Father Pitt

Category: Churches

Holy Cross Church, Glassport, by Titus de Bobula

From The New Holy Cross Church, 1954, a booklet published when the current Holy Cross Church opened.

This was perhaps the last church designed by Titus de Bobula in his short architectural career, and it was an extraordinary work. It was faced entirely with concrete, and the architect gave free rein to his love of sweeping curves and tapering forms—note, for example, how the continuous tapering of the tower was supplemented by an inverted tapering of the arch at the entrance.

In the 1950s, the congregation built a much larger church from a design by the prolific Monessen church architect H. Ernest Clark. But the old church was kept as a social hall, and—thanks to the eagle eye of our correspondent David Schwing—we have discovered that the building is still standing.

Almost everything that made the church a unique work of art is gone. The windows are blocked in; the decorations are stripped off; the spire is gone and the tower truncated. But we can still see the outline of that unique arch at the entrance. And this is the only one of Titus de Bobula’s concrete-faced churches to have survived at all—at least as far as old Pa Pitt knows. With just a few minutes to stop in Glassport on his way from here to there, Father Pitt took a bunch of pictures with three different cameras to document the church before it succumbs to complete decay.

Sony Alpha 3000; Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

Comments

September 9, 2025
Spire of Calvary Episcopal Church, Shadyside

Nikon COOLPIX P100.

We have more pictures of Calvary Episcopal Church.

Comments

September 8, 2025
Double Presbyterians in McDonald

McDonald was a very Presbyterian town, with at least four Presbyterian churches all within an easy walk of one another. In 1897, two Presbyterian churches went up in McDonald side by side—a Presbyterian church and a United Presbyterian church. They seem to have been called First Presbyterian and First United Presbyterian at first, but later took the names Trinity and Calvary. After the denominations merged, so did the congregations—but they kept the two buildings, now called the Calvary Center and the Trinity Center of McDonald Presbyterian Church.

The United Presbyterian church, now Calvary Center, was the larger of the two. The architect was James N. Campbell.

Behind the church is a neat and prosperous-looking foursquare parsonage built of matching brick.

The smaller Presbyterian church, now the Trinity Center, was designed by the Washington (Pennsylvania) firm of McCallum & Ely.

Sony Alpha 3000.

Comments

September 7, 2025
Paul Presbyterian Church, Brookline

Paul Presbyterian Church, built in 1923, was named not for the Apostle Paul, as you might suppose, but for Elizabeth Paul, who donated the land on which the church was built along with $1,000 toward the cost of the building. After the congregation dissolved in 2001, the building passed to the Providence Reformed Presbyterian congregation. Now it belongs to Freedom Fellowship Church of Pittsburgh.

The amazingly thorough Brookline Connection site has a long history of Paul Presbyterian Church, all written in bold Comic Sans, like the rest of the site.

Stained glass with a depiction of Christ as Good Shepherd was in the front windows until the Reformed Presbyterians took over. The windows needed expensive repair, and, according to the Brookline Connection article, “with this being a rather conservative Presbyterian denomination, displaying the image of Jesus above God ran contrary to the First Commandment, and replacing them was more in line with their beliefs”—a weirdly Arian argument that we hope was garbled in transmission.

Nikon COOLPIX P100.

Comments

September 7, 2025
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.

Comments

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.

Comments

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.

Comments

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.

Comments

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.

Comments

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.

Comments

August 24, 2025