Now known as Holy Ghost Byzantine Rite Catholic Church. Carlton Strong, best remembered for Sacred Heart Church in Shadyside, designed this Byzantine church and the somewhat similar St. Mary’s Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the McKees Rocks Bottoms.
Kathleen M. Washy, an expert in the history of the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, wrote a long article on Carlton Strong (download the PDF here) for Gathered Fragments, the magazine of the Catholic Historical Society, so old Pa Pitt will send you there for more about this fascinating artist. Here we’ll just look at pictures.
Two houses that both seem to date from the Civil War era; they both appear on an 1872 plat map of Allegheny City. This one has just had some spiffing up. It is an Italianate variant of the typical Pennsylvania I-house with an addition in the back (although the addition in this case may have been part of the original plan). It has been divided into two dwellings, but the outlines of the house and many of its details are well preserved.
The outline of the house on the 1872 maps shows the wing in the rear, so it is at least that old.
This house was inhabited until recently; it looks as though it had a fire and is undergoing repairs. It has a more complicated history. It also appears on the 1872 map, and later maps that distinguish the materials of buildings show that this was a wood-frame house. At some point around 1900 it was divided into two dwellings. Some time after 1923 it was sheathed in buff Kittanning brick, giving us an 1860s form with 1920s exterior details.
Canon PowerShot S45; Kodak EasyShare Max Z990.Comments
You may have noticed this old school if you looked out the window while your chauffeur drove you down the Ohio River Boulevard. It was built in 1922 for St. Gabriel’s, a Slovak parish, whose church stood across California Avenue from the school. In the late 1960s, when the expressway portion of the Ohio River Boulevard was built, the church was demolished; the congregation moved into the school while it built a big new modern church on the hill above. (We may see that building later: it still stands, though not in use as a church.)
To get this picture of the front, Father Pitt had to stand on the narrow, sloping Belgian-block median between California Avenue and the ramp to the Ohio River Boulevard while cars whizzed by on both sides. Since he lived to bring the camera back, you have this picture.
The school has been closed for years, but the building is kept standing. It seems to be in use as a warehouse.
A tiny dead-end street of little houses in a little ravine next to Holy Ghost Greek Catholic Church, showing how even the most unlikely holes in the landscape filled up back when Pittsburgh was booming and desperately in need of housing. They appear to have been built all at once, except possibly the little gambrel-roofed Dutch Colonial cottage.
Father Pitt was looking at Wikipedia’s list of flatiron buildings in the United States and thinking that he could multiply the number by ten or so just from buildings in Pittsburgh and the surrounding suburbs. So he has begun a collection of these flatiron buildings, meaning buildings that are triangular like a clothes iron. Here is one that he found especially attractive. The shape is dictated by the acute angle between California Avenue and Woodland Avenue, and of course it has the usual Pittsburgh problem of irregularity in three dimensions to deal with. The form of the building is typical of early-twentieth-century commercial architecture, but the Art Nouveau patterns picked out in light Kittanning brick set this building apart from others like it.
This Romanesque—or shall we say Rundbogenstil? Because we like to say “Rundbogenstil”—firehouse was built for the city of Allegheny, probably in the 1890s to judge by our old maps. The alterations since then can be explained by the fact that a firehouse is basically a men’s club, and men’s clubs in Pittsburgh gradually fill in their windows and block as much natural light as they can. It does make one wonder what they expect to do with that tower now, but perhaps firemen have secret initiation rituals for which a dark tower is the ideal setting.
The congregation moved to a generic late-twentieth-century church building in the North Hills this year, finally following most of its members to the suburbs. (The congregation was secure enough to be able to move without taking out a loan, which is good news for them even if it’s bad news for the North Side.) That leaves this building in an uncertain state. Right now it is still being well maintained, but its neighborhood is not yet valuable. Perhaps with the revival of city living, it will be worth doing something with in the next few years.
The church was built in 1937, when the Depression was still with us and its congregation probably was not rich. The building is a curious construction in a style old Pa Pitt has decided to call “Modular Byzantine.” The parade of identical rectangles across the tall face of the church makes it look as though it was put together by a methodical and meticulous child playing with blocks.
Because of the extreme slope of the lot, the front has to be very tall if there is going to be any back at all. Since the main entrance is on the lower level, we can add this to our list of churches with the sanctuary upstairs.
The gold domes are a landmark on this section of California Avenue, and we hope they can be preserved.
Chauncey W. Hodgdon had been practicing architecture for well over four decades when he designed this little church. It was built in about 1924,1 and this is Hodgdon on a small budget. He minimized expensive indulgences like stone trim and large windows, while still giving the congregation the respectable Gothic church it dreamed of. Now the building belongs to New Hope Church, which is keeping it in very good shape.
Source: The American Contractor, August 11, 1923: “Church: Shadland [sic] av. & Dickson st. Archt. Chauncey W. Hodgdon, Martin bldg. Owner The Calvary Christ. Church. Rev. F. Fink, 3426 Cass st. Brk. & Stone. Archt. taking bids on super. to close Aug. 20.” ↩︎
A map from 1923 identifies this building as the “A. Benedix Theatre,” which we would guess was a neighborhood movie palace. It’s crammed into an awkward lot in the Woods Run valley, so that is not a trick of photographic perspective in the picture above: the front really is at an odd angle to the rest of the building. But (in spite of the replacement of the ground floor by a garage) it does have the look and the narrow and deep shape of a low-budget theater. Father Pitt will therefore add this to his collection of silent-movie theaters still standing, unless someone gives him better information.
The Pen used to be known to frequent guests as “The Wall.”
Closed since 2017, the Western Penitentiary (or, more recently, State Correctional Institution—Pittsburgh) will have a hard time finding a buyer. It would perhaps make a fine mansion for an eccentric supervillain, but most real-world supervillains are dreadfully prosaic in their tastes.
Nevertheless, it is a masterpiece of prison architecture—aesthetically, at least. The architect was Edward M. Butz, and it was built between 1876 and 1882, with various later additions. It looks more like a prison than the Bastille did, and so we present it on Bastille Day, with the cheerful news that no inmates are imprisoned here, but the sad news that it may eventually have to be pulled down by a demolition contractor rather than a revolutionary mob.
