Built in 1893 as Sixth United Presbyterian, this church was designed by William S. Fraser, who was a big deal in Pittsburgh in the later 1800s. Fraser adopted a very Richardsonian kind of Romanesque for this church, putting its congregation right at the top of the fashion heap for the moment.
Undated postcard, about 1900, from the Presbyterian Historical Society via Wikimedia Commons.
If you ask why there are two Presbyterian churches so close together—this and East Liberty Presbyterian—the answer is that there were two kinds of Presbyterians. Sixth U. P. belonged to the United Presbyterians, a Pittsburgh-based splinter group that eventually merged with the other Presbyterians in 1958. Most neighborhoods and boroughs with large Protestant populations thus had two Presbyterian churches—or more, since there were Reformed Presbyterians and Cumberland Presbyterians as well.
The stained glass is being restored slowly and carefully.
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.
Andrew Peebles was the architect of St. Peter’s, which was dedicated in 1874. In 1876, it became the cathedral of the new Roman Catholic Diocese of Allegheny, carved out of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, which was left with all the debt while the new Diocese of Allegheny took all the rich churches. That went about as well as you might expect, and in 1877 the Diocese of Allegheny was suppressed and its territory reabsorbed by Pittsburgh. But a church never quite gets over being a cathedral.
In 1886, a fire ravaged the building and left nothing but the walls standing. Fortunately Peebles’ original plans were saved, and so the restoration, which took a year and a half, was done to the original design.
The rectory was built with a stone front to match the church, but the rest of the house is brick.
Edward Stotz was the architect of the building for Epiphany Church, with considerable interior work done by John T. Comès. It was built in 1903 to replace the old St. Paul’s Cathedral downtown as the downtown parish church after Henry Frick made the Catholic Diocese an offer it couldn’t refuse, and Epiphany served as the temporary cathedral for three years while the new St. Paul’s was going up in Oakland.
When the Lower Hill was demolished for “slum clearance,” Epiphany and its school were the only buildings allowed to survive. Thus Pittsburgh accomplished, here and at Allegheny Center, what Le Corbusier had failed to do in Paris: we created a sterile modern wasteland punctuated by a few ancient landmarks pickled in brine.
These Romanesque columns and arches strongly remind old Pa Pitt of organ pipes.
Christ stands at the peak of the west front.
On Christ’s right hand, St. Peter with his key.
On Christ’s left hand, St. Paul with his book.
An angel with plenty of anti-pigeon armor prays for worshipers as they enter.
The school is built in a simpler Romanesque style that links and subordinates it to the church.
Officially the Lower Hill has ceased to exist. It is counted as part of downtown in the city’s administrative scheme. But it has never been integrated into downtown, and indeed was forcibly cut off from downtown by the Crosstown Boulevard—a bad mistake recently ameliorated somewhat by building a park on top of the boulevard. With the new FNB Financial Center and other developments, there is some hope that this neglected wasteland may become city again. Meanwhile, Epiphany, now part of Divine Mercy Parish, still serves downtown worshipers, and perhaps will be there for new residents as the neighborhood grows and changes.
This interesting modernist church was built in 1963, as we find from the attractive plaque by the entrance:
The balance of modern design and hand-crafted artisanship in the lettering is very appealing.
The architects of the church were Williams & Trebilcock.1 The church was dedicated on April 5, 1964; it replaced a building that had been next to the old Presbyterian Hospital. This building now belongs to Living Word Ministry.
You might pass this building by on your way up North Charles Street and never think of it as anything other than another outcropping of generic ugliness. In fact it is a rare surviving frame church from the 1880s. It has been covered in sheets of cartoon fake brick, and the windows have been halved, but the building is still here. It was built before 1890 on Gallagher Street, near the intersection with Taggart Street, as the Bethel Baptist Church. By about 1900, Gallagher had changed its name to Melrose Avenue, and this was known as the Melrose Avenue Presbyterian Church. It kept that name as Taggart Street changed to North Charles Avenue.
The Presbyterian congregation has almost been erased from history—it is hard to find more than glancing references to it—but the building has been occupied by a nondenominational congregation.
A year and a half ago, old Pa Pitt published pictures of St. Stephen Proto-Martyr, but he was unable to get a picture of the front, because the leaves were on the trees, and the front looked like this:
On a gloomy afternoon recently, however, he happened to be in Hazelwood, and the trees were only beginning to leaf, so it was possible to make out the building through the bare branches.
The church was built in 1902; it is one of the most important works of Frederick Sauer, and it is hanging by a thread. The building is not in regular use, but not precisely abandoned. We will describe it as Endangered on our six-point scale of Least Concern, Near Threatened, Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically Endangered, and Demolished.
To cut through the clutter of branches and bring out the building, Father Pitt tried several exposures with two different cameras and different kinds of processing afterward. He did not come up with any outstanding pictures, but at least the outlines of the design are clear now.
This modernist church was dedicated by Cardinal Wright in 1960. The architects were Belli & Belli of Chicago. The stained glass was by Pittsburgh’s Hunt Studios; the scribbly outlines visible from the outside are typical of their postwar work. The church was abandoned by the diocese, but the last old Pa Pitt heard it was being worked on for another use. (In fact there was a stop-work order pasted on the window when Father Pitt walked by in February, but he assumes that is just a minor misunderstanding that will be cleared up.)
