This beautiful and tasteful Colonial Revival church by the Beezer Brothers was featured in the December 15, 1900, issue of the American Architect and Building News. You search Google Maps for it in vain today, and you may be thinking what a shame it is that it disappeared.
But it didn’t disappear. It’s still there.
It looks a little more working-class now, but it’s recognizably the same building. Is there a tasteful and wealthy congregation looking for a church? This one is ripe for restoration.
We have seen this especially fine church before, but since old Pa Pitt was out walking on Potomac Avenue in early-evening light, he decided that we could see it again. It is now the Dormont campus of the nondenominational North Way Christian Community, which fortunately has the money to keep up the exterior.
The parsonage is just the sort of elegant and respectable dwelling you need for your Presbyterian minister. With a broad English Gothic arch at the entrance to link it to the church, it makes a good transition between the monumental church and the prosperous merchant-class houses on Espy Avenue.
Addendum: Father Pitt tentatively attributes the church to Chauncey W. Hodgdon. Mr. Hodgdon was hired to supervise alterations in 1914, and it was considered unethical for another architect to alter or add to a building within a few years of its construction unless the original one refused, or was unavailable, or was rejected by the client.
Edmund B. Lang1 designed this church for a Slovak congregation in the McKees Rocks Bottoms; it was built in about 1914.2 The church is not a church any longer, but it has been in use as an antiques auction gallery and thus has not been allowed to decay too badly. Through the magic of twenty-first-century technology, we can see the whole front of the church, right up to the cross on the steeple, almost the way the architect saw it in his imagination, although he probably was not imagining those utility cables draped across the front of the picture.
We had originally written “Edward B. Lang,” copying the listing, but the excellent historian Kathleen Washy of the Catholic Historical Society was kind enough to send us a correction. Construction listings were often sketchy on exact names; fairly close was good enough. ↩︎
Source: The Construction Record, December 27, 1913: “Architect Edward B. Lang, House building, will receive bids until January 5, on constructing a one-story brick and stone church, at McKees Rocks, for St. Marks Roman Catholic Congregation. Cost $50,000.” ↩︎
An interesting building, published in this issue, built after the style of the early English Parish Church, and executed in that character exceptionally well both interior and exterior.
The exterior of the Church is of Rubble Masonry which as a material blends well with the immediate surroundings, the site being on Brownsville Road, Carrick, and of a rural atmosphere. The interior (as the interior of the early English Parish Church) is carried out in a very simple but dignified design, of plaster and timber, finished in a warm color scheme.
The Church has a seating capacity of 500, the Sunday School accommodating 450.
The architect, as the page with the photograph above tells us, was George H. Schwan. Although the immediate surroundings were “of a rural atmosphere” in 1915, they would not remain that way for long. Already in the photograph above you can see the great engine of urbanization: streetcar tracks.
This church was built in 1907 as the Eleventh United Presbyterian Church. The architect was Thomas Hannah.1 Now it belongs to the Greater Allen African Methodist Episcopal congregation, which has kept it in beautifully original shape, right down to the uncleaned black stones, which Father Pitt loves.
Record & Guide, May 8, 1907, p. 293. “Plans have been prepared by Architect Thomas Hannah, Diamond Bank Building, for a church to be erected in Allegheny for the Eleventh United Prestyterian [sic] congregation, at California and Davis avenues. Cost $35,000. Rev. Charles F. Wishart, pastor.” Our article has been revised with this information; old maps, apparently mistakenly, show it as a Congregational church. ↩︎
Looming up from the quiet back streets of Sheraden, this titanic Gothic church would put many a cathedral to shame. Built in 1924, it was probably the grandest work of William P. Hutchins. Though it has closed as a church and has been stripped of some of its ornamental details, it is still in use and thus maintains at least a precarious hold on existence.
This article will be a feast for lovers of utility cables. The rest will just have to put up with diagonal black lines in the pictures.
The apse of the church is a commanding presence on the street, making strollers-by feel almost as if they have wandered into a medieval cathedral city. But how many Gothic apses in those stuffy European towns have a garage in the basement?
This is is an especially fine example of the very last phase of Gothic church architecture in America. Old Pa Pitt does not know the whole history of this church. It was a congregation of the United Churches of Christ until ten or fifteen years ago; the current congregation is Southern Baptist.
The congregation moved to a generic late-twentieth-century church building in the North Hills this year, finally following most of its members to the suburbs. (The congregation was secure enough to be able to move without taking out a loan, which is good news for them even if it’s bad news for the North Side.) That leaves this building in an uncertain state. Right now it is still being well maintained, but its neighborhood is not yet valuable. Perhaps with the revival of city living, it will be worth doing something with in the next few years.
The church was built in 1937, when the Depression was still with us and its congregation probably was not rich. The building is a curious construction in a style old Pa Pitt has decided to call “Modular Byzantine.” The parade of identical rectangles across the tall face of the church makes it look as though it was put together by a methodical and meticulous child playing with blocks.
Because of the extreme slope of the lot, the front has to be very tall if there is going to be any back at all. Since the main entrance is on the lower level, we can add this to our list of churches with the sanctuary upstairs.
The gold domes are a landmark on this section of California Avenue, and we hope they can be preserved.
The building now belongs to Mercy Intellectual Disabilities Services, which has altered it to suit a radically different purpose. But the outlines of the church are still clear. The architect was T. Ed. Cornelius,1 about whom Father Pitt knows nothing except that he seems to have had a fairly successful career designing middle-class houses and modest churches—this one was budgeted at $25,000 in 1923, which was not a great deal to spend on building a church.
This is another case where old Pa Pitt went looking for one of his pictures and discovered that he had never published it. The picture was taken in August of 2022, but only recently did Father Pitt discover the name of the architect.
Source: The American Contractor, June 9, 1923: “Church: $25,000. 1 sty. & bas. 60×80. Shiras av. & Broadway. Archt. T. Ed. Cornelius, Magee bldg. Owner The Beechview Christian Church, Shiras av. & Broadway. Brk. Drawing plans.” ↩︎
Chauncey W. Hodgdon had been practicing architecture for well over four decades when he designed this little church. It was built in about 1924,1 and this is Hodgdon on a small budget. He minimized expensive indulgences like stone trim and large windows, while still giving the congregation the respectable Gothic church it dreamed of. Now the building belongs to New Hope Church, which is keeping it in very good shape.
Source: The American Contractor, August 11, 1923: “Church: Shadland [sic] av. & Dickson st. Archt. Chauncey W. Hodgdon, Martin bldg. Owner The Calvary Christ. Church. Rev. F. Fink, 3426 Cass st. Brk. & Stone. Archt. taking bids on super. to close Aug. 20.” ↩︎
