From Closing Services, First Methodist Protestant Church, Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, some engravings of the old downtown church on Fifth Avenue, built in 1832. It was a sad day, of course, when the congregation moved out in 1892, but the consolation was that they were moving into a grand new Romanesque church designed for them by Frederick Osterling (still standing today as the Korean Central Church of Pittsburgh). They were probably also taking a pile of money for their church: the Kaufmann Brothers had leased the land on which the church stood, and soon a huge addition to their department store would rise there.
The First M. P. congregation had succumbed to the forces that were changing Pittsburgh from a dense medium-sized city to an urban colossus. The “Introductory Note” to the commemorative book explains the circumstances very well.
That those who worshipped together in the old church were strongly attached to it was a matter of course, and when at the close of the last service in it, Sabbath evening, May 15, the large congregation slowly retired, many went away with heavy hearts, sorrowing most of all because they should enter their old church home no more. If it is asked why did the church dispose of its home the answer is: The inexorable logic of events so decreed.
When the church was built probably no better location could have been found. It was then almost in the centre of the city and was easily reached from every point in the town. The population was held within a comparatively small territory, but as the city grew the need for business property became more and more urgent, and consequently the people were gradually forced away from their homes in the business sections of the city and scattered into surrounding suburbs. Many of the churches located in what was Pittsburgh sixty years ago have found in these later years their membership steadily and inevitably diminishing in number, and the difficulty in recruiting their ranks has increased with almost every passing year; and the explanation of both facts is the plain one: That the people have moved away and built other churches convenient to their homes.
So the church was abandoned to the inexorable march of commerce—but the land was not. For many years thereafter, Kaufmann’s, the Big Store, stood partly on land that was owned by and paying good money to the First Methodist Protestant Church, now in the tony suburb of Shadyside.
