H. Childs Hodgens was the architect of this church, which was built in 1911.1 It has not been M. P. for a good while; currently it is shared by the House of Prayer for All Slavic Christian Church and the Congregation Yeshua Ben David.
Source: The Construction Record, September 30, 1911: “Foundations are in for the $15,000 brick and stone church, to be erected on William Pitt Boulevard and Lilac street, Squirrel Hill, for the Squirrel Hill Methodist Protestant Congregation, from plans drawn by Architect H. C. Hodgens, Vandergrift building.” William Pitt Boulevard is now Beechwood Boulevard. ↩︎
This church was built in 1927, but it is very similar to churches built half a century before that. Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists enthusiastically adopted the Akron Plan at the turn of the twentieth century, building square auditorium-style churches, often with big corner towers. The auditorium plan made sense in a church where the emphasis was on preaching. Lutherans, Catholics, and Episcopalians stuck to the traditional center-aisle church plan, because their emphasis was on liturgy.
The architect was John A. Long,1 who by this time was one of the old reliables in Pittsburgh. The church is no longer Lutheran, but it is neatly kept by the current occupants, the Agapé Life Church.
A tidy four-unit building fitting a lot of living space into a small lot. The style is very simple, but little details—the suggestion of battlements in the roofline, rectangles and a diamond of terra cotta—give what would otherwise be a prosaic building some romantic appeal. It’s about time for the awning man to come by and take those awnings down for their winter cleaning.
The architect of this Byzantine-modern church was Charles J. Pepine, who designed a number of postwar churches in our area.1 It was dedicated in 1949 under the name “Nativity of Our Lady”; later it was known as Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, but it was usually just called St. Mary’s. It closed in 2010. Some attempts were made to turn the building into apartments, but they ran into objections from neighbors and we know not what other troubles; currently the building is vacant, though with building permits dated 2015 and 2019 in the front window.
The distinctive high domes of these towers were not part of the original plan when the new church was first announced in September of 1948, as we can see from this sketch by the architect.
If there must be parking lots, they should be marked by architectural elements in keeping with their buildings—like these pillars at the parking-lot entrance for St. Mary’s.
A. F. Link designed this Romanesque school in 1912, a little more than a decade before he designed the magnificent church beside it. This design already shows Link’s trademark habit of abstracting and modernizing historic forms: here he combines a hint of Romanesque with some very Jugendstil abstract patterns in the brickwork.
Fortunately the building has been sold to Yeshiva Schools, so it will not be abandoned to rot the way so many Catholic schools have been.
Designed by A. F. Link, this Romanesque church was begun in 1923 and opened in 1925. The style is transitional: it uses traditional Romanesque elements, but it is already veering toward the Art Deco modernist interpretation of those elements that would become common in the 1930s through the 1950s.
The cross at the top of the (liturgical) west front sets the modernist tone for the decorations.
These abstract capitals continue the streamlined modernist theme, as do the three lunettes (Mary, Jesus, Joseph) on the west front:
Though it is a complex design, the rose window echoes the streamlining of the capitals and other details.
In contrast to the Deco streamlining of the front, the side of the church, with its crenellations and complex brickwork, could almost pass for a middle-1800s church by Charles F. Bartberger. Yet the styles fit together; there is no dissonance between the different views of the church.
For those who are interested, here is a Pittsburgh Catholic article published March 27, 1924, that identifies many of the contractors and artists who worked on the church.
These tiny houses on Frank Street have a historic importance far out of proportion to their cost and size. First of all, they are among the relatively few remaining works of the eccentric architectural genius and flimflam artist Titus de Bobula, the man who would have been Fascist dictator of Hungary if he had had better luck. Second, they are built of reinforced concrete, some of the very first American houses so built. Titus de Bobula was the apostle of concrete in his brief architectural career, and his influence would be hard to overestimate.
The houses have had their separate adventures since they were built, including some artificial siding. This one has had windows and front door replaced, but at least it shows the simple outlines of the design, including the bay window in front.
The house on the end may be the best preserved of the row.
Many sources say that twenty of these houses were built. Six remain, and old Pa Pitt believes there were never more than nine. The architect claimed to have built more, but we cannot rely on anything Titus de Bobula says about his work, because he was prone to exaggeration and outright fabrication.
The houses were an investment by multimillionaire newspaper magnate Eugene O’Neill, owner of the Dispatch and no relation to the playwright of the same name. He owned the land on Frank Street and along Greenfield Avenue to either side. Some architectural historians say that De Bobula rowhouses went up on Greenfield Avenue, but that is contradicted by old maps and today’s evidence.
These rowhouses on Greenfield Avenue, on the land once owned by Eugene O’Neill, were built at about the same time as the De Bobula houses, but these are standard brick. Old maps do show three more concrete houses on Lilac Street, perpendicular to the row on Frank Street, but those were replaced after the Second World War by two larger and more expensive houses:
These two houses stand where a row of three concrete houses, probably by De Bobula, stood in the first half of the twentieth century.
For more on Titus de Bobula and his very surprising career, you can see the article on Titus de Bobula in Father Pitt’s Pittsburgh Encyclopedia.
Greenfield is a hilly neighborhood whose peaks sometimes open up unexpected views of the city. Here we see two different views of the Cathedral of Learning in the distance.
