Father Pitt

Category: Churches

  • Black Stones of Fourth Presbyterian in Friendship

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    Pittsburgh used to be a city of massive black stone buildings, but, since the end of the age of steel, the buildings have been cleaned one by one, revealing the actual color of the stones as they came out of the quarry. Few of the black stone buildings are left. Here is one of them: Fourth Presbyterian in Friendship. Over the years, the stones are gradually losing their sooty coating, revealing what looks like red sandstone underneath. But they are still strikingly black, the way all proper Pittsburgh stones used to be.

  • St. Peter’s Church, North Side

    This splendid old church may look a bit prouder than the ordinary Catholic parish church, and it has every right to its pride: for a little more than a decade, it was the cathedral for the Diocese of Allegheny. In 1876 the rapidly growing Diocese of Pittsburgh was split, with Allegheny (then an independent city) as the seat of the new diocese. It was a bad plan from the beginning: Allegheny had all the wealthiest parishes, but Pittsburgh was generously allowed to keep all the debt. The shockingly un-Christian infighting that resulted ended only in 1889, when the Diocese of Allegheny was suppressed. But a Catholic diocese isn’t that easy to get rid of, and there is still a titular Bishop of Allegheny. He lives in Newark, where in his day job he is auxiliary bishop of the diocese there.

    St. Peter’s is just across Arch Street from the National Aviary, a short walk from the North Side subway station.

    Addendum: This church was built in 1872; the architect was Andrew Peebles, who also designed First English Lutheran downtown.

  • East Liberty Presbyterian Church

    East Liberty Presbyterian Church

    The massive tower of East Liberty Presbyterian Church rises above almost everything else in East Liberty, even competing with the Highland Building. The design is by Ralph Adams Cram, arguably America’s greatest Gothic architect.

  • Stained Glass in Beechview

    The Good Shepherd window at the rear of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church on Beechview Avenue, Beechview. The church building is a century old this year.

  • St. Bernard in Mount Lebanon

    You can tell St. Bernard’s congregation is a community of well-off business types, because the church’s Web site has both a mission statement and a page of “goals and objectives.” But the building itself is quite beautiful, especially its gloriously colorful tile roof. The architect was William R. Perry, who also designed, on a somewhat smaller scale but with equally splendid taste, the bandstand in West End Park. These pictures were taken from the Mount Lebanon Cemetery.

    Click on the picture to enlarge it.

  • Grace Lutheran in Troy Hill

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    The narrow streets and sudden drops in Troy Hill make for some unusual adaptations. Stuffed into a tiny lot, Grace Lutheran Church is as tall as it is long, with its main sanctuary on the second floor. It’s impossible to get a picture of the building without wires in front, and removing the wires with an image editor would be dishonest, which is Father Pitt’s way of saying “too much work.”

  • God and Mammon

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    The spire of Trinity Cathedral is dwarfed by the massive Oliver Building behind it, one of Daniel Burnham’s greatest gifts to Pittsburgh.

    Trinity Cathedral is half a block up Sixth Avenue from the Wood Street subway station.

  • Immaculate Heart of Mary, Polish Hill

    Click on the picture to enlarge it.

    It is impossible to get a good picture of Immaculate Heart of Mary without a forest of cables in front of it. But part of the magnificence of the building is the way it rises up from an impossibly cramped and sloping lot in a crowded hillside neighborhood; it is more impressive because it can never be seen all at once.

    The madly ambitious Polish railroad workers who built this church with their own hands chose a design that intentionally resembles St. Peter’s in Rome. The rest of the neighborhood is still modest and picturesquely shabby, but Immaculate Heart of Mary is a building that could easily pass for a cathedral.

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  • East Liberty Presbyterian Church

    East Liberty Presbyterian Church

    Franklin Toker, the architectural historian, says this may be, per square foot, the most expensive church ever built in America. Ralph Adams Cram (who may have been America’s greatest Gothic architect) designed it, and it was built with enormous donations of Mellon money, which is why locals know it as the Mellon Fire Escape. It dominates East Liberty from every angle. Above, a view from the south over the rooftops of East Liberty; below, the great central tower.

  • Heinz Chapel, Inside and Out

    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.