Father Pitt

Category: Churches

Inside the Second United Presbyterian Church, Highland Park
We have seen pictures of the outside of this church before—here, for example, is a picture from May of 2021:

The other day the current inhabitants, the Union Project, were kind enough to turn old Pa Pitt loose in the sanctuary to take as many pictures as he wanted.

The architect was John L. Beatty, who designed the building in about 1900. A newspaper picture from 1905 (taken from microfilm, so the quality is poor) shows the exterior looking more or less the way it does now.

Pittsburg Press, April 29, 1905.

After a disastrous fire, much was rebuilt in 1915, again under Beatty’s supervision.¹ Another fire in 1933 would necessitate rebuilding part of the tower.

The church was built for the Second United Presbyterian congregation, which had moved out to the eastern suburbs from its former location downtown at Sixth Avenue and Cherry Way (now William Penn Place)—exactly one block from the First United Presbyterian Church, which moved to Oakland at about the same time. Later it became the East End Baptist Church, and then was renamed the Union Baptist Church. When that congregation folded, the church was bought by a Mennonite group that founded the Union Project. It is now a community center for pottery, because “everyone should have access to clay.” The sanctuary—which has been preserved mostly unaltered, except for the removal of pews and other furnishings—is available for large events.

The sanctuary is roughly square, which is typical of many non-liturgical Protestant churches in Pittsburgh at the turn of the twentieth century. Above, looking up at the center of the ceiling.

The stained glass was restored as part of a remarkable community effort in which people in the neighborhood learned the art of stained-glass restoration themselves. It would have cost more than a million dollars to have the work done professionally, but volunteers learned priceless skills, and the glass is beautiful.

The vestibule includes some of the original furniture from the church, and some smaller stained-glass windows.

Sony Alpha 3000; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
1. Source: The Construction Record, January 16, 1915: “The Second United Presbyterian Congregation has selected Architect J. L. Beatty, 146 Sixth street, to prepare plans for repairing the church on Stanton and Negley avenues.” ↩︎
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March 16, 2025
Deutsche Evangelische Lutherische St. Paulus Kirche, Uptown

The last time we looked at this church, it was undergoing some renovation. Here it is with a fresh coat of paint. It was perhaps a shame to cover up the original blond bricks, but in a transitional neighborhood like Uptown, paint is certainly the easiest way to keep a building looking sharp and fresh. The painting was done with care to leave the stone trim unpainted, and the church looks very good.

This church was also known as Second German Lutheran, and to English-speaking neighbors it was known as the Dutch Lutheran Church. It now belongs to an Anglican ministry called Shepherd’s Heart.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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March 9, 2025
Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church, Mount Oliver

The congregation dissolved in 2020, so here is an excellent opportunity for an investment in a beautiful building in a trendifying neighborhood. It is in very good shape, and it has enough architectural distinctiveness to make its new owner proud. It also commands a prominent corner on Brownsville Road.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

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February 23, 2025
First Methodist Protestant Church

From Closing Services, First Methodist Protestant Church, Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, some engravings of the old downtown church on Fifth Avenue, built in 1832. It was a sad day, of course, when the congregation moved out in 1892, but the consolation was that they were moving into a grand new Romanesque church designed for them by Frederick Osterling (still standing today as the Korean Central Church of Pittsburgh). They were probably also taking a pile of money for their church: the Kaufmann Brothers had leased the land on which the church stood, and soon a huge addition to their department store would rise there.

The First M. P. congregation had succumbed to the forces that were changing Pittsburgh from a dense medium-sized city to an urban colossus. The “Introductory Note” to the commemorative book explains the circumstances very well.

That those who worshipped together in the old church were strongly attached to it was a matter of course, and when at the close of the last service in it, Sabbath evening, May 15, the large congregation slowly retired, many went away with heavy hearts, sorrowing most of all because they should enter their old church home no more. If it is asked why did the church dispose of its home the answer is: The inexorable logic of events so decreed.

When the church was built probably no better location could have been found. It was then almost in the centre of the city and was easily reached from every point in the town. The population was held within a comparatively small territory, but as the city grew the need for business property became more and more urgent, and consequently the people were gradually forced away from their homes in the business sections of the city and scattered into surrounding suburbs. Many of the churches located in what was Pittsburgh sixty years ago have found in these later years their membership steadily and inevitably diminishing in number, and the difficulty in recruiting their ranks has increased with almost every passing year; and the explanation of both facts is the plain one: That the people have moved away and built other churches convenient to their homes.

So the church was abandoned to the inexorable march of commerce—but the land was not. For many years thereafter, Kaufmann’s, the Big Store, stood partly on land that was owned by and paying good money to the First Methodist Protestant Church, now in the tony suburb of Shadyside.

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February 16, 2025
Remnants of German Bloomfield

If you had asked Pittsburghers a century ago what kind of neighborhood Bloomfield was, they would have told you it was a very German neighborhood, with a few Irish mixed in, and a little pocket of Italians starting to move in back near the tracks. Go back a bit further, into the late 1800s, and hardly an Italian name is to be seen among the property owners.

