Somehow Charles Z. Klauder managed to create perfectly Gothic buildings with an Art Deco sensibility in every detail. His Cathedral of Learning is the most perfect Gothic skyscraper in the world; it’s organically Gothic, not just a skyscraper with Gothic trimmings.
On the same ideally landscaped square in Oakland sits Heinz Chapel, Klauder’s last work, a building with more modest dimensions but more flamboyant ornament. Its lacy spire is a remarkable work of Gothic fantasy. Its transept windows, designed (like all the other stained glass in the building) by Charles J. Connick, are supposedly the tallest stained-glass windows in the world, or among the tallest, or rather tallish, depending on which source you consult. It’s one of Pittsburgh’s favorite wedding sites, and on a Saturday afternoon weddings follow one after another as though the brides were on a conveyor belt.
The cornerstone identifies the date in figures that perfectly match the Deco Gothic spirit of the building.
These photographs were taken with a Zorki-4 bearing a Jupiter-8 f/2 lens, which is a fine camera for a day out in the city. It’s versatile, it’s built like a Soviet tank, and the lens is sharp and fast (and interchangeable with any screwmount Leica lens). And there were literally millions made, so if it does break you can just get another one.
The same drug-store digital camera, the same day, two more pictures. The view of the spire half-obscured by leaves suggests a poetic fantasy of a forgotten and immemorially ancient church. Or perhaps it suggests that a tree was in the way.
It was one of those cheap digital cameras dangling from a hook in the drug store, but it takes pictures that, if you squint a bit, sort of remind you of the object the camera was pointed at. Here’s St. Paul’s Cathedral in Oakland as reflected in the glass of the Software Engineering Institute across the street:
And here are two more pictures of what would, liturgically speaking, be the west front of the cathedral, although geographically speaking it happens to be the south front:
One would prefer to use 120 film, or failing that 35-mm film, or failing that at least a better digital camera, but there are certain advantages to a camera nearly small enough to slip into a wallet. And the hazy glow from the cheap lens might be good for certain effects.
This article, by far the most popular one Father Pitt has ever published, continues to accumulate pictures. Some of them are large by Internet standards: if you click on a large picture, in most browsers it will be sized to fit your browser window.
Mr. Alan Veeck writes:
I have a group of friends who want to visit “The Ten Most Beautiful Catholic Churches in Pittsburgh” for Mass (I likely have seen the top ten UGLIEST Catholic Churches… Pittsburgh, as I understand it, is something of a “center” for this sort of thing) but I was wondering what your take was on the Top Ten list?
Father Pitt, after lifting his wig and scratching his head for a bit, came up with this list, which is in no particular order:
1. Sacred Heart, Shady Avenue, Shadyside. The door of this church is a portal to an alternate universe where beauty and devotion reign in tandem.
2. St Paul’s Cathedral, Fifth Avenue, Oakland. It gets better as it ages: like any great cathedral, it grows organically, adding chapels and decorations as the years go by. After a century, it’s only getting started. The grounds and matching outbuildings (notably Synod Hall) add to the impression of a great European cathedral. Besides all that, the organ is one of the best in the city.
3. Immaculate Heart of Mary, Polish Hill. Built by Polish railroad workers in their meager leisure hours, it dominates its neighborhood with its huge green dome, just the way it should.
4. St. Stanislaus Kostka, 21st Street, Strip. The interior is full of rich dark wood and beautiful stained-glass Polish saints. The location is also spectacular: the rose window faces a broad plaza that’s the center of the wholesale produce business in Pittsburgh.
5. St. Nicholas, Millvale. The church is dignified but unassuming on the outside; inside, however, its extraordinary murals (which make a strong metaphorical connection between the horrors of war and the horrors of industry) are some of Pittsburgh’s greatest artistic treasures.
6. Holy Rosary, Homewood. Designed by Ralph Adams Cram, so no more needs to be said.
7. St. Boniface, East Street, North Side. The Parkway North swerved to avoid this masterpiece, but destroyed the neighborhood that kept it alive. Now home of the officially approved non-schismatic Latin Mass community in Pittsburgh.
8. Epiphany, Lower Hill. For a short time, between the demolition of the old St, Paul’s downtown and the opening of the current St. Paul’s in Oakland, this church served as the cathedral for the Diocese of Pittsburgh. Its enormous rose window in the west front is distinctive.
9. St. John the Baptist Ukrainian, East Carson Street, South Side. The gilded domes (which used to be bright blue) feature in many postcard views of Pittsburgh.
10. St. Bernard, Washington Road, Mount Lebanon. St. Bernard’s church presides over a whole matching medieval village of warm honey-colored stone and brightly colored roof tiles. It’s a rich congregation that has produced its own gloriously illustrated coffee-table book about the building.
St. Anthony Chapel in Troy Hill should also be mentioned; with the biggest collection of relics outside the Vatican, it’s a world-class pilgrimage site.
Mike Aquilina, the well-known Catholic writer, has mentioned that he thinks St. Patrick in the Strip should be added. The building is small and undistinguished on the outside, but the statuary garden (with statues of American saints and heroes of the faith) is something special, and the Sacra Scala, a stairway that must be ascended on the knees in prayer, is an experience worth coming for.
Of course, by restricting the list to Roman Catholic churches, we miss some of the most striking church buildings in Pittsburgh. A very incomplete supplementary list:
Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, downtown
First Presbyterian, downtown (worth seeing for its Tiffany glass)
First English Lutheran, downtown
East Liberty Presbyterian
Calvary Episcopal, Shadyside
First Methodist, Shadyside
Calvary United Methodist, Allegheny West (famous for its Tiffany glass, some of the best work ever to come out of Tiffany’s studio)
Emmanuel Episcopal, Allegheny West
First Baptist, Oakland
Heinz Chapel, Oakland
St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox, McKees Rocks Bottoms Shadyside Presbyterian
Old St. Luke’s, Woodville, Scott Township
Rodef Shalom synagogue, Oakland (not strictly a church, but one of our most striking religious buildings)
Pittsburgh used to be a city of massive black stone buildings. In a few years, perhaps, they will all have disappeared–not torn down, but cleaned of the soot deposits from decades of heavy industry. When the mills died and the cleanings began, it came as a surprise to many Pittsburghers that the uniquely Pittsburghish black stones they had known all their lives were, underneath it all, quite pale and ordinary-looking, almost like the stones in every other city. Experts say that the pollutants eat away at the stones, so I suppose the cleanings are necessary; but I miss those black stones. Albright Community United Methodist Church on Centre Avenue in Shadyside has not been cleaned yet; this is its tower, still gloriously black, though not as inky black as it was at the peak of the steel industry.
First United Methodist Church sits where Shadyside, East Liberty, Friendship, and Bloomfield all meet. It would be hard for a building to get much more Richardsonian without having been designed by Henry Hobson Richardson himself.
East Liberty Presbyterian Church dominates East Liberty from every angle. It was designed by the great Ralph Adams Cram, and, per square foot, it may be the most expensive church ever built in America. Because Mellon money built it, perhaps to atone for some of the sins inevitable on the road to becoming the richest family on earth, locals call it the Mellon Fire Escape.
First Presbyterian Church sits on Sixth Avenue next to Trinity Cathedral (Episcopal) and just across the street from the Duquesne Club. These are the bastions of old money in Pittsburgh, and plenty of that money went into the elaborate Gothic ornamentation of the church building, not to mention its famous stained glass by Tiffany.
