The 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.
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St. Paul
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Old St. Luke’s, Woodville
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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Heinz Chapel
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.
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Clock, St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Oakmont
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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St. Augustine
St. Augustine reads to the people of Lower Lawrenceville from the front of the church that bears his name.
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Grace Lutheran Church, Troy Hill
Taller than it is long, Grace Lutheran Church occupies a tiny space in the narrow streets of Troy Hill, a traditionally German neighborhood straddling a narrow hilltop above the Allegheny.
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Black Stones of Fourth Presbyterian in Friendship
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.
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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.
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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.
