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.
Edward Stotz was the architect of the building for Epiphany Church, with considerable interior work done by John T. Comès. It was built in 1903 to replace the old St. Paul’s Cathedral downtown as the downtown parish church after Henry Frick made the Catholic Diocese an offer it couldn’t refuse, and Epiphany served as the temporary cathedral for three years while the new St. Paul’s was going up in Oakland.
When the Lower Hill was demolished for “slum clearance,” Epiphany and its school were the only buildings allowed to survive. Thus Pittsburgh accomplished, here and at Allegheny Center, what Le Corbusier had failed to do in Paris: we created a sterile modern wasteland punctuated by a few ancient landmarks pickled in brine.
These Romanesque columns and arches strongly remind old Pa Pitt of organ pipes.
Christ stands at the peak of the west front.
On Christ’s right hand, St. Peter with his key.
On Christ’s left hand, St. Paul with his book.
An angel with plenty of anti-pigeon armor prays for worshipers as they enter.
The school is built in a simpler Romanesque style that links and subordinates it to the church.
Officially the Lower Hill has ceased to exist. It is counted as part of downtown in the city’s administrative scheme. But it has never been integrated into downtown, and indeed was forcibly cut off from downtown by the Crosstown Boulevard—a bad mistake recently ameliorated somewhat by building a park on top of the boulevard. With the new FNB Financial Center and other developments, there is some hope that this neglected wasteland may become city again. Meanwhile, Epiphany, now part of Divine Mercy Parish, still serves downtown worshipers, and perhaps will be there for new residents as the neighborhood grows and changes.
This interesting modernist church was built in 1963, as we find from the attractive plaque by the entrance:
The balance of modern design and hand-crafted artisanship in the lettering is very appealing.
The architects of the church were Williams & Trebilcock.1 The church was dedicated on April 5, 1964; it replaced a building that had been next to the old Presbyterian Hospital. This building now belongs to Living Word Ministry.
You might pass this building by on your way up North Charles Street and never think of it as anything other than another outcropping of generic ugliness. In fact it is a rare surviving frame church from the 1880s. It has been covered in sheets of cartoon fake brick, and the windows have been halved, but the building is still here. It was built before 1890 on Gallagher Street, near the intersection with Taggart Street, as the Bethel Baptist Church. By about 1900, Gallagher had changed its name to Melrose Avenue, and this was known as the Melrose Avenue Presbyterian Church. It kept that name as Taggart Street changed to North Charles Avenue.
The Presbyterian congregation has almost been erased from history—it is hard to find more than glancing references to it—but the building has been occupied by a nondenominational congregation.
A year and a half ago, old Pa Pitt published pictures of St. Stephen Proto-Martyr, but he was unable to get a picture of the front, because the leaves were on the trees, and the front looked like this:
On a gloomy afternoon recently, however, he happened to be in Hazelwood, and the trees were only beginning to leaf, so it was possible to make out the building through the bare branches.
The church was built in 1902; it is one of the most important works of Frederick Sauer, and it is hanging by a thread. The building is not in regular use, but not precisely abandoned. We will describe it as Endangered on our six-point scale of Least Concern, Near Threatened, Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically Endangered, and Demolished.
To cut through the clutter of branches and bring out the building, Father Pitt tried several exposures with two different cameras and different kinds of processing afterward. He did not come up with any outstanding pictures, but at least the outlines of the design are clear now.
Update: This church was demolished shortly after this article appeared. It seems the misunderstanding we mentioned below was not so easy to clear up.
This modernist church was dedicated by Cardinal Wright in 1960. The architects were Belli & Belli of Chicago. The stained glass was by Pittsburgh’s Hunt Studios; the scribbly outlines visible from the outside are typical of their postwar work. The church was abandoned by the diocese, but the last old Pa Pitt heard it was being worked on for another use. (In fact there was a stop-work order pasted on the window when Father Pitt walked by in February, but he assumes that is just a minor misunderstanding that will be cleared up.)
Now St. Paul Baptist Church. Built in 1887, it was designed by Brooklyn architect Lawrence B. Valk, whose church designs can be found all over the country. (In about 1900, Valk and his son moved to Los Angeles, where they became bungalow specialists but continued turning out the occasional church.)
The tower with its huge open Romanesque arch dominates the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Penn Avenue. After the tower, the most eye-catching thing is the porch, with its even huger arch and its crust of terra-cotta tiles.
The side entrance also gets a big arch, and even the basement door gets a stony arched porch.
This church has a complicated history. It was built as the Tenth United Presbyterian Church. In 1940, it was sold to the Catholic Diocese and became Mary Immaculate Church, the Italian parish in Dutchtown. It went through several parish mergers and names—Our Lady, Queen of Peace, being the most recent—before being sold again, and today it serves as Jonah’s Call Anglican Church. The original church is a typical Pittsburgh corner-tower Protestant church, but the Catholics made it their own with some fine sculpture, to which the Anglicans fortunately have no objection. The Catholic congregation also moved the main entrance, which had been in the tower; the old entrance made a good frame for the Blessed Virgin.
