The life of Christ is depicted in relief at the main entrance to East Liberty Presbyterian Church. We believe the sculptor was John Angel (but we would be delighted to be corrected). Above, the Nativity.
The baptism of Christ by John the Baptist.
The Sermon on the Mount.
The Commission to the Disciples.
Christ washing the disciples’ feet.
The Last Supper.
“Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Parables and miracles of Christ are illustrated in the smaller panels below.
Ralph Adams Cram considered this church his greatest accomplishment, and it would be possible to argue that it is the greatest work of Gothic architecture in North America. Cram was intensely aware of the Gothic tradition, but he was not an imitator: he was as unique and original among the Gothicists as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe among the modernists. The tower of this church is a feast of Gothic detail, but it also takes inspiration from American skyscrapers, and it looms higher than the Highland Building, a steel-framed skyscraper across the street.
Cram himself was a high-church Episcopalian, a monarchist, and a member of the Society of King Charles the Martyr, so it is one of history’s amusing little jokes that his greatest work was built for Presbyterians. But the Mellons, Richard Beatty and Jennie King, gave him complete freedom—a privilege seldom granted even to the greatest architects. The Mellons poured so much money into this church that locals still call it the Mellon Fire Escape, and the late Franklin Toker guessed that it was probably, per square foot, the most expensive church ever built in America.
Back in 2014, old Pa Pitt took these pictures of the old St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Munhall. In the intervening years Father Pitt has learned much more about making adjustments to photographs to produce a finished picture that looks like the scene he photographed, so he presents these pictures again, “remastered” (as the recording artists would say) for higher fidelity.
The church was built in 1903 for a Greek Catholic (or Byzantine Catholic, as we would say today) congregation. When Pittsburgh became the seat of a Ruthenian diocese, this became the cathedral.
The mad genius Titus de Bobula, who was only 25 years old when this church was built, was the architect, and this building still causes architectural historians to gush like schoolgirls. It includes some of De Bobula’s trademarks, like the improbably tall and narrow arches in the towers and side windows and the almost cartoonishly weighty stone over the ground-level arches. It’s made up of styles and materials that no normal architect would put together in one building, and it all works. Enlarge the pictures and note the stonework corner crosses in the towers and all along the side, which we suspect were in the mind of John H. Phillips when he designed Holy Ghost Greek Catholic Church in the McKees Rocks Bottoms, which also makes use of De Bobulesque tall and narrow arches.
The rectory was designed by De Bobula at the same time.
This illustration of the church and rectory was published in January of 1920 in The Czechoslovak Review, but it appears from the style to be De Bobula’s own rendering of the buildings, including the people in 1903-vintage (definitely not 1920) costumes.
The Byzantine Catholic Cathedral moved to a modern building in 1993, still in Munhall, and this building now belongs to the Carpatho-Rusyn Society. According to the Web site, the organization is currently doing “extensive renovations,” which we hope will keep the church and rectory standing for years to come.
This church at the eastern end of the Great Soho Curve is one of our endangered landmarks. It is a great masterpiece of ecclesiastical architecture by the Pittsburgh genius John T. Comès, who died at the age of 49 but had already built a legacy of glorious churches and schools across the country. However, it belongs to Carlow University, and universities hate historic buildings with a burning passion—Carlow more than most. All that stands in the way of a multimillion-dollar building with a rich donor’s name on it is this stupid church, which isn’t doing anybody any good. All it’s useful for is assembling large numbers of people for some sort of religious observance, and what good is that to a Catholic university?
So we document its details as well as we can. There is a strong movement to preserve the church, but universities usually win these fights in the end.
The martyrdom of St. Agnes.
In the center: a Chi-Rho monogram with the Alpha and Omega. Left to right are the symbols of the four Evangelists: the lion of Mark, the eagle of John, the human face of Matthew, and the ox of Luke.
There’s still a bell in this tower.
The rectory next door is designed to match the church. It shows the Art Nouveau influence that Comès could combine effortlessly with historical models to produce a style uniquely his own.
This church, formerly First Presbyterian of Carnegie, now belongs to the Attawheed Islamic Center, which keeps the building up beautifully and lavishes a lot of attention on the landscaping. We can see from an old postcard from the Presbyterian Historical Society collection (undated, but probably about 1900) that this side of the building has hardly changed at all—except for the improvement in the landscaping. Even the stained glass is intact, since it is not representational and therefore causes no offense to Islamic principles.
At least two layers of educational buildings are behind the church.
Diagonally across Washington Avenue is another Presbyterian church…
…but this one was First United Presbyterian. The United Presbyterians were a Pittsburgh-based denomination that finally merged with those other Presbyterians in 1958. The building now is used as a banquet hall.
Dedicated in 1873, this church for an Irish parish was designed by James Sylvester Devlin, about whom old Pa Pitt knows only that he designed this church. It has closed as a parish, and when Pittsburgh Catholics leave a church they take everything distinctive and valuable with them, so that, for example, all the stained glass is gone. But the building is still in good shape.
