Father Pitt

Category: Churches

St. Henry Church, Arlington

St. Henry Church has been abandoned for years, and it is slowly rotting away. Yet the neighborhood still remembers it as a point of pride: when Father Pitt was taking pictures along Arlington Avenue the other day, some locals stopped to talk and immediately asked, “Did you see our church?”

And, of course, our utility cables.

St. Henry was designed by Marlier & Johnstone and built in 1952, when the neighborhood was thriving.

Each of those squares had a symbolic relief at its center, with a big metal cross in the middle of the façade. Those have all been taken away, because when Catholics abandon a building, they generally preserve whatever is unique and valuable about it and place it in another parish if possible. It does leave the building looking stripped, but we can understand the impulse.

The entrance is sharply drawn in a style that flavors modern with just a bit of late Art Deco.

An abstract cross-topped cupola.

An exhibition of utility cables.

The rectory is older than the church; it is hard to guess the age of it, and it has been added to in various eras and various styles.

Nikon COOLPIX P100.

The school next to the church has been abandoned twice. It was a public primary school for a while after the parochial school closed, but the public school closed a few years ago.

December 22, 2024
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Highland Park

Built in 1905–1909, St. Andrew’s was designed by Carpenter & Crocker, who seem to have been favorites among the Episcopalians of Pittsburgh: they also designed the parish house for the cathedral downtown and St. James’ in Homewood, now the Church of the Holy Cross. This building is dominated by its outsized tower.

Very grouchy gargoyles guard the tower.

An ornamental pinnacle on one corner of the tower.

The side entrance, with one of its lanterns.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

December 22, 2024
St. Anne’s Church, Castle Shannon
Edward J. Schulte was a master of the modern in ecclesiastical architecture. Wherever he went, all over the United States, he left churches that were uncompromisingly modern in their details, but also uncompromisingly traditional in their adaptation to Christian worship. St. Anne’s, which was finished in 1962, is a fine example of his work.

A date stone on the grounds.

The details are modern, but the form of the church is perfectly adapted to the ancient Christian liturgy. Too many modern architects expected the liturgy to adapt to the building, but Mr. Schulte obviously knew Christian tradition.

We might point to the baptistery as an illustration of what we mean.

It’s a strikingly modern building, bang up to date for the Kennedy administration. But in its form and position it reminds us of…

…the Baptistery of Neon in Ravenna, seen here in a photograph from A History of Architecture in Italy by Charles A. Cummings (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1901). Built in the late 300s or early 400s, it was originally an extension of a large basilica, just like this baptistery. The one in Ravenna is one of the oldest Christian buildings still standing; Mr. Schulte reached right back to Roman imperial days to find his inspiration.

The most striking feature of the church is a detached bell tower more than a hundred feet high.

The tower was donated by the United Steelworkers of America in honor of Philip Murray, the union’s first president. St. Anne’s was his home parish, and he is buried in St. Anne’s Cemetery.

A relief of St. Anne and St. Mary is accompanied by a quotation from Psalm 44 in the Vulgate numbering (Psalm 45 in the numbering used in Protestant and newer Catholic Bibles).

The (liturgical) west front of the church¹ is a balaced composition in geometry and symbolism.

Some roof work was going on when old Pa Pitt visited. (Update: A parishioner informs us that the work was in the basement, including an elevator, which is doubtless why we saw workers on the roof.)

The entrance to the convent.

Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
1. In traditional churches, the altar end is always referred to as “east,” even when it is not in the east by the compass. The end opposite the altar, where the main entrance is traditionally placed, is thus the west, and if—as in this case—the compass says the west front faces northeast, then the compass is entitled to its opinion. ↩︎
December 15, 2024
Watson Memorial Presbyterian Church, Observatory Hill

Designed by Allison & Allison, this stony Romanesque church was renamed Riverview Presbyterian in 1977, when, we suppose, no one remembered Watson anymore. After sitting vacant for a while, it now has a nondenominational congregation called Pittsburgh Higher Ground, and we wish them long life and prosperity in this beautiful building.

Old Pa Pitt thinks writers on architecture tend to throw the name “Richardsonian” in front of the term “Romanesque” far too thoughtlessly, but there is no question about this church. It is very Richardsonian, right down to the little triangular dormers on the roof. Compare them to the ones on Richardson’s famous Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Allegheny West:

This is the architectural equivalent of a direct quotation.

