Father Pitt

Category: Knoxville

  • Fire at Knoxville Presbyterian Church

    Knoxville Presbyterian Church

    Three and a half years ago, old Pa Pitt visited this church to take pictures of the exterior. It was not in use then, although the grounds were maintained. Neighbors reported hearing a smoke detector’s low-battery signal for quite a while. Two days ago, a commenter alerted Father Pitt that a fire had seriously damaged the building.

    We’ll put the rest of the large number of pictures we took today behind a link, so that the sad evidence of the conflagration will not be the dominant impression in visitors’ minds for the next week and a half. Furthermore, we promise to balance this article soon with some very cheerful news from the Hilltop neighborhoods.

    More pictures of the church after the fire.

  • Row of Houses on Charles Street, Knoxville

    Houses on Charles Street

    This row of houses is typical of Knoxville, which was an independent borough until 1927. Much of the borough was built up in batches by the Knoxville Land Improvement Company, which often laid down rows of nearly identical houses. They tend to become a little less identical as the decades wear on. These houses were probably built in about 1900 or so in a style we might call Queen Anne Lite. The porch roof and splaying wooden columns on the house below probably show us what all the other houses looked like before their porches were repaired or replaced.

    424 Charles Street
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.
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  • Union Baptist Church, Knoxville

    Union Baptist Church
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    This church is now a duplex residence, and it may have been deconsecrated for quite a long while. Old maps cease to show it as a church by 1917: this Hopkins plat map simply shows a frame building at the corner of Beltzhoover Avenue and Jucunda Street.

    The tower, however, gives it away: though it has been heavily altered, this is a rare surviving frame church from about 1895. It does not appear on an 1893 Sanborn fire-insurance map, but on an 1896 Hopkins plat map it is marked “Union Bapt. Ch.”

    Most small frame churches of that era in the city were later replaced by larger brick or stone churches, but this one fizzled out. It appears on an 1898 Sanborn fire-insurance map as “German Baptist Mission,” and perhaps that explains its short life: it may have been an attempt by the Baptists to reach Germans in the heavily German borough of Knoxville, but the Germans preferred to remain Catholic or Lutheran.

    Comments

  • Queen Anne Manse in Knoxville

    221 Knox Avenue
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    Much of the detail on this fine old house is well preserved, including the half-octagon dormer, the oval art-glass window, the wraparound porch (partly enclosed by an improvised screen), and one of the finest displays of aluminum awning old Pa Pitt has ever seen.

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  • Knoxville

    Knoxville, Pittsburgh

    The slopes of Knoxville, an independent borough until it was taken into Pittsburgh in 1927. Below, two very different towers: the tower of St. Canice on the left and the U. S. Steel Tower on the right.

    Two towers
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
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  • Houses on Bausman Street, Knoxville

    Houses on Bausman Street

    For two blocks, Bausman Street in Knoxville is lined with these houses, which are modest in their dimensions but unusually fine in their design. There are four basic shapes, which repeat in the same order on both sides of the street.

    327 Bausman Street
    327 Bausman Street
    325 Bausman Street
    315 Bausman Street
    313 Bausman Street
    313 Bausman Street

    The houses were built for the Knoxville Land Improvement Company as a speculative venture. Father Pitt has not yet discovered who the architect was, but the developers got their money’s worth from these designs.

    321 Bausman Street
    309 Bausman Street
    311 Bausman Street
    319 Bausman Street

    Knoxville is a bit tattered around the edges at the moment, and a few of these houses have been lost to the ravages of time and poverty—two forces whose destructive power is surpassed only by the even more destructive force of prosperity. The remaining houses ought to be preserved as a document of the best early-twentieth-century styles in middle-class housing, and because, as a streetscape, they are a work of art.

    Houses on Bausman Street
    Sony Alpha 3000.

  • Fall in the South Hills Neighborhoods

    South Hills neighborhoods of Pittsburgh: Rooftops of Beechview houses with the tower of St. Canice Church, Knoxville, in the background
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    Rooftops of Beechview houses with the tower of St. Canice Church, Knoxville, in the background.

  • Christ English Lutheran Church, Knoxville

    Now St. Paul A. M. E. Zion Church. This congregation had money in the 1960s, it would seem; a new sanctuary in 1960s modernist Gothic was grafted on the older Sunday-school and office wing, which is in a stony Jacobean style.

  • Knoxville Baptist Church

    Knoxville Baptist Church

    Now Iglesia de Cristo León de Judá, the Knoxville Baptist Church was built in 1909; it is a typical small vernacular-Gothic church with some Arts and Crafts details. The attractive indigo paint applied by the current congregation makes it stand out from others of its type.

    Cornerstone

    Fundamentalist Christians in the United States have always had a deep suspicion of stained glass as creeping idolatry, but the Spanish-speaking Evangelical congregations are the most vengefully thorough about it. As soon as they take over an old church building, the stained glass is removed. Usually it is replaced with clear glass, but this congregation has blocked all natural light from entering the building. Photographs of services on line show that the interior is set up like a theater, and natural light would only interfere with the projections and spotlights.

    Knoxville Baptist Church
    Entrance
    Tower entrance

  • Vanished Storefront on Brownsville Road, Knoxville

    Sometimes old Pa Pitt hasn’t got around to publishing a picture of something before it disappears. Back in January he took this picture of a three-storey commercial building from 1901; it has just been demolished. It was not an extraordinarily fine work of architecture, but the upper floors were pleasingly proportioned and treated with enough ornamentation to make the building a good citizen of the streetscape. The ground floor was a mass of decades’ worth of improvised improvements and adaptations; its last tenant was a general store that advertised “videos” among its wares, which tells us how long that store had been vacant.