Father Pitt

Category: McKees Rocks Bottoms

St. Mary’s Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, McKees Rocks Bottoms

Now St. Mary Ukrainian Orthodox Parish. The history of Catholic and Orthodox Ukrainian Christians in the United States is complicated, and old Pa Pitt will not attempt to sort it out here. It ends with double Ukrainian churches in many neighborhoods, and that is the case here: there is a more recent Ukrainian Catholic church around the corner from this one.

This impressive building was designed by Carlton Strong (whose full name was Thomas Willet Carlton Strong, and no wonder he usually shaved off half of it). Strong’s most famous work was the magnificently Gothic Sacred Heart in Shadyside, but he adapts very well to the Byzantine style here and gives the Bottoms a distinctive addition to its skyline.

The rectory is in a different style; it is certainly one of the most splendid houses in the Bottoms.

The fence behind the rectory has recently been repainted in a patriotic color scheme.

Carlton Strong, incidentally, came to Pittsburgh as a designer of apartment buildings, giving us the Bellefield Dwellings as his first work here. He later converted to the Catholic faith and became one of our most prominent church architects. You can read a good biography of Carlton Strong by the distinguished local historian Kathleen M. Washy on line:

Designing in God’s Name: Architect Carlton Strong

December 3, 2023
St. John’s Ukrainian Catholic Church, McKees Rocks Bottoms

Built in 1960, this church adopted a radically simplified Byzantine architecture. It is much smaller than its Ukrainian Orthodox (formerly Ukrainian Greek Catholic) neighbor St. Mary’s around the corner, but both congregations continue to inhabit the same neighborhood without throwing bricks at each other.

The attached rectory is in an equally simple style; the pasted-on false shutters are an attempt to make it feel less institutional.

December 3, 2023
St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church, McKees Rocks Bottoms

Now billing itself as just an “Orthodox” church, since the Russian Orthodox church in America became autocephalous in 1970 and has long included a broad spectrum of ethnicities. This church was built in 1914, and the architect was George W. King—a name that so far does not appear anywhere else on old Pa Pitt’s Great Big List of Buildings and Architects. “King” does not sound like a particularly Russian name, though Ellis Island could do funny things to people’s names. But he certainly seems to have captured the spirit of Russian church design, and these onion domes are one of the most distinctive features of the skyline of the Bottoms.

After the baroque elaboration of the church, the rectory seems almost ruthlessly plain. But it does its job well: it matches the church in materials, thus showing its association, but it directs all attention away from itself and toward the church, which seems theologically appropriate.

December 3, 2023
Holy Ghost Greek Catholic Church, McKees Rocks Bottoms

If you have ever come up the Ohio or across the McKees Rocks Bridge, chances are you have noticed this gold-domed tower rising from the McKees Rocks Bottoms. You would not have had time to appreciate the details, but appreciate them now. Just the tower is a remarkable piece of work. But the whole church is something extraordinary, and worth a visit to the Bottoms to see. Since the Bottoms is a neighborhood of surprising architectural riches, you will probably find yourself distracted by a dozen other wonders before you leave.

Holy Ghost Greek (now Byzantine) Catholic Church is a startling outcropping of Art Nouveau in a neighborhood where we never expected to find it. The design was the work of McKees Rocks’ own John H. Phillips, as we know from the cornerstone.

Here we have the date, the name of the architect, and the name of the contractor, along with the name of the pastor. There was one other church architect in Pittsburgh who routinely put his own name and the name of the contractor on cornerstones in florid Art Nouveau lettering, and that was Titus de Bobula. Looking at the style of this church, with its radical and constantly surprising Art Nouveau ornamentation, Father Pitt forms the hypothesis that Phillips knew of Titus de Bobula’s work and was strongly influenced by the eccentric Hungarian.

The corner cross picked out in bricks is wildly different from anything you have seen before. To the right of it we also see a variant of the square above a downward-pointing triangle that seems to have been a kind of signature for Phillips, appearing on at least three of the four buildings of his that Father Pitt has so far identified.

The church behind the front is more conventional—which is also true of Titus de Bobula’s churches. Both de Bobula and Phillips relied on elaborate fronts to make their grand impression.