Built in 1920 in an angular modern-Gothic style, this church served its original congregation until 2013, the year of the great collapse of Dormont mainline churches, when the Presbyterians, the Methodists, and the Baptists all threw in the towel. The building became a Buddhist temple for a while (the Buddhists gave it the current paint scheme), but it seems not to be active right now. It is, however, kept up well.
Thanks to the Gazette Times of September 13, 1920, we have a picture of Bishop McConnell of the M. E. Church laying laying “a copy of the Gazette Times containing announcement of the corner stone laying, coins of the present day, a list of trustees and a list of members of the Dormont and Banksville churches, recently combined” in the cornerstone.
This cornerstone is a top contender for the coveted title of Most Awkward Word Break on a Stone Inscription Outside a Country Graveyard.
It seems that another capsule was laid in 2009, four years before the church dissolved.
None of the news stories we found mentioned an architect, but we hope to find a name eventually.
Built in 1893 as Sixth United Presbyterian, this church was designed by William S. Fraser, who was a big deal in Pittsburgh in the later 1800s. Fraser adopted a very Richardsonian kind of Romanesque for this church, putting its congregation right at the top of the fashion heap for the moment.
Undated postcard, about 1900, from the Presbyterian Historical Society via Wikimedia Commons.
If you ask why there are two Presbyterian churches so close together—this and East Liberty Presbyterian—the answer is that there were two kinds of Presbyterians. Sixth U. P. belonged to the United Presbyterians, a Pittsburgh-based splinter group that eventually merged with the other Presbyterians in 1958. Most neighborhoods and boroughs with large Protestant populations thus had two Presbyterian churches—or more, since there were Reformed Presbyterians and Cumberland Presbyterians as well.
The stained glass is being restored slowly and carefully.
This odd-looking building has looked odd for nearly a century, but it was not meant to look this way. It has a story—one that it shared with a number of other churches in our area, but this one almost uniquely was frozen in the middle of the story.
On September 26, 1926, the Press reported that a permit had been issued for building the Carter Chapel of the Colored Methodist Episcopal church. (The denomination is now called Christian Methodist Episcopal, indicating that it is not limited to any particular race.)
The Carter chapel of the Colored Methodist Episcopal church congregation, through their pastor, the Rev. W. H. Wiggins, has applied to the bureau of buildings for a permit to construct a two-story brick and stone church edifice on a site at 2332-34 Bedford ave, to cost $50,000. The plans call for a building 48×97 feet, highly ornate in appearance, with all modern church conveniences and a seating capacity of approximately 500. L. O. Brosie, of this city, is the architect, and Miss Olivet [sic] Day, of Indianapolis, is the contractor.
Louis O. Brosie was a successful and well-established Pittsburgh architect who had been in business on his own since 1903. Olive A. Day (apparently misheard as “Olivet Day”) was an Indianapolis contractor who seems to have been a low bidder on small projects.
It seems that things did not run smoothly, and something interrupted the construction. On May 28, 1927, the Press reported,
Work on the new Carter Chapel of the C. M. E. church will be resumed. Laying the cornerstone will take place next Sunday at 3 p. m.
Still there were difficulties, and somewhere along the line the construction ceased with only the first floor built. It would have been a sanctuary-upstairs church, with this first floor dedicated to Sunday school and social hall, but the “highly ornate” sanctuary was destined never to be. On March 18, 1928, we read in the Press:
The Carter chapel of the C. M. E. church, recently put in usable shape, at Bedford ave. and Somer st., will be formally dedicated to religious worship Sunday, April 2.
An improvised roof had been put on the building, doubtless with the intention that the real church would be finished when times were better. But the Depression came a year and a half later, and the building was never finished.
It was not uncommon to use the basement or ground floor of a half-finished church for some time before the sanctuary could be built. The second Presbyterian congregation in Beechview never got further than the basement of their church before they overcame their differences with those other Presbyterians and sold the unfinished building, which became the foundation for the Beechview firehouse. Nativity parish in Observatory Hill was finished after some years with a temporary roof over the basement.
But this church, perhaps uniquely in Pittsburgh, has kept its temporary arrangement for nearly a hundred years. It is a tribute to the persistence of its congregation, which stayed in this building for decades, and perhaps a tribute to the contractor and builders, who came up with a temporary solution that still serves a Christian community—now the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith.
Andrew Peebles was the architect of St. Peter’s, which was dedicated in 1874. In 1876, it became the cathedral of the new Roman Catholic Diocese of Allegheny, carved out of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, which was left with all the debt while the new Diocese of Allegheny took all the rich churches. That went about as well as you might expect, and in 1877 the Diocese of Allegheny was suppressed and its territory reabsorbed by Pittsburgh. But a church never quite gets over being a cathedral.
In 1886, a fire ravaged the building and left nothing but the walls standing. Fortunately Peebles’ original plans were saved, and so the restoration, which took a year and a half, was done to the original design.
The rectory was built with a stone front to match the church, but the rest of the house is brick.
