This odd-looking building has looked odd for nearly a century, but it was not meant to look this way. It has a story—one that it shared with a number of other churches in our area, but this one almost uniquely was frozen in the middle of the story.
On September 26, 1926, the Press reported that a permit had been issued for building the Carter Chapel of the Colored Methodist Episcopal church. (The denomination is now called Christian Methodist Episcopal, indicating that it is not limited to any particular race.)
The Carter chapel of the Colored Methodist Episcopal church congregation, through their pastor, the Rev. W. H. Wiggins, has applied to the bureau of buildings for a permit to construct a two-story brick and stone church edifice on a site at 2332-34 Bedford ave, to cost $50,000. The plans call for a building 48×97 feet, highly ornate in appearance, with all modern church conveniences and a seating capacity of approximately 500. L. O. Brosie, of this city, is the architect, and Miss Olivet [sic] Day, of Indianapolis, is the contractor.
Louis O. Brosie was a successful and well-established Pittsburgh architect who had been in business on his own since 1903. Olive A. Day (apparently misheard as “Olivet Day”) was an Indianapolis contractor who seems to have been a low bidder on small projects.
It seems that things did not run smoothly, and something interrupted the construction. On May 28, 1927, the Press reported,
Work on the new Carter Chapel of the C. M. E. church will be resumed. Laying the cornerstone will take place next Sunday at 3 p. m.
Still there were difficulties, and somewhere along the line the construction ceased with only the first floor built. It would have been a sanctuary-upstairs church, with this first floor dedicated to Sunday school and social hall, but the “highly ornate” sanctuary was destined never to be. On March 18, 1928, we read in the Press:
The Carter chapel of the C. M. E. church, recently put in usable shape, at Bedford ave. and Somer st., will be formally dedicated to religious worship Sunday, April 2.
An improvised roof had been put on the building, doubtless with the intention that the real church would be finished when times were better. But the Depression came a year and a half later, and the building was never finished.
It was not uncommon to use the basement or ground floor of a half-finished church for some time before the sanctuary could be built. The second Presbyterian congregation in Beechview never got further than the basement of their church before they overcame their differences with those other Presbyterians and sold the unfinished building, which became the foundation for the Beechview firehouse. Nativity parish in Observatory Hill was finished after some years with a temporary roof over the basement.
But this church, perhaps uniquely in Pittsburgh, has kept its temporary arrangement for nearly a hundred years. It is a tribute to the persistence of its congregation, which stayed in this building for decades, and perhaps a tribute to the contractor and builders, who came up with a temporary solution that still serves a Christian community—now the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith.
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