Father Pitt

Category: Hazelwood

  • First Hungarian Lutheran Church of Pittsburgh, Hazelwood

    First Hungarian Lutheran Church of Pittsburgh

    Hazelwood was a famously Hungarian neighborhood, and several kinds of Hungarian churches sprouted there. The cornerstone of this church was laid one hundred years ago today on December 20, 1925, but it’s not much different in front from the vernacular Gothic churches of half a century earlier.

    Cornerstone with date of 1925 and the name of Rev. S. Ruzsa

    If we walk around the side of this church, though, we see what is really unusual about it: it grows out of a big old Italianate house built in the 1870s.

    First Hungarian Lutheran Church

    The new building was dedicated on May 16, 1926.

    Church and house
    Entrance

    The congregation is long gone, but the church now belongs to an organization called “Center of Life.”

    Cornice brackets

    The old house has some very fine woodwork, which we hope can be preserved.

    Former door
    Collapsed stained glass
    Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.

    Some of the stained glass has fallen to pieces. It is expensive to restore stained glass, but the Union Project in Highland Park made restoring stained glass a community-education project, with spectacular results.

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  • Glenwood Division Office, Pittsburgh Railways Company

    Pittsburgh Railways Glenwood
    Samsung Galaxy A15 5G with ultra-wide camera (so don‘t expect too much it you enlarge it)

    Pittsburgh Railways, the streetcar conglomerate, had a big facility here in Glenwood (the southern end of what city planning maps mark as Hazelwood) with a car barn and this station and offices. The complex was adjacent to the Glenwood station on the B&O, where there was a large railroad yard with a roundhouse.

    Inscription: Pittsburgh Railways Company

    The building is now the Hazelwood Healthy Active Living Community Center, so it has been restored and is kept in exceptionally neat condition.

    Glenwood Station
    Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.

  • St. Ann’s Church, Hazelwood

    St. Ann’s Church

    St. Ann’s was built in our most Hungarian neighborhood for Hungarian Catholics. The cornerstone was laid in 1919; the congregation worshiped in the basement of the unfinished building for a few years, and finished the church in 1925. The church closed in 1998, and the building was sold; its current owners have kept it from falling down.1 That is as much as old Pa Pitt knows about the church, other than what you see in these pictures.

    Front of the church

    From the front, the church seems extremely tall, with its sanctuary upstairs from the main entrance. However, Hazelwood is a neighborhood mostly built on a slope, and the altar end of the sanctuary is at ground level. The cross in a circle on the façade was originally a rose window.

    St. Ann’s Church
    Entrance
    Entrance
    Ornamental brickwork
    Central tower

    The central tower has an octagonal belfry.

    Left tower
    Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR.

    Two identical side towers have interestingly treated roofs.

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  • Gladstone School, Hazelwood

    Gladstone School

    O. M. Topp was the architect of this palace of education, which grew in stages to magnificent proportions on a difficult slope. The original part of the school, opened in 1914, was featured in School Houses: the Eleventh Annual Year Book of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club Incorporated, a record of the 1916 exhibition of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club.

    Gladstone School in 1916
    THE GLADSTONE SCHOOL
    O. M. Topp, Architect, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
    [1916]
    Gladstone School in 1916
    VIEW SHOWING PORTION NOW FINISHED
    THE GLADSTONE SCHOOL
    O. M. Topp, Architect, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
    [1916]
    Floor Plan
    PLAN SHOWING THE COMPLETED BUILDING
    THE GLADSTONE SCHOOL
    O. M. Topp, Architect, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
    [1916]
    Entrance

    After sitting vacant for two decades, the main part of the school has been restored as apartments, much to the delight of nearby residents. One neighbor on the same street told old Pa Pitt he had been a student at the school, and was very happy to see the building taken care of once again—and happy to see someone documenting it with a camera.

    Entrance
    Downspout

    If you visit, don’t forget to look up at the downspouts.

    Annex

    The population of the neighborhood rapidly grew, and an annex was added in 1926, connected to the main school by a pedestrian bridge. Restoration of the annex is still in progress.

    Annex
    Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.

  • Odd Fellows Lodge, Hazelwood

    Odd Fellows lodge

    W. Ward Williams was the architect of this fine hall, built in 1912 for the local lodge of the International Order of Odd Fellows. Like most lodge halls, it was built with the meeting hall upstairs, so that the ground floor could be given over to rent-paying storefronts. The building has been neatly restored and is now home to Community Kitchen Pittsburgh.

