William P. Ginther, an Akron-based architect who also gave us St. Mary’s in McKees Rocks, designed this magnificent church, but much of the labor was done by the Polish railroad workers who formed the congregation. The design is inspired by St. Peter’s in Rome; this church isn’t quite on that scale, but it certainly dominates the neighborhood, and it would make a fine cathedral.
This neat little church was probably the first church to be built in the new neighborhood of Beechwood, which was later renamed Beechview when it was taken into the city of Pittsburgh. It has been well refurbished for a Spanish-speaking congregation. Some of the original stained glass is gone, and the tower is bricked in, but on the whole it looks much the way it looked more than a century ago. We also note the aggressive slopes for which Beechview is notorious.
Beechview itself was laid out in 1905, so this would have been one of the earliest buildings.
Beechview’s streets changed their names when the neighborhood entered the city, because Pittsburgh didn’t need yet another set of numbered streets. Sixth Avenue is now Methyl Street; Pennsylvania Avenue is now Hampshire Avenue.
A small but substantial Gothic church that could easily pass for a church from any other denomination.
Brereton Street was the commercial spine of Polish Hill. A few businesses still straggle along here, and the streetscape itself is one of those only-in-Pittsburgh sights: tall, narrow little buildings crowded on an improbably steep hillside, leading to a massive Renaissance church the size of a cathedral—Immaculate Heart of Mary.
The Strip was once a densely populated immigrant neighborhood, and until 1993 there were three Catholic churches within five blocks—an Irish one (St. Patrick’s), a Polish one (St. Stanislaus Kostka), and this Slovak church. By 1993 hardly anyone lived in the Strip, and in the parish consolidations this church was closed. After a few vacant years it became a night club. Then it became a church again: now it belongs to Orchard Hill Church. In a way this new ownership continues both strands of the building’s history: Orchard Hill is the kind of nondenominational church where worship is a stage show with a band.
We looked at the Church of the Ascension a little while ago. Here is a view of the entire south side of it that took twelve individual photographs to capture. That is the kind of effort old Pa Pitt is willing to put into documenting his city’s architecture for you, his beloved readers. The whole picture is nearly 11 megabytes, so don’t click or tap on it if you’re on a metered connection.
A little experiment in digital art. It began with a photograph of one of the Gothic gateposts outside the chancery behind St. Paul’s Cathedral in Oakland. That was made black and white, and then put through a multiple-layer “etching” filter, and then every detail that looked at all modern was scribbled over. This is the result. Was it worth the work? Probably not, but one can always learn something from these experiments.
With its half-timbered parsonage, First Trinity Lutheran Church forms a little medieval enclave on a street of apartment buildings.
The Church of the Ascension was designed by William Halsey Wood, a master of Gothic architecture who died very young, at 41, but nevertheless left a substantial body of work. Here he seems to have concentrated his efforts on the massive tower.
Compare these recent pictures to the Father Pitt’s pictures of the same church in 2013.
