Father Pitt

Category: Churches

  • Fawcett Church, Cecil Township

    The congregation began as a house meeting in 1793 and was officially founded in 1812. The current church, which replaced an earlier log church, was built in 1843 and restored after a fire in 1944. Families of early settlers are buried in the churchyard.

    Father Pitt has never run across “Nazarene” as a male given name before. The stonecutter made some very elegant letters, but “May the 1th” was as wrong in 1839 as it is today.

    These pictures are made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, so no permission is needed to use them for any purpose whatsoever.

  • St. Basil Catholic Church, Carrick

    In the light of the setting sun, St. Basil’s presides benevolently over part of Carrick, a neighborhood of steep and crowded hills.

    These pictures have been donated to Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, so no permission is needed to use them for any purpose whatsoever.

     

  • Sacred Heart, Shadyside

    Sacred Heart Church, Shadyside
    Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.

    Two splendid churches face each other across Shady Avenue. One is Ralph Adams Cram’s Calvary Episcopal. This is the other: Sacred Heart, one of the most tastefully beautiful Gothic churches in a city with one of the best collections of Gothic churches in the Western Hemisphere.

  • Saints Peter and Paul: Our Most Endangered Landmark?

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    There are still too many endangered landmarks in Pittsburgh, in spite of a strong local preservation movement. This one is probably doomed. All that has saved it so far is that it would cost a good deal of money to tear down, and the revival of central East Liberty has not reached this part of the neighborhood yet. As much as it would cost to tear down, it would at this point cost much more to restore, and for what? No church would spend that kind of money, and it is really suitable for no other use.

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    The cornerstone is dated 1857, but that comes from the older and smaller church that preceded this building. The Rev. A. A. Lambing in 1880 described that building thus: “The church, situated on Larimer Avenue, is of brick, about 75 feet in length by 40 in width, and has a tower rising from the centre in front to the height of about 100 feet…. The church, though neatly finished, lacks the leading characteristics of any particular style of architecture.” The plaque below has the data for this building:

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  • St. Paul’s Cathedral

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    St. Paul’s Cathedral, the cathedral of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, in the Fifth Avenue monumental district. (The Oakland neighborhood has at least three cathedrals—Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Antiochian Orthodox—or four if you count the Cathedral of Learning.) A cathedral is the architectural equivalent of a coral reef; over the centuries, it accumulates a diverse ecosystem of art and history. St. Paul’s is only a little over a century old, but it’s beginning to show signs of the rich diversity that only time can bring.

  • St. Paul

    KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERAThe statue of St. Paul (by Joseph Sibbel) over the main entrance to St. Paul’s Cathedral in Oakland. He is reading from, presumably, one of his own letters, and he casually holds the sword that beheaded him.

     

  • Old St. Luke’s, Woodville

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    Old St. Luke’s Church in the little village of Woodville (an unincorporated part of Scott Township) was founded in 1765. It was stuck in the middle of the Whiskey Rebellion, which divided the congregation, one of whose members was General John Neville, a tax collector who barely escaped with his life. (Woodville Plantation, the house to which he escaped, is still standing nearby.)

    The current building dates from 1852. In the burying ground surrounding the little stone church are some very old graves, including some Revolutionary War veterans and “the first white child born in the Chartiers Valley.” The oldest stones were native shale, which is a very poor material for gravestones; but some of the obliterated inscriptions have been duplicated in plaques beside the stones.

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    Old St. Luke’s

  • Heinz Chapel

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    The Heinz Memorial Chapel at the University of Pittsburgh, designed in fantasy-Gothic style by Charles Z. Klauder, who designed a whole complex of fantasy-Gothic buildings for Pitt with the Cathedral of Learning at its center.

  • Clock, St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Oakmont

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    Built in 1906, St. Thomas in Oakmont has a proper clock tower made of fine old Pittsburgh black stones, with a proper clock that (unfortunately) has stopped.

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  • Church of the Ascension

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    Right on the border between Oakland and Shadyside, the Church of the Ascension is one of the diminishing number of black stone buildings in Pittsburgh. Father Pitt hopes that his pictures will preserve the memory of our black stones when the last stone building has been sandblasted.

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