Father Pitt

Category: Brookline

Resurrection Church, Brookline
If old Pa Pitt were more ambitious, he would remove those utility cables from the photograph, or from the street if he were more ambitious than that.

Resurrection Church was built in 1939 in an interesting modernist Gothic style, anticipating the streamlined modernist Gothic that would have a brief vogue after the Second World War. This design managed to give the congregation a sumptuous Gothic interior while keeping the exterior outlines starkly simple. The main entrance, for example, is recessed far into the building, so that only by standing right in front of it can we see the elaborate Gothic tracery and inscription.

An update: The 1939 church was designed by William P. Hutchins, who gave us many distinguished late-Gothic churches and schools, including St. Mary of Mercy downtown.

One of the side entrances.

“Light of the World” relief over the side entrance.

Before 1939, Resurrection Parish worshiped in the school next door, which was built in 1909. As usual, the Brookline Connection site has a thorough history of Resurrection Parish. From it we learn that the school was built in stages: the first two floors of the front were built first, with the rear and top floor added later. (Addendum: We have found that the architect of the second-floor addition was John T. Comès.¹ This strongly suggests that Comès was the architect of the original building.) We are also told that the sanctuary was on the “ground floor,” but as we see from this picture, “ground floor” can be a slippery concept in Pittsburgh.

The school closed some time ago, and it is now a retirement home. Resurrection Church is now a worship site of St. Teresa of Kolkata parish, which also includes St. Pius X church in Brookline and St. Catherine of Siena in Beechview.
1. Source: The Construction Record, January 13, 1912: “Architect John T. Comes, 1005 Fifth avenue, will be ready for estimates about January 15th on erecting a one-story brick fireproof parochial addition at Brookline, for the R. C. Church of the Resurrection, Brookline. Cost $15,000.” The original building cost $22,000. ↩︎
October 3, 2022
Brookline Boulevard United Presbyterian Church

The main part of this church building, which now belongs to the Tree of Life Open Bible Church, opened in 1924. The style is a kind of utilitarian Perpendicular, with attractive stone textures and buttresses and a couple of broad pointed Tudor arches characteristic of the English Perpendicular style; but the side windows are plain rectangles.

This and later additions largely conceal an older chapel built in 1913, which became the rear of the new church. The Christian Education wing along the Brookline Boulevard side was built in 1953 in a more elaborate (and earlier) Gothic style that harmonizes well with the main building. Clearly the church was feeling rich in the early 1950s, when many other churches were abandoning Gothic altogether and building modernist warehouses.

The Presbyterians sold this church to the Tree of Life congregation in 2016, but rented space in it for two more years until giving up in 2018.

September 24, 2022
St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, Brookline

When this small but rich Gothic church opened in 1929, it was intended to be temporary. A much grander church would be built next to it, and this would become the Sunday-school wing. But decades passed and the new church had not yet been built. Meanwhile Gothic architecture had become extinct. Finally it was decided to keep the original building as the sanctuary and add a new Sunday school and auditorium in a 1960s modern style with pointed arches to recall its Gothic neighbor.

Addendum: The architect of the 1929 building, and probably of the never-built church, was O. M. Topp. Source: The Charette, Vol. 7, No. 1 (January 1927): “173. Architect: O. M. Topp, Jenkins Arcade, Pittsburgh, Pa. Title: St. Mark’s Lutheran Church. Location: Brookline Boulevard and Glenarm Avenue. Preliminary stage. Approximate size: One story and basement. Stone exterior, ordinary construction. Cubage 200,000 feet.”

September 22, 2022
Rooftops of Brookline

Father Pitt was trying out a very long lens after making an expedition to Pitaland. In the center of the picture is the tower of Engine House Fifty-Seven. It was about half a mile away.

September 8, 2022
Go Straight at the Intersection

Or, you know, do your best. A typically Pittsburgh sign on Brookline Boulevard.

August 31, 2022
Brookline Methodist Episcopal Church

This church was finished in 1927 and continued to serve the Methodists until about a quarter-century ago. It now belongs to the Brookline Assembly, an Assemblies of God congregation. Old Pa Pitt has not been able to find out who the architect was, but there’s a wealth of other information at the wonderfully well-informed Brookline Connection site, including the interesting fact that the stone is Beaver County sandstone.

July 5, 2022
Brookline Boulevard

The Boulevard, as it’s known in the neighborhood, is Pittsburgh’s broadest commercial street—which strikes out-of-towners as absurd, but Pittsburgh has never been a city of broad streets. The breadth comes from the history of the street: when streetcars ran in Brookline, they ran in a separate right-of-way in what is now the middle of the street, with a narrow lane for automobiles on each side of the tracks—just like Broadway in Dormont today, where the Red Line cars still run. That history also accounts for the Boulevard’s other peculiarity: unlike most business streets, it has almost all the businesses lined up on one side of the street, with the other side more residential.

In every way this is an eclectic street. There’s a high occupancy rate in the storefronts, but very few chains are here, giving the neighborhood an unusually rich collection of odd little one-off shops. The architecture is also eclectic: in one block we can see everything from the beginning of the twentieth century to twenty-first-century International Style revival.

January 9, 2022
Engine House Fifty-Seven, Brookline

A firehouse that looks like the Platonic ideal of a firehouse. The tower commands a view that must extend for miles: not only is the tower itself tall, but the station is built at the crest of a hill.

Addendum: The architects were Thomas W. Boyd & Co. This is a near-duplicate of the firehouse by the same firm at 3000 Chartiers Avenue, Sharaden, even though that one is dated 1928, eighteen years later

January 7, 2022
Ash Wednesday in Brookline

You can tell it’s Ash Wednesday because churches in all the neighborhoods are offering fish ’n’ at. This church in Brookline was Presbyterian until recently, but now appears to be nondenominational.

February 17, 2021
The Boulevard

Brookline Boulevard, known simply as “the Boulevard” in the neighborhood, is the broadest commercial street in Pittsburgh—which surprises visitors from flat cities, where it would be at best a middling business street. It’s a curiously one-sided business strip: almost all the businesses are on the southwest side, the northeast side being primarily residential.

That may be because, for much of the neighborhood’s life, it was effectively two streets. When trolleys ran in Brookline, Brookline Boulevard was two narrow strips for cars, with trolleys in a separate median in the middle—much like Broadway in Dormont along the current Red Line. Removing the trolleys and paving the median created the exceptionally broad street.

The Brookline business district is one that is seldom thought of as a destination for shoppers from out of the neighborhood. But it should be. It has very few chain stores, but it is prosperous enough that storefronts are seldom empty for long. The result is a delightful mix of little one-off shops, cafés, and ethnic restaurants.

The tower in the distance is the lookout tower of Engine House Fifty-Seven.

February 15, 2021