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.)
Now St. Paul Baptist Church. Built in 1887, it was designed by Brooklyn architect Lawrence B. Valk, whose church designs can be found all over the country. (In about 1900, Valk and his son moved to Los Angeles, where they became bungalow specialists but continued turning out the occasional church.)
The tower with its huge open Romanesque arch dominates the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Penn Avenue. After the tower, the most eye-catching thing is the porch, with its even huger arch and its crust of terra-cotta tiles.
The side entrance also gets a big arch, and even the basement door gets a stony arched porch.
This church has a complicated history. It was built as the Tenth United Presbyterian Church. In 1940, it was sold to the Catholic Diocese and became Mary Immaculate Church, the Italian parish in Dutchtown. It went through several parish mergers and names—Our Lady, Queen of Peace, being the most recent—before being sold again, and today it serves as Jonah’s Call Anglican Church. The original church is a typical Pittsburgh corner-tower Protestant church, but the Catholics made it their own with some fine sculpture, to which the Anglicans fortunately have no objection. The Catholic congregation also moved the main entrance, which had been in the tower; the old entrance made a good frame for the Blessed Virgin.
Built for a German Reformed congregation, Imanuel Evangelical Church later became a Methodist church, and then an art gallery. This is another city church with the sanctuary upstairs.
The inscription on the front tells us that the church was built in 1859 and rebuilt in 1889. Father Pitt does not know how extensive the rebuilding was, but he might guess that the ground-floor windows on the side, with their angular Gothic arches, were from the 1859 building. The carved stonework ornaments probably date from 1889.
Whenever old Pa Pitt looks into Romanesque foliage and sees somebody looking back at him, he suspects our master of Romanesque grotesqueries, Achille Giammartini.
Exactly two years ago today, Father Pitt paid a visit to this unique church, one of the most imaginative works of architect Thomas Cox McKee. At the time, he had no idea the church would be demolished a few months later, or he would have documented it more carefully. Looking back on the pictures he published then, old Pa Pitt decided they were lousy, not to mince words. As a memorial to the vanished building, he decided to go back to the original images and see if he could make better pictures out of them. Two years from now, Father Pitt will look back at these pictures and think they were lousy and he could do better, but the delight of a life of constant learning is seeing incremental improvement.
To put the pictures in context, we reprint the text of the article we published two years ago:
Now known as Shady Avenue Christian Assembly, after having spent many years as Shady Avenue Presbyterian Church (without the “Cumberland”).
Just down the street from the huge and spectacular Calvary Episcopal and Sacred Heart Catholic churches, each the size of many a cathedral, this 1889 church is likely to pass unnoticed. Once you do notice it, though, you will not stop noticing it. It is a bravura performance in a sort of Queen Anne Romanesque style by a Victorian architect who was about 22 years old at the time, and who was not afraid to pull out all the stops and stomp on the pedals for all he was worth. An entire issue of the East Ender, the East End Historical Society’s newsletter, was devoted to the architect, T. C. McKee (PDF), and we take all our information from Justin P. Greenawalt with profound gratitude for his research.
Thomas Cox McKee (usually known as T. C. McKee) was apprenticed to architect James W. Drum. But in 1886, when young McKee was still only 20, his master was run over by a freight train. Instead of looking for another apprentice position, McKee went out on his own and seems to have been successful right away. He later built a comfortable practice designing homes for the wealthy and small to medium-sized commercial buildings, along with at least one prominent school (the Belmar School in Homewood, still standing). Then, in 1910, he threw it all away and went to Cleveland, where he took odd jobs until he settled down as a designer of soda fountains. No one seems to know what happened, although Mr. Greenawalt’s article hints that it might have had something to do with McKee’s constitutional extravagance.
That extravagance comes through in every detail of this building. In the age of modernism, this sort of thing was dismissed as a bunch of Victorian noise, but the masses are balanced to form interesting compositions from every angle.
The much more conventional 1911 addition (although even it is a little bit fantastical) was designed by Rodgers & Minnis. Below we see it across the pile of dirt that used to be Shady Hill Center until the property became too valuable to host a suburban-style strip mall.
On the corner of North Avenue and Middle Street stands this small but imposing German Lutheran church, built in 1877. Father Pitt is fairly sure the Lutherans have gone, though the church site (last updated in 2010) is still on line. The Urban Impact ministry remains.
“St. Matthew’s German Evangelical Lutheran Church, built 1877.”
Connoisseurs of such things will note that this is a church with the sanctuary upstairs.
The hefty tower was added in a burst of prosperity about 25 years after the church was built.
Meanwhile, just across narrow Middle Street was a different kind of Lutheran church. And although old Pa Pitt gave this article a humorous headline, he is fairly sure there was no battle. Pittsburgh learned the virtue of tolerance: those other Lutherans across the street may be completely wrong about everything that is most important in life, but they’re our neighbors, and we wave to them when we see them on the street.
St. Mark’s was built in 1892. After its Lutheran congregation left, it was a Church of God in Christ until a few years ago. It has recently been expensively refurbished and painted black (it used to be painted brick red). Old Pa Pitt has not heard who was responsible for the refurbishing, but all the stained glass was removed, which is often the sign of a Pentecostal congregation moving in.
Except for the loss of the glass, the church is in very good shape externally, and it is a fine example of Pittsburgh Rundbogenstil—the round-arched German style that mixes classical and Romanesque elements.
Designed by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow very early in their practice, this house was built in 1888. For a long time it served as the parsonage for Trinity Lutheran Church next door, which created the odd spectacle of a church whose parsonage was taller and grander than the sanctuary.
If you look for downspouts on this house, you won’t find them. Oral tradition says that Mr. Boggs, one of the founders of the Boggs & Buhl department store, hated gutters; at any rate, his architects devised a system of internal drainage that, when it works, carries runoff through channels in the walls. When it doesn’t work, the grand staircase is a waterfall on a rainy day. When the church sold the house, the buyers had to spend a million dollars refurbishing it, and making the drainage system work again was where a lot of the money went. The house is now a boutique hotel under the name Boggs Mansion.
Seen from Climax Street in Beltzhoover. Old Pa Pitt will disclose that there were bunches of utility cables in the way, but to make an idealized view of the building rather than the utility grid, he took them out. If there are blackouts in your idealized Beltzhoover, you know why.