Certainly this tower makes a strong impression. There is nothing else quite like it in Pittsburgh. The variation of detail in the bricks is remarkable. But the forms are harmonized very cleverly, with each level echoing shapes from the other two.

Phillips also designed the Ukrainian National Home around the corner, and Father Pitt hopes to identify more buildings by him in McKees Rocks. He has joined Pittsburgh’s exclusive little club of early modernists, and old Pa Pitt is delighted to make his acquaintance.

November 27, 2023
Ukrainian National Home, McKees Rocks Bottoms

Father Pitt would like to introduce you to an architect you’ve never heard of, but one who merits your attention: John H. Phillips, who kept his office in McKees Rocks, and about whose personal life old Pa Pitt knows absolutely nothing.

When we speak of the early modernists in Pittsburgh—the architects before 1920 or so who adopted the idioms of Art Nouveau and related movements—we generally have a very short list: Frederick Scheibler, Kiehnel & Elliott, and the incomparable Titus de Bobula, the man who gave up his promising career as an architect because he would rather be a millionaire playboy Nazi dictator. Now Father Pitt proposes to add the name of John H. Phillips to that list. Here is the Ukrainian National Home, built in 1913 in a shockingly unconventional style.

We have to use our imagination to see the building with the colossal windows the architect designed to flood the building with light, because men’s clubs in Pittsburgh always block in their windows. But the outlines of the building are unaltered, and the ornamental brickwork is remarkable. Note in particular those squares above downward-pointing triangles at the entrance: they will reappear on other Phillips buildings, almost like a signature.

Where did this obscure architect get his Art Nouveau style? There could be any number of explanations, but Father Pitt suspects that Phillips took a lot of inspiration from Titus de Bobula. We will see some evidence for that speculation when we come to Phillips’ most prominent work in the McKees Rocks Bottoms, Holy Ghost Church. Meanwhile, this extraordinary building may serve as John H. Phillips’ initiation into the exclusive little club of early modernists in Pittsburgh.

November 19, 2023
St. Mark’s School, McKees Rocks Bottoms

This is a Catholic school with more than the usual touch of whimsy. Old Pa Pitt does not yet know the architect, but whoever it was decided to make a school that would strike its pupils as something out of a fairy tale. It is sadly vacant and decaying right now, although at least the grounds are kept. The cornerstone tells us that the building was begun in 1928:

Since old Pa Pitt considers this school endangered, he has many pictures to show you, so the rest will be behind a “read more” link to avoid cluttering the front page for a week.
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November 17, 2023
Domes of St. Nicholas

The domes of St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church in the McKees Rocks Bottoms.

Nikita Khrushchev visited Pittsburgh during his reign, and there’s an amusing legend about his trip in from the airport. He was being driven in along the Ohio River Boulevard, which was the way to get downtown before the Parkway West was finished, and he saw the skyline of the McKees Rocks Bottoms out the window. Khrushchev was convinced that the Americans had built a Russian Potemkin village to fool him into thinking…something. His American minders tried to explain that Pittsburgh is just like that, but Khrushchev couldn’t be fooled.

The legend may be apocryphal, but like most such legends it tells us more about the people who told the legend than it does about the person it was told about. Pittsburghers were intensely proud of exotic landscapes like the Bottoms, and thought of them as things that made their city unique in America.

November 15, 2023
St. Mark’s Church, McKees Rocks Bottoms
Edward B. Lang designed this church for a Slovak congregation in the McKees Rocks Bottoms; it was built in about 1914.¹ The church is not a church any longer, but it has been in use as an antiques auction gallery and thus has not been allowed to decay too badly. Through the magic of twenty-first-century technology, we can see the whole front of the church, right up to the cross on the steeple, almost the way the architect saw it in his imagination, although he probably was not imagining those utility cables draped across the front of the picture.
1. Source: The Construction Record, December 27, 1913: “Architect Edward B. Lang, House building, will receive bids until January 5, on constructing a one-story brick and stone church, at McKees Rocks, for St. Marks Roman Catholic Congregation. Cost $50,000.” ↩︎
November 12, 2023