Father Pitt

Category: Churches

  • First Hungarian Reformed Church, Hazelwood

    First Hungarian Reformed Church

    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.

    Inscription
    Entrance

    The wildly irregular stonework around the uniquely shaped windows may remind you a bit of Gaudi.

    Isten hozott

    “Welcome” in stained glass over the main entrance.

    Signature

    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.

    First Hungarian Reformed Church

  • Holy Rosary Church, Homewood

    Holy Rosary Church

    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.

    Towers and pinnacles

    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.

    Entrance
    Rose window
    Decorations
    Angel with monogram

    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.)

    Kelly Street side

  • Interior of Trinity Cathedral

    Interior of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, Pittsburgh

    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.

    Pews

    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.

    End of a pew

    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.)

    Interior, diagonal view
    Interior

  • The Tallest Stained-Glass Windows in the World

    Stained glass in Heinz Chapel

    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.

  • West End Methodist Episcopal Church

    West End M. E. 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.

    West End Methodist Episcopal Church

    The church is vacant at the moment; it would make a fine studio for some prosperous artist.

    West End M. E. Church

    Entrance

    Connoisseurs of Victorian lettering will be delighted by the inscriptions.

    Inscription

  • Working on the Roof of Heinz Chapel

    Workers on the roof of Heinz Chapel

    It’s easy to forget how tall Heinz Chapel is until we see people working on the roof.

    Heinz Chapel with roof work

  • Deutsche Vereinigte Evangelische Kirche, West End

    Deutsche Vereinigte Evangelische Kirche Now the Jerusalem Baptist Church, this church was built in 1864, according to the inscription on the front. The Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation identifies the architects as Dahner and Dear.

    Inscription

    It is not possible to get a straightforward picture of this inscription without intrusive utility cables. Old Pa Pitt resorted to taking three different pictures from slightly different angles and welding them together, which was probably more work than it was worth. But here is a complete picture of the German inscription, and if drivers on Steuben Street were confused by the sight of a gentleman in eighteenth-century garb lying on the sidewalk pointing a long lens across the street, at least they had something to tell their families when they got home. “Deutsche Vereinigte Evangelische Kirche” is German for “German United Evangelical Church.”

    Jerusalem Baptist Church

    As with many Pittsburgh buildings, the question “How tall is it?” cannot be answered without a paragraph of disquisition on topography. The precipitous Belgian-block street along this side of the church is Sanctus Street.

    How should we describe the style of this church? The rounded arches might say Romanesque or classical, although a presentable Gothic building could be made simply by swapping them for pointed arches. We’ll call it classically Victorian.

  • Entrance to St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1994

    Entrance to St. Paul’s

    This composition is no longer possible, because the building in the foreground was demolished to make way for the larger Rand Building that occupies the corner of Fifth and Craig today. At least old Pa Pitt is fairly sure he was standing in the old Mellon Bank building, although after almost three decades the memory clouds over a bit, and he had to rely on maps and angles to make that determination.

  • Sixth Presbyterian Church, Squirrel Hill, in 1994

    Sixth Presbyterian

    One of the many black stone buildings that still remained in Pittsburgh in the 1990s. Like almost all the others, Sixth Presbyterian has since been cleaned and restored to its original color.

    Father Pitt has always wondered why the Presbyterians kept numbering their churches. “First Presbyterian” is an honorable distinction. “Fifth Presbyterian” just sounds tired. And then why stop at six? There is a Seventh Presbyterian in Cincinnati, for example.

  • St. Leo’s, Marshall-Shadeland

    St. Leo’s

    If he had known that the church would be demolished the next year, Father Pitt would have been more careful to document it. As it is, he happened to be passing in 2001 with one of his many odd old cameras, and he decided to take this quick picture before rolling on. The architect was Frederick Sauer; the church was built in 1906.1

    The church had been vacant for several years when the Sisters of Divine Providence demolished it and built a new Family Support Center. The front of that building bears a mural with a picture of St. Leo’s in it.

    1. Source: Pittsburgh Press, February 6, 1906. “Architect F. C. Sauer, No. 804 Penn avenue, will close bids March 1 for the foundation for the St. Leo Church on Brighton road, Allegheny, Pa.” In a previous version of this article, Father Pitt had written, “The architect was probably John T. Comès, who gave this German congregation an Italian Romanesque church, because why not?” The attribution was based on a secondary source, but our primary source is decisive. ↩︎