Father Pitt

This church was built in 1906; the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation was unable to identify the architect, and so far Father Pitt has had no better luck. (Update: The architects are now identified as Vrydaugh & Wolfe; see the end of this article.) It used to be called the Bellevue Methodist Church—Methodist Episcopal, as opposed to Methodist Protestant, since there was one of those, too. This one is in Avalon, which used to be called West Bellevue, and its striking green stone gave it the name by which everybody called it. In 1982, the congregation bowed to the popular will and renamed the church Greenstone.

This is one of the relatively few churches of this type that have kept their spires.

The picture above is one of those rare pictures where old Pa Pitt decided to remove all the fat ugly utility cables, because they were just too distracting.

The composite picture above shows some of the matching Sunday-school wing. The stitching worked perfectly for the building, but it made a noticeable break in the car parked on the street, which you can see if you enlarge the picture. Father Pitt left a note on the windshield.

Here is a map.

Addendum: Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the style—and especially that low tower with four corner pinnacles—this church was designed by Vrydaugh & Wolfe.¹ This means that Vrydaugh & Wolfe had two of the four corners of this intersection covered: diagonally across from this church is their Church of the Epiphany.

1. Source: The American Architect and Building News, July 23, 1904: “Architects Vrydaugh & Wolfe will be ready for bids in a few days on the Methodist Episcopal Church, of Bellevue. The building will be erected at Lincoln and Home Aves., at an approximate cost of $60,000.” ↩︎

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