.

Philadelphia's Charles Klauder was the Cathedral of Learning's architect, but in many of the ways that matter, it was John Bowman's building. He'd gotten the idea of a Gothic tower in March 1921, just two months after taking the university's reins. A rapidly growing Pitt needed to expand and had room to do so on its hillside campus in Oakland. But Dr. Bowman had a different idea, one that grew out of his early, Ruskin-influenced interest in Gothic architecture. John Ruskin, a 19th-century English artist and critic, promoted the Gothic as honoring a handmade aesthetic in an industrial age.

Dr. Bowman would later recall telling financier Andrew Mellon, a university trustee, that he wanted "classrooms with master-made chairs in them; chairs not arranged in rows, but grouped informally around a teacher's chair; doors, doorknobs and hinges that tell that workmen left their souls in these things."

The tower would be "like a psalm," Dr. Bowman wrote, "a psalm that would tell of the courage and spirit of Pittsburgh."

Inspiration came, too, from the Art Deco skyscrapers that were in the air in Chicago and New York and soon would be in Downtown Pittsburgh.

Dr. Bowman knew what he wanted but had trouble communicating it to his architect, who went through dozens of iterations. The breakthrough came one evening in 1924 after the two men had dinner at Mr. Klauder's house outside Philadelphia. After many sketches had landed on the floor, the architect turned to his phonograph and put on the record that happened to be on the top of the pile. It was the "Magic Fire Music" from Wagner's "Die Walkure," and its crescendos triggered Dr. Bowman's comment that the building must be like that: "Isn't each leap a buttress, a buttress on a tower?"

He told his architect to spread out the bottom of the building and make the tower rise out of it. As both men sat on the floor, Mr. Klauder drew. When Dr. Bowman finally left at about 4 a.m., it seemed to him that after two years, "we had really made a start."

The Commons Room surrounded by classrooms and Nationality Rooms also was Dr. Bowman's idea.

"The most beautiful room in America is the aim in the commons," he told The Pittsburgh Press in 1928. Mr. Klauder drew the room 25 times before getting it right -- a stone room 52 feet high with arches close to the ceiling, like the cathedral at Chartres. Here, however, the Gothic was meant to inspire a deep, quiet reverence for learning.

Dr. Bowman first publicly called the tower the Cathedral of Learning when he introduced the design -- in drawings, lantern slides and a 12-inch plaster model -- to trustees, professors, civic leaders and the press in November 1924. At 52 stories, the $10 million tower would be the tallest in the city and express Pittsburgh's "spirit of achievement.

Reaction from trustees and the press was essentially favorable. Then criticism began to mount, with people expressing fear that students would fall from its windows or that the building itself would topple in the wind. Carnegie Institute trustees voted to condemn the tower, saying it would destroy the new Civic Center.

Dr. Bowman persevered, hiring public relations man Carlton Ketchum to guide the capital campaign in three stages. Two captains of industry -- Carnegie Steel president Homer D. Williams and Harbison-Walker Refractories vice-president Hamilton Stewart -- served as chair and vice-chair.

"The Cathedral of Learning campaign today is considered a landmark in the field," with pioneering methods and striking results, Robert C. Alberts reported in his 1986 book, "Pitt: The Story of the University of Pittsburgh, 1787-1987," the source for some of the information in this story.

Community involvement from the boardroom to the classroom was the key. U.S. Steel gave girders, beams and other steel totaling $250,000, "a breakthrough in corporate philanthropy" at a time when gifts from corporations to colleges and universities were suspect and virtually unknown, Mr. Alberts wrote.

Six-foot-high painted plywood silhouettes of the tower appeared in the windows of banks and stores. At the Colfax School kindergarten, 30 children built a reproduction in building blocks. A Downtown baking company displayed a 56-inch cake model of the cathedral in its Wood Street window; across the Allegheny on Federal Street, a grocery store fashioned the building from 500 cans of milk. And 97,000 Western Pennsylvania schoolchildren each gave a dime to help buy a brick; in return they received a certificate acknowledging their admission into the "fellowship of the builders of the Cathedral of Learning."

By June 1925, Dr. Bowman had $7 million in hand, but only $5.6 million could be used solely for the building. In September, the trustees approved a 29-story building not to exceed $7 million.

Dr. Bowman ignored them. The tower's design already had been cut by 10 stories because of funding and engineering concerns; he would not chop it further. The board acquiesced.

In May 1928, the tower's steel frame began to rise. In a topping-off ceremony in October 1929, workers planted an American flag atop its 42 stories.

Not everyone was enthusiastic about the Cathedral: Pittsburgh architect Edward B. Lee, who'd lived with his family in a Fifth Avenue house claimed by the construction, sent Christmas cards that year with a drawing of the house superimposed under the looming tower. "Good-bye -- little happy house, good-bye," it read.

By November 1930, the exterior Indiana limestone reached to the top of the tower, but the lower floors were not yet clad. Although most of the interior also was incomplete, the first classes moved in on Feb. 28, 1931. On April 1, with funds exhausted, all work on the building stopped.

As the cathedral was rising, Mr. Scheuch was watching it from a few blocks away. He graduated from Carnegie Tech in 1931 and soon established himself as a leader among Pittsburgh painters. The following year The Pittsburgh Press described him as "a well-known artist of the city" in a story about his desire to stage a public art market "with oil paintings and charcoal sketches on sale instead of celery and oranges."

Work on the Cathedral resumed in early 1934 with a $300,000 federal grant that employed 1,259 stonemasons, ironworkers, plumbers, electricians and other tradesmen. In the larger of his two paintings, Mr. Scheuch depicts them from a distance as they tackle the project like industrious swarms of ants. His vantage point must have been the Schenley Hotel, now Pitt's student union, from which he also saw and painted Mellon Institute, the Webster Hall Hotel and St. Paul Cathedral in the background ­-- a seemingly implausible but accurate composition afforded by the bend in Fifth Avenue. The smaller painting takes a more intimate view of five workers, including masons laying bricks.

By October the exterior stone was completed, but much remained to be done inside. In March, Dr. Bowman had launched a campaign to finish the cathedral, but it fell $1 million short of its goal. Still, money continued to come in -- Andrew Mellon gave $500,000 to complete the Commons Room in 1936, and ethnic groups were building out the Nationality Rooms. Although work continued for years after, the cathedral was largely completed by 1937.

That year, Mr. Scheuch, who'd married an art school classmate, was appointed head of the Federal Art Project in Western Pennsylvania, overseeing the work of other artists and painting two mural commissions of his own, at the City-County Building and the post office in Scottdale, Westmoreland County. From 1938 to the early '40s, Mr. Scheuch's Bessemer Galleries, studio-gallery space in the Bessemer Building that stood opposite the Fulton Building, showed the work of many local artists, including Marie Kelly, Milton Weiss and Olive Nuhfer.

Both of his Pitt paintings were held by the Department of Labor in Washington, D.C., before their transfer to the Smithsonian in 1964. They'll be on view at the Frick through April 25.

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