Originally the First United Presbyterian Church, this congregation merged with the Bellefield Presbyterian Church down the street, which sold its building (of which only the tower remains) and moved here, with the compensation that this church was renamed Bellefield Presbyterian. The building, designed by William Boyd and built in 1896, is festooned with a riot of carved Romanesque ornaments.
Each one of these cherubs has a different face and different ornamental carving surrounding it.
There were two large Presbyterian churches around the corner from each other in Bellevue, both called Bellevue Presbyterian. The other one was the United Presbyterian congregation, and old Pa Pitt will pause for a moment to let the laugh track do its job. The church we see here was later called Northminster Presbyterian, and it is now home to the New Life Community Church.
Of course, in the glory days of steel and coal, the building was not quite so pale, as we see in this old postcard:
The Baroque style is unusual, but St. Stephen’s is a Frederick Sauer church through and through, starting with that yellow Kittanning brick he favored. We’ll have to wait till the leaves drop to get a view of the front, but since the building is slowly crumbling, it’s good to get the details as soon as we can.
Update: An Iranian correspondent who does not seem to be a spammer has left a remark that Google Translate renders as “We have a similar example in Iran from Sar Setun.” Although it would not have occurred to him before, Father Pitt now notices how much this ornate entrance porch resembles certain examples of Islamic architecture.
There are countless pictures in Father Pitt’s archives that are not good enough to publish, but every once in a while he realizes that he has forgotten to publish a perfectly adequate one. He went looking for his article on this church in Allentown because he had just identified the architect, and the article was nowhere to be found. So here it is, almost a year after the picture was taken. The architect was E. V. Dennick, as we learn from The Construction Record in 1915: “Architect E. V. Denick, 1212 House Building, is taking bids on erecting a one-story and basement brick and sandstone church on Excelsior Street, Allentown, for the Bethlehem Lutheran Congregation.” (On another page of the same magazine, the architect’s name is spelled “Denick,” and it is usually spelled that way in other listings.)
From the front this appears to be another one of our churches with the sanctuary upstairs, but the building is set into the hill, and therefore justifies the magazine’s description as “one-story and basement.”
The tower of East Liberty Presbyterian dominates the neighborhood in a way few buildings do in any urban setting.
Although we don’t find it listed among his works, Father Pitt suspects that this school may have been designed by John T. Comès. The polychrome brickwork and crenellations remind us of some of his more famous churches, and the fact that the parish hired his disciple Leo McMullen to design the main church after Comès was dead may be suggestive. If anyone at the parish knows who designed this building, Father Pitt would greatly appreciate a comment.
Obviously the parish was getting ready for a festival when old Pa Pitt stopped by a few weeks ago.
This beautiful little Romanesque church is one of our few remaining black stone churches; some day the stones may be cleaned, and the church will lose some of its character. It was built in the early 1900s—the land was purchased in 1906—and it has remained more or less the same since then, as we can see from an old postcard view.
The church was originally the First United Presbyterian Church of Etna; in 1918 it was renamed after the beloved founding pastor. A lush growth of utility cables mars this view, but the picture demonstrates a curious property of the tower: it has the ability to look taller or shorter than the main roof, depending on the angle of view.
The steeply pitched roof and tiny triangular dormers remind us more than a little of H. H. Richardson’s Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Allegheny West:
We can be fairly sure the resemblance was intentional, since Richardson was still, twenty years after his death, by far the most famous architect in the Romanesque idiom. Note the buttresses on the Etna church, which Emmanuel lacks. That may also be a lesson learned from Richardson: the bulging walls of his Emmanuel Episcopal were not intended.
Built in 1904 as the First Congregational Church, this building had a surprisingly short life with its original congregation; the Congregationalists left in 1921, and the Greek Orthodox congregation bought it in 1923. The church became a cathedral when Pittsburgh was elevated to a diocese. The architect was Thomas Hannah, who was at home in both classical and Gothic idioms. Here he went all in for classical, producing an ostentatiously Ionic front that looks like a Greek temple—which, oddly, is a style a Greek Orthodox congregation would never choose for its church if it were building one from scratch.
John T. Comès was probably Pittsburgh’s most prolific architect of Catholic churches—a record made all the more remarkable by the fact that he died at the age of 49. His favorite style was Romanesque, and in the out-of-the-way back streets of Etna we find this masterpiece, built in 1914, that shows him at the peak of his creative power. It has all of Comès’ quirks. Unlike many other American architects who worked in the Romanesque style, he enthusiastically embraced the almost gaudy polychrome stripes and patterns typical of medieval Romanesque masterpieces. The bells in their cutout arches also seem like a thoroughly Comès detail.
With the light from the wrong angle, this composite picture of the front was about the best old Pa Pitt could do.
It is sad to report that the last Lutheran congregation in Sharpsburg has thrown in the towel. (There were once three Lutheran churches: this English one and two German ones.) The good news, however, is that Sharpsburg is becoming a trendier neighborhood, and it will be worth adapting this distinctive building to some other use. It is a sort of Jacobean Gothic with more than a whiff of Art Nouveau.
