Note the fine ironwork decorations.
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Belfry, South Side Presbyterian Church
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Pulpit of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral
This elaborate Gothic pulpit is equipped with a traditional sounding board to deflect the sound out into the congregation. It is also equipped with a microphone, which has become a much more tenacious tradition. An Episcopal church would sooner give up the Thirty-Nine Articles than the microphone. It is an interesting fact of history that no one ever heard anything until electrical amplification was invented.
Addendum: This pulpit was designed by Bertram Goodhue, the disciple of Ralph Adams Cram who was the architect of First Baptist in Oakland. It was installed in 1922.
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Two Antebellum Churches on the South Side
Here are two very similar churches in the same block of Bingham Street, both from the 1850s, and both built with the sanctuary on the upper floor. In the middle 1800s, this was a common adaptation for churches in crowded neighborhoods of Pittsburgh and adjacent boroughs (Birmingham was still independent until 1872). Built on tiny lots, they needed space for Sunday-school rooms and social halls, but the sanctuary obviously needed a high ceiling or it would look and feel absurd. Thus the ground floor was left for the smaller rooms.
The church above was the Bingham United Methodist Church (built 1859), now the City Theatre. It is a generic church-shaped church with vaguely classical details, including rounded arches in the windows. The same shape could be given details in any style; the church below is the First Associated Reformed Presbyterian Church of Birmingham (built 1854), with a very similar outline, but Gothic pointed arches in the windows. The windows along the sides are simple rectangles, and old Pa Pitt suspects that the 14th Street end was Gothicized at some time in the later 1800s.
The name “First Associated Reformed Presbyterian Church of Birmingham” is too long to fit on a date stone.
Boston ivy is eagerly devouring the entrance, so it is hard to see that this arch is also pointed.
When this article appeared, Joseph Moore commented:
Are those really the main doors for the Presbyterian Church? Very plain – look more like a loading doc than the entrance to a church, even a Calvinist one. The United Methodist Church has the architectural articulation one would expect for the main doors for a church.
We replied:
The main entrance might have been on the long side on Bingham Street, where the garage door is now. On the other hand, the Gothic arch with columns on the end (and the very interesting woodwork on the doors) does suggest that someone intended it as a main entrance. On the third hand, one would expect more natural light in a main entrance, which would probably have led into a foyer with a stairway (or a pair of stairways, as in the South Side Presbyterian Church). And on the fourth hand, it is possible that windows flanking the entrance have been bricked up. Old Pa Pitt has not been able to persuade himself that the brickwork is all original, and he has not been able to persuade himself that it is not. And on the fifth hand (we might as well be an octopus by now), Father Pitt has not been inside this building; it is possible that the whole front is a stairwell, in which case the large Gothic windows would provide ample light.
This was one of the small number of articles that did not survive the transition between servers, so it had to be reconstructed and the comments copied by brute force.
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Trinity Window in Trinity Episcopal Cathedral
The large window at the rear of the cathedral. At the apex is the Shield of Faith, the emblem of the Trinity. In the center is Christ ascending, with the legend “He is the King of Glory.” Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John watch and record, each with his traditional symbol (man, lion, ox, eagle).
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Church of the Good Shepherd, Hazelwood
Certainly unique in Pittsburgh, this Episcopal church was a design by William Halsey Wood, whose only other work here that Father Pitt knows about is the Church of the Ascension in Shadyside. The Church of the Good Shepherd was built in 1891; it is now up for sale, so anyone with some money has a chance at a signature building that looks like nothing else in the city. After decades of decline, this part of Hazelwood is moving up in the world: just a couple of blocks away is a branch of La Gourmandine, the delightful French bakery. Wouldn’t you like to live or work in a landmark building just a short stroll from a French bakery?
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First Hungarian Reformed Church, Hazelwood
And then there’s Titus de Bobula.
There are few real outliers among the architects who worked in Pittsburgh before the First World War; we had brilliant architects, but we can sort most of them into groups by the styles they worked in. Titus de Bobula’s work, however, is unique here. He brought us a breath of Budapest Art Nouveau, and for a few years he was the favorite architect for East European churches of all sorts.
And then he was gone—back to Hungary, where his regular job seems to have been trying and failing to overthrow the government. Later he ended up back in the United States, but he never again had a great architectural career. Perhaps that was because he worked with Nikola Tesla, designing the structural parts of Tesla’s never-built (and possibly delusional) superweapons. It might have been a good job at the time, but no permanent structures ever came of it.
So we should try as hard as we can to preserve what remains of de Bobula’s work. Fortunately this church, built in 1903, still belongs to its original congregation and is still active.
The shape of the building is similar to the shape of your average Pittsburgh Gothic church, but the details are straight from fin-de-siècle Budapest—right down to Titus de Bobula’s trademark Art Nouveau lettering in the inscriptions.
