Oh not again!
Not trying to post another melancholy or nostalgic story, but sometimes that’s just what comes out on a cold early spring night.
I was taking a walk through the old homestead—my alma mater, Cardinal Brennan Junior/Senior High School. For those who don’t know the history, it started at one time as an all-girls school, became a high school, and after a few good decades, shut down around 2007. It was doomed. Catholic education in the coal region is also doomed it would seem.
So why do I bring this up now?
It’s strange—the school’s old field has been beautified, and the Patrick Kempsey Sports Complex is being used again for baseball practice. Very strange to hear the laughter and voices of kids playing sports coupled with that old familiar wind—echoing through the pine trees that surround Cardinal Brennan. For those who went to school there or stayed late after class, you might remember that sound. It was almost haunting. Eerie. Lonely.
Now imagine that sound on a cold fall evening, just as the school year was beginning. You’ve got a recipe for deeply embedded memories that never quite go away.
So what’s the point of posting this after all these years?
As I stood in the parking lot of the old Academy building, I wondered if there are still any old spirits that linger. Maybe some still pace the halls, waiting for students who haven’t shown up in nearly two decades. Maybe there’s a bell that still rings. Maybe a breeze through a cracked window still stirs a paper on a long-abandoned desk.
It’s strange, how buildings die.
It takes a long time. Because as long as there are people alive who remember it, a building still has some kind of meaning. But eventually, that memory fades. And when it does, the building dies, too. It happens everywhere—across the planet all the time. Eventually, what’s left is a headline in a forgotten newspaper or a memory that pops up in conversation with someone who still happens to be around. And that’s it.
Cardinal Brennan is now owned by the North Schuylkill School District. At some point, they’ll have to decide what to do with the building. It’s not in great shape. In fact, it’s falling apart. The old bell tower still stands, but it’s hollow now. The facade is crumbling. The sidewalk is cracked. Some areas look like a hazard to even walk on. Hordes of bats persist in the summer time.
There’s no clear right or wrong answer for what the district should do. And right now, there’s no big public discussion about it—it’s just sort of sitting there. Maybe there were big plans when it was first purchased. But now what?
I think we all know.
Unless there’s a massive influx of money and an ambitious construction project, we’re likely going to see headlines in the future about the building being razed. And yeah, that’ll hurt. But not as much as it would have twenty years ago when the school first closed—because time softens the blow.
In two years, it’ll be twenty years since Cardinal Brennan closed its doors.
Echoes of memory remain. But those echoes are fading—vanishing into the same wind that always rustled through those old, creepy pine trees in the fall, when classes began..
