Former morgue coming to life
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For the former Allegheny County morgue, it no longer will be about corpses but habeas corpus.
The county plans to convert the historic 110-year-old building, once a place for autopsies and tragic endings, into offices for its law department.
"Our goal is to keep it as original as possible," said Sam Taylor, principal architect for the county. "I mean, the building's had quite a history."
The county will brief the city planning commission on the work on Tuesday. It hopes to begin the renovations in late spring or early summer and have them completed within a year.
For decades, the building housed a courtroom for inquests, a first-floor chapel for bereaved families, a room for autopsies, glass coolers to hold corpses, and offices.
Once the renovations are finished, it will primarily be office space. There also will be a conference room, a law library and a file storage area.
While some walls will be removed for circulation or building code purposes, most will remain intact, Mr. Taylor said, adding that the structure "lends itself to office space in many respects."
"We're doing a lot of restoration. There's a lot of beautiful plaster work in there," he said.
The county also will make some changes on the outside, but none that would alter the building's historic character. Much of it will involve removing air conditioning units from the windows because the renovated structure will have central air conditioning.
About seven years ago, the county spent nearly $1 million installing new windows, putting in a terra cotta roof and doing masonry work.
The old morgue is a city historic structure, which limits the type of exterior work that can be done. It was built in the same Romanesque style as the county courthouse and old jail. In 1929, the morgue was lifted and moved 297 feet to its present location on Fourth Avenue to make way for the County Office Building.
But when morgue operations moved to the Strip District in 2009, it "gave us a golden opportunity to work in a department or a program that could benefit from the location," Mr. Taylor said.
The law department will move from leased space in the Fort Pitt Commons building on Fort Pitt Boulevard, saving the county $200,850 a year.
While moving into an old morgue might give some people the willies, Mr. Taylor said there will be no reason for that.
"Not when we're done," he said. "It's going to be a nice-looking facility when we're finished."
First Published February 4, 2012 12:00 am