The wildly irregular stonework around the uniquely shaped windows may remind you a bit of Gaudi.
“Welcome” in stained glass over the main entrance.
Titus de Bobula made a habit of signing his buildings. The rail of a later wheelchair ramp obstructs part of this inscription (the contractor was Bodine and Co.), but we can see enough to appreciate the Art Nouveau lettering.
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Holy Rosary Church, Homewood
Ralph Adams Cram was probably the greatest Gothic architect our country ever produced. There are three churches by Cram in Pittsburgh (and one in Greensburg), and each is a masterpiece in its way. East Liberty Presbyterian is overwhelmingly impressive. Calvary Episcopal is restrained and tasteful, a good fit for its low-church Episcopalian congregation. But Holy Rosary seems to be a product of the artist’s pure delight in his medium. It was finished in 1930, when Cram was at the peak of his creative powers.
The church is still in good shape, but it is no longer a worship site, and what can be done with a building this size? The offices of St. Charles Lwanga parish are here, but it is only a matter of time before someone decides that it would be more efficient to have an office building that is less expensive to maintain. Homewood is prospering much more than it was a few years ago, but it has a long way to go before it becomes a rich enough neighborhood to make it worth adapting this building; and any congregation looking for a church would have to have a high budget to maintain this one. (St. Charles Lwanga parish worships a few blocks away in the small and undistinguished, but much easier to maintain, Mother of Good Counsel church.)
We hope Holy Rosary will be preserved and restored, but it competes with many other churches and synagogues worthy of preservation and restoration. It is hard to find uses for a building so perfectly adapted to one specific purpose for which it is no longer wanted.
All the niches have lost their statues, which suggests that the parish took them down and reinstalled them elsewhere. Do any St. Charles Lwanga parishioners know the story? (Addendum: See the comment from Theresa Moore below; she tells us that statues were never installed.)
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Interior of Trinity Cathedral
Trinity Episcopal Cathedral was built in 1872 from a design by Gordon W. Lloyd, an English-born Canadian architect who was popular among Episcopalians. The view above is made up of three pictures to give us a broad view of the nave.
This is the third church for this congregation. The first was the “Round Church,” built at about the time the streets were laid out in their present plan in 1785. (It was actually an octagon—one of the first generation of odd-shaped buildings caused by the colliding grids along Liberty Avenue.) The second was a brick Gothic church built in 1824.
Note the divided pews, which are the original furniture from 1872. At the time this church was built, churches were generally funded by pew rents. Your family would rent a particular section, and that was where you sat every Sunday.
The number on the end of the pew identifies your section. When Father Pitt visited, the dean of the cathedral, the Very Reverend Aidan Smith, was kind enough to bring out a precious historical artifact: a pew chart of the previous church marked with the prices for each section. The closer to the front (and the more visible) the pew, the more it cost per annum. He explained that this cathedral stopped the practice of pew rents in the 1930s, after receiving a large legacy on the condition that pew rents would be stopped. (In addition to funding the church, they were a good, but arguably un-Christian, way of keeping out the undesirable poor.)
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The Tallest Stained-Glass Windows in the World
That is the claim made for the transept windows in Heinz Chapel, and old Pa Pitt accepts it until someone proves otherwise. They were created by the studio of Charles Z. Connick.
The windows trace Christian history down from Christ to American heroes like Abraham Lincoln, shown here freeing slaves with his Emancipation Proclamation.
Father Pitt’s very favorite detail in these windows is in the Lincoln pane. In fact it is one of his favorite details in any stained glass anywhere. You probably won’t even notice it as you look at the heroic figure of Lincoln, but here it is:
This scowling cartoon-villain plantation owner, furious that some Northern abolitionist scum has the temerity to interfere with his right to whip his own property, is the perfect background for Lincoln. One feels that the whole Civil War was worth the trouble just to make this man frown.
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West End Methodist Episcopal Church
In 1888 the Allegheny County Courthouse was finished, and by then its influence in Pittsburgh had already been profound. H. H. Richardson predicted, correctly, that it would be his most famous work; he died in 1886 without seeing it completed, when the mania for “Richardsonian Romanesque” in Pittsburgh was only beginning. Fortunately several competent Romanesque architects were available to supply the buildings Richardson could no longer provide.
Frank E. Alden was the Alden of Longfellow, Alden, and Harlow. Longfellow himself had trained with Richardson, and his firm was regarded as the successor to Richardson’s. Here Alden fills a very unpromising lot with a romantically Romanesque pile, built in 1888 while the last stones were still falling into place in the courthouse.
The church is vacant at the moment; it would make a fine studio for some prosperous artist.
Connoisseurs of Victorian lettering will be delighted by the inscriptions.