    I. O. O. F.
    Three-link chain

    The three-link chain is the emblem of the Odd Fellows.

    Front of the building
    Odd Fellows lodge
    From down Second Avenue
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    Map.

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  • Hazelwood Christian Church

    Hazelwood Christian Church

    Here is another church with the sanctuary upstairs, if you look at the front. This is Pittsburgh, though, so upstairs is the ground floor in the rear.

    Front elevation
    Entrance
    Cornerstone: “Christian Church, 1921”
    Front elevation really big
    Nikon COOLPIX P100; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G
    Comments

  • Church of St. Stephen Proto-Martyr, Hazelwood

    Church of St. Stephen Proto-Martyr

    A year and a half ago, old Pa Pitt published pictures of St. Stephen Proto-Martyr, but he was unable to get a picture of the front, because the leaves were on the trees, and the front looked like this:

    Front obscured by leaves

    On a gloomy afternoon recently, however, he happened to be in Hazelwood, and the trees were only beginning to leaf, so it was possible to make out the building through the bare branches.

    Perspective view

    The church was built in 1902; it is one of the most important works of Frederick Sauer, and it is hanging by a thread. The building is not in regular use, but not precisely abandoned. We will describe it as Endangered on our six-point scale of Least Concern, Near Threatened, Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically Endangered, and Demolished.

    Church of St. Stephen Proto-Martyr
    West front

    To cut through the clutter of branches and bring out the building, Father Pitt tried several exposures with two different cameras and different kinds of processing afterward. He did not come up with any outstanding pictures, but at least the outlines of the design are clear now.

    West front
    Nikon COOLPIX P100; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
    Comments

  • Church of St. Stephen Proto-Martyr, Hazelwood

    Statue of St. Stephen
    Date stone

    The Baroque style is unusual, but St. Stephen’s is a Frederick Sauer church through and through, starting with that yellow Kittanning brick he favored. We’ll have to wait till the leaves drop to get a view of the front, but since the building is slowly crumbling, it’s good to get the details as soon as we can.

    Front of the church obscured by trees
    Chimney and tower
    Elizabeth Street side of St. Stephen’s
    Main entrance
    Main entrance.

    Update: An Iranian correspondent who does not seem to be a spammer has left a remark that Google Translate renders as “We have a similar example in Iran from Sar Setun.” Although it would not have occurred to him before, Father Pitt now notices how much this ornate entrance porch resembles certain examples of Islamic architecture.

    Left entrance
    Left entrance.
    JMJ shield over the left entrance
    Right entrance
    Right entrance.
    MR shield
    Capitals with crosses
    Column swags
    Mark and John
    The Evangelists Mark and John.
    Luke and Matthew
    The Evangelists Luke and Matthew.
    Pilaster decoration
    Capital with cherub
    Capital with cherub
    Tower
    Tower
    Side window
    One of the side windows.

  • Glen Tenement House by Titus de Bobula, Hazelwood

    Tenement by Titus de Bobula

    This tenement house in Hazelwood was built in 1903, making it one of Titus de Bobula’s early commissions in Pittsburgh. It is very conventional for De Bobula, but it represented him in a Pittsburgh Press roundup of local architects in 1905 (“Able Architects the Authors of City’s Architectural Beauty,” April 29, 1905), where this picture was published (we regret that we have not been able to find a better copy than this ugly microfilm scan):

    From what we can see in the indistinct old photograph, the building has not changed much at all, though Gertrude Street in front of it has been regraded.

    Front view of the tenement

    The Gertrude Street face. It is likely that many of the first residents were Hungarian millworkers: that is a bit of De Bobula’s First Hungarian Reformed Church peeking out from behind the building.

    Oblique view from the south
    Entrance

    Entrance on the south end of the building. The entrances originally had some sort of triangular pediment or small projecting roof; the Press photo is too indistinct to make out any details, but we can see the shadow of a triangle over the entrances at both ends.

    Elizabeth Street side

    The Elizabeth Street end of the building.

  • Old Hazelwood Branch Library

    Old Hazelwood library

    Andrew Carnegie peppered the city with neighborhood libraries designed by his favorite architects, Alden & Harlow. They’re all little gems. This one has been abandoned for years, since a new library was built in the mostly empty business district of Hazelwood on Second Avenue. (That block of Second Avenue now seems to be the center of the Hazelwood neighborhood revival.) It is still in good shape, and—unlike an abandoned church or synagogue—it would be a relatively easy building to adapt to new uses.