Here is a uniquely well-preserved relic of German Bloomfield, whose date stone tells is that it was built in 1882 as the Baum German Evangelical Protestant Congregation. It now belongs to a charity called Shepherd Wellness Community that keeps it in beautiful shape.

Now, if we turn around and look up the street, we’ll find something else uniquely well preserved in a different way.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

This building has seen layers and layers of renovations and alterations, but it goes back to the 1880s, if we read our old maps right. It appears on an 1890 map as the Bloomfield Liedr. S. Society, and on a map from a decade later under the fuller name Bloomfield Lieder-Tafel Singing Society. And if you look on Google Maps, you will find that it still appears as the Bloomfield Liedertafel Singing Society. It is still a private club devoted to music—a social relic of German Bloomfield, still in its original building.

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February 16, 2025
Allegheny Unitarian Universalist Church, Mexican War Streets

R. Maurice Trimble designed this charming little church, which was finished in 1909. It is still in nearly original condition, and still owned by its original congregation.

Kodak EasyShare Z981; Sony Alpha 3000.

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February 9, 2025
St. Joseph’s Church and School, Mount Oliver

St. Joseph’s was an old German parish in Mount Oliver—the part of Mount Oliver that became a city neighborhood, not the adjacent borough of the same name. The land for the church was bought before the Civil War, but the war interrupted the plans, and instead of a church the hastily erected Fort Jones (named for B. F. Jones of Jones & Laughlin) went up on this hilltop to keep the Confederates out of Pittsburgh. Apparently it worked, because you hardly ever see Confederate cavalry riding through Mount Oliver. After the war, the cornerstone of the church was laid in 1868, and the church was dedicated in 1870.

In 1951, the old church burned down, which was a sad blow to the neighborhood—but it made way for this fine building, which was dedicated in 1953. The Catholic congregation left the building in 2005, but the current owners have kept it from falling down.¹

Update: Once again, all it took was publishing the pictures, and the information came in. The architects of the rebuilding were Marlier & Johnstone,² who at about the same time designed St. Henry’s nearby in Arlington. What is even more interesting is that the old church is not entirely gone. It appears that, in the picture above, the side wall and transept, where you see the arched windows, are from the burned-out original church—but with the new construction so skillfully worked around it that old Pa Pitt had not even realized that part of the church was 85 years older than the rest.

The most striking feature of the building is this broad-arched porte cochère, with a long drive making the otherwise steep ascent from Ormsby Street easy.

The rectory, built in 1889, is a well-preserved example of Second Empire architecture. Even the decorative ironwork railing on the tower is still intact.

The school is neglected. In 2011, the old school, part of which dated to the 1870s, burned in a spectacular fire. The part that is left probably dates from the 1920s, with a postwar addition in the 1950s or 1960s.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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February 2, 2025
St. Vladimir’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church, South Side

St. Vladimir’s has been in this building (the older one on the left, that is) for nearly a century, but if you think it doesn’t look like the sort of building a Ukrainian Orthodox congregation would build for itself, you’re right. If you’ve seen as many churches as old Pa Pitt has, you might think right away that this one has an Episcopalian look about it, and indeed it was built as St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. The Ukrainian congregation moved in in 1926. Here we see it in the middle of a snowstorm.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

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January 26, 2025
First Methodist Episcopal Church of Coraopolis

Now Coraopolis United Methodist. T. B. and Lawrence Wolfe, father and son, were the architects of this church. Here’s a walk all the way around from front to back on a drizzly day.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

More pictures of the First Methodist Episcopal Church of Coraopolis.

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January 19, 2025
Shadyside Presbyterian Church, 1891 and Today

In 1891 the Architectural Record ran a long illustrated feature on “The Romanesque Revival in America.” Naturally it dwelt on the accomplishments of H. H. Richardson, and in particular on Trinity Church in Boston and the Allegheny County Courthouse in Pittsburgh, his two most famous buildings. But what about the work done in the “Richardsonian Romanesque” style since Richardson’s death? Few churches could stand up to Trinity, but…

A Presbyterian church at Pittsburg by Mr. Richardson’s successors, Messrs. Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, is an unmistakable and a very successful piece of Richardsonian Romanesque, which owes much of its success to the skill with which the central tower, a lower and much simpler crowning feature than that of [Trinity Church in] Boston, is developed into the church to which the other features of a short nave and shallow transepts are brought into harmonious subordination.

The church has not changed much since the picture above was published in 1891. It has expanded, but the expansions have been carefully matched to the original. And since the soot has been cleaned off, it looks almost as just-built today as it did when it was new—and almost as timelessly ancient, which is the paradoxical trick that the best Richardsonian Romanesque buildings can pull.

There are some secondary sources that say this was one of the projects Richardson had sketched before his death and left his successors to finish, but the earlier sources seem to attribute it entirely to Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge.

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January 12, 2025