Father Pitt

Category: Churches

  • All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Brighton Heights

    All Saints’ Episcopal Church

    Disclosure: old Pa Pitt took some utility cables out of some of these pictures. Fans of Pittsburgh utility cables will have to look elsewhere today.

    A beautiful Gothic church from the 1930s. It is typical of Episcopal churches in Pittsburgh: small but rich, Gothic in style, with a steeply pitched roof that makes up more than half the height of the building. The architects were Ingham & Boyd.1

    Front
    Front entrance

    The wooden wheelchair ramp is not the most elegant solution to the problem of access, but it does its job without permanent damage to the building.

    Loaves and fishes

    Loaves and fishes.

    Pelican

    The pelican, a symbol of Christ. In medieval zoology, the pelican was known for feeding her young with her own blood. Modern zoology disputes the data, but as symbolism the legend is irresistible.

    Vine

    Vine and pilaster capitals at the main entrance.

    Oblique view
    Lawn

    According to the church site, the neatly kept lawn was once the site of a parsonage.

    Side of the building
    1. Source: “Episcopalians Planning North Side Edifice,” Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, March 30, 1930. Also, “Big Six Who Shaped Face of Pittsburgh To Be Honored for Outstanding Work,” Pittsburgh Press, January 13, 1952, where it is listed among Ingham’s works, along with other Ingham & Boyd projects. Thanks to David Schwing for these clippings. In an earlier version of this article, Father Pitt had admitted ignorance of the architect, but the discovery of the attribution is not surprising, since Ingham & Boyd did several other churches in a very similar style. ↩︎

  • Saint Nicholas Orthodox Church, Homestead

    Saint Nicholas Orthodox Church, Homestead

    Many other Eastern churches have gilded or painted domes, but these domes are genuine made-in-Homestead stainless steel. Saint Nicholas Orthodox Church has its own Wikipedia article. It is a Ruthenian, or Rusyn, or Carpatho-Russian congregation that belongs to the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese, a group of Ruthenian churches that left the Roman Catholic Church because the American bishops refused to allow them to keep their Eastern Rite traditions, notably married clergy. (The problem was later addressed with a separate Ruthenian Greek Catholic hierarchy for North America—too late to prevent this particular split.) The building itself was begun in 1936, but, what with one thing and another, it was not completed until 1950.

    It was a day of sun and clouds, so we have pictures in very different lighting.

    In the sun
    From the north
    Entrance

  • First Baptist Church, Oakland

    Designed by Bertram Goodhue in the Perpendicular Gothic style, this church emphasizes verticality. We also have pictures of the interior of First Baptist.

  • St. Francis Xavier Church, Brighton Heights

    St. Francis Xavier Church, Brighton Heights

    Architect William P. Hutchins certainly made the most of the site. He had a hillside location, a prominent intersection, and a lot of space to work with, so he oriented the building diagonally and gave the church a west front (liturgically speaking) that hits us with an outsized magnificence as we come up California Avenue. The church was built in 1927; the style is Perpendicular Gothic, and already shows some signs of the streamlining that would mark Hutchins’ later works. (To see how far he would take that streamlining, have a look at Resurrection Church in Brookline, one of Hutchins’ last churches.)

    Entrance with clouds
    To get the building, the distant hill, and the clouds all properly exposed took three different exposures, all mashed together in one high-dynamic-range photograph. That is how much work Father Pitt is willing to do for you, his readers.
    Entrance
    Shields

    Shields in relief over the three main doors honor important saints with their symbolic attributes.

    Shields
    Shields
    Cornerstone

    The cornerstone. The Latin inscription says, “This is the house of God and the gate of heaven.”

    Side view of the church

    Old Pa Pitt noticed that Wikimedia Commons had no current pictures of landmarks in the very pleasant neighborhood of Brighton Heights, except for a few pictures of the Sacrifice monument, most of them taken by Father Pitt. That lacuna has now been filled, and we will be seeing many of the pictures in the next couple of weeks.

  • Park Place A. M. E. Church, Homestead

    Park Place A. M. E. Church

    There has been an A. M. E. church on this site for a long time: a frame church appears on an 1891 map of Homestead. This modest but rich little Tudor Gothic building, with its matching parsonage, dates from 1920, and faces a pleasant park on a pleasant street. It fits well with its neighbors, not overwhelming them but still announcing itself as a church.

    Front of the church

  • The Back of Bellefield Presbyterian Church on a Rainy Day

    Rear of Bellefield Presbyterian Church

    Pedestrians and drivers often see the front of this magnificent Romanesque church, but few ever notice the back. It is plainer but still interesting in its masses, with the half-round auditorium characteristic of many Methodist and Presbyterian churches in the late 1800s.

    The front (seen below in a picture from last year) is also given a round bulge, so that the whole building seems to orbit around that polygonal central tower.

    Front of the church

    Old Pa Pitt will repeat what he said the last time he published pictures of Bellefield Presbyterian Church:

    The church was built in 1896 as the First United Presbyterian Church; the architect was William Boyd, who gave the congregation the most fashionably Richardsonian interpretation of Romanesque he could manage. It was more or less in competition with the original Bellefield Presbyterian, of which only the tower now remains. But in 1967 the two congregations merged. They kept this building, renamed it Bellefield Presbyterian, and abandoned the old Bellefield Presbyterian up the street, which was later demolished for an office block.

  • Uxor Way and St. Michael’s Church, South Side

    This is one of those only-in-Pittsburgh views: a glorious Romanesque church on the Slopes hovering over little frame alley houses on the Flats. St. Michael’s (now the Angel’s Arms apartments) was designed by Charles F. Bartberger, father of, and often confused with, the prolific Charles M. Bartberger.

  • St. Joseph’s Church, Sharpsburg

    St. Joseph’s Church

    Now Madonna of Jerusalem Church of Christ the King Parish, which also includes the St. Joseph Church that once lived in this building but handed it over to Madonna of Jerusalem in 1960. This building was finished in 1874, but it was built around an earlier school from 1869. It is a typical nineteenth-century Pittsburgh Gothic church, with the buttresses and crenellations we expect from the style.

  • Domes of St. John the Baptist

    These famous domes figure in many postcard views of Pittsburgh. There are actually two St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic churches on the South Side. This, the Ukrainian one, is the one everyone sees. The lesser-known one is on Jane Street near 18th; it belongs to a Ruthenian congregation that split from the larger St. John the Baptist to have its own liturgy in its own language.

    The picture above is a high-dynamic-range image made from three separate photographs at different exposures. Below, the church from across the Monongahela.

  • Bell Tower, Duquesne University Chapel

    This cupola on top of the chapel still has a working bell, never replaced by loudspeakers. That is an unusual thing in Pittsburgh.