Father Pitt

Category: Churches

Old Frame Church in Brookline

There are a couple of interesting used-to-bes about this frame duplex in Brookline. First, it used to be St. Mark’s English Lutheran Church: it was built before 1910, when the neighborhood was first being developed. In 1929, the church moved several blocks away to a new stone building designed by O. M. Topp, and this was converted to a double house.

Second, although the building stands on Bodkin Street now, it used to be on Brookline Boulevard. It was not the building that moved, however: the street moved out from under it. Brookline Boulevard used to go down toward West Liberty Avenue in a straight line from the top of the hill, but the grade was too steep for streetcars, which were routed in their own right-of-way that made a long curve down the hill. When the streetcar line to Brookline was abandoned, the western section of Brookline Boulevard, from Pioneer to West Liberty Avenues, was routed over the abandoned streetcar right-of-way, and the old Brookline Boulevard was renamed Bodkin Street.

March 6, 2024
First English Evangelical Lutheran Church

Designed by Andrew Peebles, this church, which would be the most magnificent thing in many a neighborhood, is dwarfed by the Grant Street behemoths around it. Other even grander churches on Grant Street (St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Cathedral and St. Peter’s Episcopal) were displaced by commercial interests, but this one has somehow survived since 1887, which may make it the oldest standing building on Grant Street. It’s currently getting some restoration.

February 14, 2024
Calvary Methodist Church at Night

Calvary Methodist Church in Allegheny West is floodlit at night, and old Pa Pitt stopped the other night to get a few pictures. The design of this church is credited to Vrydaugh & Shepherd with T. B. Wolfe. Vrydaugh & Wolfe would soon become a partnership designing a number of fine churches and millionaires’ mansions. Old Pa Pitt does not know what happened to Shepherd.

These pictures were all taken hand-held with very slow shutter speeds. Photographers will tell you that you cannot take a sharp hand-held picture at 1/10 of a second. What they mean is that you cannot reliably take a sharp picture. With digital photography, where individual pictures cost nothing, what you can do is take a dozen or two pictures and hope that one of them will be sharp.

February 2, 2024
Nativity of Our Lord Church, Observatory Hill

Here is an interesting demonstration of how many Catholic parishes developed in the first half of the twentieth century, and a reminder of how ecclesiastical priorities have changed. Father Pitt does not know the whole history of this building, and perhaps a parishioner could fill us in. But the main outline is this:

The cornerstone tells us that the building was put up in 1925. But it tells us that this was the parish school—and indeed, if we look at the picture at the top of the article again, we can see that the lower level was built first. Many parishes built a school building first, and worshiped in a space in the school until they could afford to build a sanctuary. In Brookline, for example, Resurrection parish built its parish school first and worshiped in the gymnasium until the main church could be constructed. The Lutherans a couple of blocks away did the same thing: St. Mark’s still worships in the building that was intended to be the Sunday-school wing, with a much grander church that never went up next to it. It was taken for granted that the children would be educated, and in Catholic parishes it was taken for granted that there would be a parish school to give them their daily education; if priorities had to be set, the school went up first, because it was easier to adapt a school for worship than to adapt a church sanctuary for schooling.

In this case, the sanctuary was built on top of the original school, which was probably the plan from the beginning. We can therefore add this to our list of churches with the sanctuary upstairs, although, because of the steep Pittsburghish lot, the corner entrance is only seven steps up from the sidewalk.

The belfry is one of the most picturesque aspects of the building.

January 7, 2024
North End United Presbyterian Church, Observatory Hill

Now Emmaus Deliverance Ministries. Designed by John Lewis Beatty, this late-Gothic-style church was built in about 1925. (The cornerstone has been effaced, which old Pa Pitt regards as cheating, though he understands that a new congregation likes to make a new beginning.)

A Gothic church must maintain a delicate balance: it wants to be impressive, but it also wants to be welcoming. The simple woodwork over the entrances (this one is the basement entrance) gets the balance right: it fits well with the style of the building, matching the angle of the Gothic arches, but it sends the message that we’re just plain folks here.

