Father Pitt

Category: Churches

St. Pamphilus Church (Our Lady of Victory Church), Beechview

Casimir Pellegrini Associates were the architects of this church, whose cornerstone was laid in 1963. It was a Franciscan parish until just a few years ago. Unlike some other abandoned Catholic churches, this one has a happy ending: it was bought by the thriving Lebanese Maronite Catholic congregation of Our Lady of Victory, which began in Brookline (or arguably earlier in the Lower Hill) and spent years banished to the wilds of Scott Township. In honor of Pittsburgh’s best Lebanese festival, which begins today and lasts all weekend, here are quite a few pictures of St. Pamphilus/Our Lady of Victory, which old Pa Pitt has done his best to make look like period-appropriate Kennedy-era Kodachrome slides.

The Our Lady of Victory congregation has graciously allowed St. Pamphilus to stay in his home on the front wall of the church, where he distributes bread to begging hands.

Father Pitt will admit that he does not find the nave the most attractive of all our church buildings. It is dignified and spacious, and that is enough. But the tower, a mailbox on stilts, captures his imagination, and he would hate to see anything happen to it.

The church was dedicated to St. Pamphilus, but it is St. Francis who greets you at the door with his usual motto “Pax et bonum.”

This shrine to Our Lady of Victory is now in its third location.

Father Pitt makes it a practice to try to record all the names on a war memorial, because sometimes things happen to inscriptions. If you enlarge this picture, every name should be clearly legible.

A plaque remembers Msgr. Elias P. Basil, the founding pastor of Our Lady of Victory parish. He had been pastor of St. Anne’s, the Maronite church in the Lower Hill. The story is that he promised St. Mary that, if all his parishioners came home safe from the Second World War, he would build a church in her honor. They did, and he did.

St. Anne Church was on Fulton, later Fullerton, Street, one of the Lower Hill streets that no longer exist because they were urban-renewaled to death. This cornerstone was preserved from the demolished church.

Sony Alpha 3000; Nikon COOLPIX P100.

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September 5, 2025
Mount Lebanon Baptist Church, Dormont

Mount Lebanon Baptist Church has been without a congregation since 2013, but it is kept up, and we hope it has or finds a sympathetic owner. In spite of the name, the church is in Dormont, which was in the “Mount Lebanon district” until it became a separate borough.

The church was put up in 1930; the architects were Lawrence Wolfe (the middle term in a dynasty of Wolfes who were in the architecture business for more than a century) in association with Smith & Reif.

This decoration seems to be meant to represent an outdoor pulpit of the sort that was popular in medieval times. It is not functional, or at least not easily used, but it does send the message that the minister could step out here and denounce the whole borough if it became necessary.

For hardware connoisseurs, here are some very elegant door pulls and locks.

Grape vines in Gothic style make up most of the carved decoration.

Olympus E-20N; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

Some of the decorations verge on an Art Deco interpretation of Gothic.

We have more pictures of Mount Lebanon Baptist Church in different lighting at a different season.

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August 31, 2025
St. Patrick’s Church and Cemetery, Noblestown

According to the parish history at the diocesan site, this church was built in 1900, after previous buildings had been destroyed by fire twice in the 1890s. In old Pa Pitt’s opinion, the black tinted window coverings do the church no favors, but no one asked him.

Behind the church is a cemetery remarkable for its precipitous slope, which makes it necessary for some plots to be terraced.

Olympus E-20N; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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August 31, 2025
Rennerdale First United Presbyterian Church

The little village of Rennerdale sits halfway between Carnegie and Oakdale on the Noblestown Road. This corner-tower frame church, with its Colonial-style details, reminds us of the Noblestown Methodist Episcopal Church designed by James Allison; and since we know that Allison designed other buildings in the area, it would not surprise us to find that he was responsible for this one. It has been swathed in artificial siding, as our few surviving frame churches usually are; but the siding men did an unusually good job of making sure that the windows and doors were properly framed. The church still belongs to its original congregation.

There’s still a bell in that belfry.

Olympus E-20N.

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August 26, 2025
Third Presbyterian Church, Shadyside

“Mrs. Thaw’s chocolate church” was what the neighbors called it, since the brownstone church was largely built with Thaw money. The architect was Theophilus P. Chandler, Jr., a name that sounds as though its bearer was summoned into being to have his suspenders cut by the Marx Brothers.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Sony Alpha 3000.

More pictures of Third Presbyterian.

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August 24, 2025
Waverly Presbyterian Church, Park Place

A magnificent building that takes full advantage of a magnificent site, right at the busy corner of Forbes and Braddock Avenues. It was dedicated in 1930; the architects were Ingham & Boyd, who abstracted the Gothic style into a cool and elegant modernism that does not look dated at all almost a century later.

