St. Paul’s German Evangelical Lutheran Church was built in 1872. Since Uptown was a dense rowhouse neighborhood, the church had a tiny lot, and resorted to the common expedient of putting the sanctuary on the second floor. Today it is home to the Shepherd’s Heart Fellowship, and we caught it in the middle of some spiffing up.
We might point out that this church is marked on an 1882 map as “Dutch Lutheran Church.” When misinformed pedants insist on calling East Allegheny “Deutschtown” (a pedantry that is flat-out wrong and makes old Pa Pitt’s skin crawl every time he hears it), you can point out that “Dutch” was the usual word for “German,” and English-speakers in Pittsburgh commonly referred to the Germans as “Dutch” even as late as the 1880s.
We are going to use our imaginations here to bring the East Birmingham of a century and a half ago back to life.
Take a good look at this VFW hall. Now erase the belligerently patriotic mural. Then strip away the improvised vestibule at the end. Then take away the side entrance. Then unblock the windows along the side (old Pa Pitt does not know what demonic secret rituals the veterans practice that would be spoiled by natural light, but they seem to have an aversion to it).
What you will have left is a little old church building, probably from just after the Civil War. It appears on an 1872 map as “Welsh Cong. Ch.,” and so for many years after; but by 1923 it had been transferred to another congregation, and appears as a “Polish M. E. Ch.” (M. E. for Methodist Episcopal). At least half a dozen churches on the South Side were bought by East Europeans around the turn of the twentieth century. We might call it Nordic flight: people of northwestern European ancestry fled the South Side as undesirable East Europeans poured in.
Methodists were never a large segment of the Polish population, and at some point the church changed hands again, going out of the religion business entirely. But not much has really changed about the exterior. The outlines of a typical small middle-1800s church are clearly visible. It would be fairly easy and inexpensive to restore it to something like its original appearance, and—unlike large churches—small churches like this have many uses. If the Veterans of Foreign Wars are ever interested in selling, they should ask Father Pitt first.
Take a look at this old Methodist church on the South Side. Do you notice anything unusual about it? Yes, you do notice, because you already read the title of this article. But just passing by, you might not have noticed that the sanctuary—the main worship space—is on the second floor.
When he was publishing his pictures of the old St. John’s Lutheran Church on the border of Bloomfield and Lawrenceville, old Pa Pitt ran across an interesting article about the conversion of that church to apartments, which apparently was done with minimal alteration. In fact the whole “Urban Traipsing” site is worth a long exploration, and you can go there and spend a few hours as soon as you’ve finished here. To stick to our current subject, Father Pitt was struck by the author’s reaction to finding that the sanctuary was upstairs:
This is the only church building I have been in where the sanctuary is a full flight of stairs above ground level. I’m very curious to know if there are any others—please share, if you’ve come across one!
Well, that article was written nine years ago, so Father Pitt will not bother the author with comments now. But this is actually a very common adaptation in Pittsburgh. Churches in dense rowhouse neighborhoods had tiny lots, and they had to make the most of those lots. If you can’t build out, you build up. It would be aesthetic nonsense to have any other facilities above the sanctuary, so obviously the sanctuary goes at the top.
The South Side has a larger collection of these churches than any other neighborhood, so we’re going to stay there for this article. In fact Father Pitt believes that this article will give you a complete census of the remaining churches on the South Side with the sanctuary upstairs; if anyone knows of any others, please step forward.
The grandest of the lot is South Side Presbyterian. It was originally more modest, looking like many of the other churches here, but the congregation prospered and added the impressive front with bell tower.
Here is the sanctuary of South Side Presbyterian, which is reached by a pair of stairways at the front of the church.
The Bingham United Methodist Church is now the City Theatre; the building dates from 1859. Birmingham and East Birmingham, the boroughs that became the South Side, were full of Methodists and Presbyterians in the middle 1800s, and many of the churches on the South Side began as Methodist or Presbyterian churches.
This was also built as a Methodist church, but at some time around the First World War it became St. George’s Serbian Orthodox Church. The onion dome cannot disguise the typically American Protestant shape of the rest of the Victorian Gothic building.
The German Baptist Church on 19th Street is now Holy Assumption of St. Mary Orthodox Church.
First Methodist Episcopal Church, East Birmingham, became a nest of Polish Falcons; then the Falcons moved to a smaller nest a block and a half away, and this building was converted to apartments as “Falcon Court.”
The First Associated Reformed Church of Birmingham was built in 1854.
The Tabernacle of the Union Baptist Church was built in 1881 in a curiously angular style, an abstract machine-age Gothic.
These are eight churches on the South Side alone that have their sanctuaries upstairs. Have we missed any? There were almost certainly others; if Father Pitt recalls correctly, the Walton Church, demolished more than twenty years ago, was one of them, and there are other churches that did not make it into our century.
There are also others in other neighborhoods: we already mentioned St. John’s Lutheran in Bloomfield/Lawrenceville, and we have pictures of Grace Lutheran in Troy Hill and the Union Methodist Church in Manchester. These are all churches built in densely crowded neighborhoods where they had to make do with a tiny patch of land.
Now that you have been alerted to their existence, you will start to see these churches everywhere, and you will have old Pa Pitt to thank for your new hobby.
The outstanding feature of this church is its outsized corner tower; the architect has cleverly emphasized its height with strong vertical lines. Corner towers are common in churches on corner lots, but seldom do they reach these proportions.
There are also smaller towers at three of the other four corners of the building, and a matching Sunday-school wing is attached.
This is one of several abandoned churches in Knoxville, but at least somebody mows the lawn and sweeps away the trash. Note the steep slope that makes two floors’ difference between the front of the lot and the back of the lot.
In many neighborhoods this would be the most distinguished building, but of course Homewood has Holy Rosary Church. Nevertheless, this is an important building in its own right. It was built in 1904 as St. James Episcopal Church, but in 1953 it was bought by a Black Episcopalian congregation, which obviously showers love on this building. It was designed by Carpenter & Crocker, and the grandson of William James Carpenter gives us the story of the church on a site dedicated to his grandfather’s work. You can also read the story of the congregation from the church’s own site (the link goes to a page where you can download a PDF file).
Few of these black stone buildings are left, but in some of the less prosperous neighborhoods we can still find uncleaned stones. Knoxville is a particularly interesting neighborhood from the point of view of the urban archaeologist: it was prosperous and now is not, so it retains some splendid buildings in their original state, many of them sadly abandoned and decaying. This church, marked “1st Meth. Prot. Ch.” on a 1916 map, is still in use as a nondenominational church, and old Pa Pitt very selfishly hopes that the congregation always sits at that middle point where it has enough money to keep the doors open and not enough to clean the black stones.
This is on 40th Street in the end of Bloomfield that sticks like a thumb into Lower Lawrenceville. It is another of those city churches where the sanctuary is on the second floor, as we often find in dense rowhouse neighborhoods where the church must make the most of a tiny lot. Like many of those churches, it is now apartments.
Addendum: According to a city database of historic buildings, the architect was Frederick Sauer, famous for attractive and competent Catholic churches and the strange flights of whimsy he built in his back yard in Aspinwall.
This 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.
Built in 1924, this church seems typical of the slightly modernist Gothic of the period: the pointed arches and the stonework are still there, but the details are spare, and the forms are relatively simple.
This church was finished in 1927 and continued to serve the Methodists until about a quarter-century ago. It now belongs to the Brookline Assembly, an Assemblies of God congregation. Old Pa Pitt has not been able to find out who the architect was, but there’s a wealth of other information at the wonderfully well-informed Brookline Connection site, including the interesting fact that the stone is Beaver County sandstone.