January 1, 2024
Holy Virgin Russian Orthodox Church, Carnegie

These deep-blue onion domes are one of the distinctive features of the Carnegie skyline as motorists see it from the Parkway West. This Russian church, originally known in English as St. Mary’s (according to the cornerstone), sits right next to the Ukrainian Orthodox church by Titus de Bobula; it was built in 1920, about fourteen years after the Ukrainian church. Though Holy Virgin is not so extravagantly eccentric, it holds up well against its neighbor; and the two of them together form a memorable composition that makes us wonder for a moment what continent we landed on.

December 22, 2023
The Oldest Church in Beechview Was in Banksville

The current St. Catherine of Siena Church, today part of St. Teresa of Kolkata parish, inhabits a big warehouse-like building from the 1960s on Broadway in Beechview. But St. Catherine’s parish predates Beechview itself. It was originally in the heart of the village of Banksville, where it inhabited this frame building that still stands today, after many subsequent adventures.

City planning maps like to draw neighborhood boundaries down the middle of major streets. This often leads to absurd divisions where the spine street of a neighborhood is marked as the neighborhood boundary, putting half the neighborhood in a different neighborhood—as in Garfield and Arlington, for example. Banksville is another example: the neighborhood boundary goes right through the center of the old town of Banksville, putting the eastern half of it in Beechview, including this church. But when it was built, this church was in the heart of Banksville, right across Bank Street (later Gorn Avenue and now the driveway for this building) from the Banksville post office, the site of which is also in Beechview according to city planning maps.

December 20, 2023
St. Peter & St. Paul Ukrainian Orthodox Church and Hall, Carnegie
Originally Ukrainian Greek Catholic, this church, built in 1906, was designed by Titus de Bobula with an extravagantly broad range of materials that no sane architect would attempt to harmonize. We are tempted to say it was fortunate that De Bobula was no sane architect; at any rate, he has pulled the rabbit out of his hat and made harmony out of dissonance.

De Bobula did not sign the cornerstone, as he did at the First Hungarian Reformed Church and St. John the Baptist, but the lettering is certainly in his style.

Next door to the church is a parochial hall. If we interpret our sources correctly, the architect was Harry H. Lefkowitz, and the building was put up in 1928 or shortly after.¹ It successfully matches the church by incorporating some of Titus de Bobula’s most distinctive quirks—the freakishly tall and narrow arches at the sides of the façade, the stonework at the top of the two-storey entrance arch, the horizontal scores in the brickwork around the entrance.

Father Pitt, who admits he does not speak Ukrainian, would translate “Ukrainska Parochiyalna Galya” as “Ukrainian Parochial Hall.”
1. “SS. Peter and Paul Church Takes Bids,” Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, May 27, 1928, p. 45. “The SS. Peter and Paul Greek Catholic Church is taking bids for a school and auditorium in James street, Carnegie. H. H. Lefkowitz is the architect.” “James Street” must be a mistake for “Jane Street,” the old name of Mansfield Boulevard, though there is a James Street a block away. The two names would be indistinguishable over the telephone. ↩︎
December 19, 2023
Second United Presbyterian Church, Highland Park

This church has an unusually eclectic history. It began as the Second United Presbyterian Church. Father Pitt does not know the original architect, but in 1915 there was a devastating fire, and a large reconstruction project was supervised by the architect John Louis Beatty. In 1933 the Presbyterians moved out, and this became the East End Baptist Church. Now it is the Union Project (an arts venue) and the meeting-place of the Jonah’s Call Anglican congregation.

About two and a half years ago, old Pa Pitt published some pictures of this church, but something seemed different about it. It took a moment to realize: the decorative details on the tower have been cleaned. Back in 2021, all the stone had been cleaned except for the very top of the tower:

But now the tower is clean to its very tip:

This little pinnacle is still the color the whole church used to be.

Map showing the location of the church.

December 18, 2023
Old Church in Aspinwall
This old Lutheran church¹ is no longer a church, but the exterior has been preserved very well. It is an unusual style for a small church, much like a Queen Anne house with a corner tower. The woodwork in the front gable is especially ornate.
1. It appears on a 1906 Hopkins map as “Evan’l Luth. Ch.” ↩︎
December 15, 2023