Sony Alpha 3000; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

December 8, 2024
Bethel Baptist Church (Zion Christian Church), Carrick

Now Zion Christian Church. The cornerstone tells us that the congregation was founded in 1908, and its first building was at the corner of Birmingham Avenue and Hays Avenue (now Amanda Street)—a small frame chapel that must have quickly become woefully overcrowded, since this building many times the size was constructed less than twenty years later.

Plat map showing the original location of Bethel Baptist.

“The membership is 381, as compared with a membership of 30 in 1908,” says the Gazette Times of February 18, 1925, when the plans for the new building were announced.

Pittsburgh Gazette-Times, February 18, 1925

The architect was Walter H. Gould, “a member of the church,” and so far this is the only building attributed to him that Father Pitt knows about. However, it is an accomplished if not breathtakingly original design, so there must be other Gould buildings lurking about, probably in the South Hills neighborhoods. Comparing the published rendering above with the church as it stands today shows us that the tower grew about a floor’s worth of height between conception and construction—a rare example, perhaps, of an architect being told that his original design was not ambitious enough.

“By spirit and faith and the help of God.”

Nikon COOLPIX P100.

December 1, 2024
St. Joseph’s Church, Bloomfield

For about a century and a third, this church was one of the main centers of life in Bloomfield. Now that all the Catholic churches in Bloomfield are closed, incredible as it may seem in our most Italian neighborhood, an Italian Catholic who lives in Bloomfield cannot walk to Mass without making a serious expedition of it.

The church was built in 1886; the architect was Adolf or Adolphus Druiding, who also designed Ss. Peter and Paul in Larimer/East Liberty, which is likely to vanish soon now that the neighborhood is becoming too valuable to leave an abandoned wreck standing.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

The rectory next to the church has been damaged by the installation of windows in the wrong size and style, but otherwise is in good shape.

Samsung A15 5G.

November 24, 2024
Unity Presbyterian Church, Green Tree

Originally the Wallace Memorial Presbyterian Church. In 2013, Dormont Presbyterian Church closed, and its congregation merged with this one; the two congregations together took the appropriate name Unity.

The current church building was put up in 1952 in the fashionable New England Colonial style; it’s a good example of that type.

The smaller Gothic church replaced by the 1952 church is still standing next to it, now in use as a music school.

Kodak EasyShare Z981; Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

November 17, 2024
St. Stanislaus Kostka Church, Strip

Frederick Sauer designed St. Stanislaus Kostka, which was built in 1891. The church presides dramatically over the broad plaza of Smallman Street. It used to look out on a sea of railroad tracks, but its view improved considerably when the Pennsylvania Railroad built its colossal Produce Terminal.

Nikon COOLPIX P100.

It is probable that the rectory, done in a matching style, was also designed by Sauer. The glass blocks are not an improvement, but they have kept the building standing and in use.

November 10, 2024
Some Details of the Church of the Ascension, Shadyside

Construction of the new addition was still finishing up when old Pa Pitt last visited. Here is a pile of stones.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Kodak Retinette with Kentmere Pan 100 film.

More pictures of the Church of the Ascension, and some pictures of the church in 2013, when it still wore a coat of black.

November 3, 2024
Ingomar Methodist Episcopal Church

This is an old congregation, founded in 1837, and its adjoining cemetery has some stones dating from shortly after that. It has grown continuously; the building you see here was designed by Chauncey W. Hodgdon and built in 1915, and encrusted with additions fore and aft in later years. But the congregation (still Methodist, but advertising itself these days just as “Ingomar Church”) outgrew this church and built a much bigger one across the street; this is now the Ingomar Church Community Life Center.

The 1915 church was originally built very cheaply; its final cost of about $9,000 was roughly equivalent to the price of two middle-class houses at the time. A good history of the church was written in 1962 by Margaret L. Sweeney, and we take our information from that booklet (but we have corrected the spelling of the architect’s name).

Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

The new building across the street is in a grandiose New Classical style that recalls colonial New England churches and refracts them through a Postmodernist lens.

Ingomar is an unincorporated community that straddles two municipalities. Most of the church grounds and the cemetery are in the borough of Franklin Park, but the border with McCandless Township runs diagonally through this building.

October 27, 2024