When the cornerstone was laid on November 17, 1928, the Press described the planned facilities:

The new church will be of early English gothic style of architecture. The contract for the erection of the church has been awarded to Edward A. Wehr, noted builder of a number of famous churches in Pittsburgh and other cities. The seating capacity of the new edifice will be slightly in excess of 600. The exterior walls will be of Indiana limestone. The roof will be an “open timber” roof, with wood trusses exposed. In the vestibule, oak paneling will be used to the top of the doors, with plaster above and an oak beam ceiling. The floor of the vestibule will be tile. Paneled and carved woodwork will be used at the front of the auditorium, the pulpit, reading desk, choir gallery and organ screen being designed as a unit to create a focal point in the design at this location. Temporary windows will be of leaded glass of good quality, in the hope that from time to time these temporary windows may be replaced with memorial windows of stained glass, of high quality in design and workmanship.

That the assembly room on the ground floor may be used as a social room as well as for Sunday school purposes, a temporary kitchen has been arranged for, adjoining. At the opposite end of the assembly room, shower baths and locker rooms have been provided in accordance with the original intention of using this room for recreational purposes also.

—“Sunday Service to Mark Start on New Church,” Pittsburgh Press, November 17, 1928, p. 5.

Pittsburgh Press, May 18, 1930, p. 23.

Olympus E-20N; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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August 24, 2025
Pittsburgh New Church, Point Breeze

This picturesque church, built for the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem in 1930, still serves its original congregation, now under the name “The New Church.” The architect was Harold Thorpe Carswell, who had been an apprentice of Ralph Adams Cram; to judge by the few references to him on line, this is one of his best-known works. Few Pittsburghers ever see it, however, because it sits at the end of a one-block dead-end residential street in Point Breeze.

The inscription, in florid medievalistic lettering, reads, “Nunc licet intrare in arcana fidei”—an abridged quotation from Swedenborg, which we may translate as “Now we are permitted to enter into the hidden things of the faith.”

The attached school is in a complementary Tudor style.

Olympus E-20N.

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August 17, 2025
Church of the Atonement, Carnegie

Utility cables were removed from this picture, because Father Pitt could not remove them from the street.

With almost complete confidence, old Pa Pitt attributes this Episcopal church to Ingham & Boyd. It speaks the same dialect of Gothic as some of their other churches, and they are known to have designed the parish house that was built just before the church. However, Father Pitt has not yet found the documentary evidence that would remove the “almost” from his statement.

The cornerstone was laid on October 5, 1930. At the same time, one stone taken from the foundation of Old St. Luke’s in nearby Woodville was also laid in the foundation of this church, to tie it to the pre-Revolutionary tradition of Episcopalianism in Allegheny County.¹

Olympus E-20N.

This parish house is known from several listings to have been the work of Ingham & Boyd,² and it was built just a little before the church itself. The architects looked to vernacular Western Pennsylvania farmhouses for their inspiration. We do not know what inspired the designer of the modern vestibule.

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August 10, 2025
Noblestown Methodist Episcopal Church

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

Yesterday we looked at the Oakdale Public School, one of the earliest commissions for James E. Allison. Here, just a short distance to the west in the old village of Noblestown, is another Allison building¹ from a little over a year later—a small frame church that, although it has been coated with artificial siding, still retains some of its distinctive character. The form is the irregular square popular in small Romanesque churches of Victorian times, but the details are Georgian, including the big window. The half-round protrusion in front indicates a Sunday-school room built on the popular Akron Plan. The congregation dissolved a few years ago, but the building is in use by a veterans’ organization called Heroes Supporting Heroes.

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August 8, 2025
Gustavus Adolphus Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Church, Bloomfield

Gustavus Adolphus was a Swedish congregation that began in Lawrenceville, but in 1908 it bought this lot at Evaline Street and Friendship Avenue. O. M. Topp, the favorite architect among Lutherans, was commissioned to design this imposing Gothic building.¹

Topp’s design, from “Cornerstone Laid in Storm,” Pittsburgh Gazette Times, July 13, 1908.

The cornerstone was laid in a howling storm on July 13, 1908,² and the church was completed in seven months—except for the main auditorium. It seems the congregation ran short of money and worshiped in the basement social room for several years. The main church was finally finished in 1916.

The church is now called Evaline Lutheran, but it is still Lutheran, and its spires still point heavenward—an unusual survival: probably a majority of churches of the era have lost their spires and must be content with bareheaded towers. It also has not been cleaned of its historic soot, making it one of our increasingly rare black stone churches.

Olympus E-20N; Samsung A15 5G.

The Tudor-style parsonage next door was also designed by Topp and built at the same time; it was connected with the church through the pastor’s study.

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August 3, 2025