The star-spangled blue dome of this church is an almost startling sight rising above the streets of downtown McKeesport. The church, generally known as “St. Mary’s” by locals, was built in 1974 from a design by Sergei Padukow,1 a specialist in Russian churches who adapted very traditional Russian forms to a late-twentieth-century style.
The serviceable canopy over the side entrance replaced a much more characteristic original, as we see in this 1970s photograph.
From “Our Eastern Domes, Fantastic, Bright…,” by James D. Van Trump. PHLF; reprinted from Carnegie Magazine.
A comparison with this illustration of “a characteristic church” in Moscow (from from John L. Stoddard’s Lectures, 1898) shows us how neatly Padukow adapted traditional Russian forms to a modern idiom.
A modernist church built in 1964 in traditional basilica form. The architect was J. Kenneth Myers. The church is dedicated to St. Nicholas of Myra, famous for giving gifts to poor children (thus inspiring our legend of Santa Claus) and for smacking Arius across the face at the Council of Nicaea. He was versatile.
Jolly old St. Nick slapping Arius. Ecumenical councils were a lot more fun in the old days.
It is a curious fact of our religious life that, even in the most depressed areas, the Eastern Catholic and Orthodox congregations often flourish, while the Western churches languish and evaporate one by one. This church is in a part of downtown McKeesport that can seem nearly abandoned—but not if you visit on a Sunday, when parishioners flock to St. Nicholas and the Russian Orthodox church just down the street.
The skeleton outline of an onion dome instantly conveys that this is an Eastern church.
McKeesport’s own Charles R. Moffitt, whose office was a short stroll down Walnut street from the construction site, designed this automotive palace for a Studebaker dealer.1 It was built in 1926, and shortly after it opened a picture of the auto-accessories section of the showroom was published in India Rubber and Tire Review for April of 1927:
We can still see the Studebaker emblem at the top of the long side of the building.
A view from a couple of blocks away on Shaw Avenue gives us a better idea of the scale of the building.
The Iron Age, April 15, 1926, p. 1113. “The Ninth Avenue Garage, Ninth Avenue, McKees Rocks [sic], Pa., operated by Baehr Brothers, has plans for a four-story and basement service, repair and garage building, 70 x 140 ft., to cost about $100,000 with equipment. C. R. Moffitt, Masonic Building, is architect.” This listing puts it in “McKees Rocks,” but that’s obviously an editor’s error: there was never a Ninth Avenue in McKees Rocks, and Moffitt was a McKeesport architect, and the dimensions are right for this building. We might add that “Baehr Brothers” is a very unusual name, so unusual that there seems to have been only one automotive-related firm by that name. ↩︎
It is cheering to report that this impressive little Gothic church, once an abandoned hulk, has now been stabilized and put to use, apparently as a private home. Some of the stained glass was smashed while it was abandoned, but the remainder has been kept in place and covered with clear glass to seal up the holes. Since it sits in a prominent spot diagonally across from the Carnegie Free Library of McKeesport, it improves the neighborhood quite a bit to have this building occupied.
The cornerstone bears a date of 1903.
The outsized tower and shadowy inset corner porch are distinctive features.
The richly detailed Peoples Building deserves owners and tenants who will love it, and we hope it can find them. It has at least been stabilized by its current owner, and it looks like an attractive place to have an office.
These entrances want clocks, but the elegance of the gleaming white stone is unimpaired.
This classical roof ornament was clearly meant to be right in the middle of the Fifth Avenue side, but it appears that the building was expanded by two more bays not long after it was built.
The McKeesport Community Newsroom site gives us A Peek Inside the Peoples Building, showing us a wonderful time capsule that it would almost be a shame to disturb. If old Pa Pitt were a billionaire, he would buy the building, preserve all the contents as they are, and call it a museum, and then not care whether anyone actually paid the 50¢ admission fee, because he would be a billionaire.
Addendum: The architects were Mowbray & Uffinger, New York specialists in bank buildings.
We often see diamond-shaped asbestos-cement siding like this in neglected neighborhoods, but seldom in such good shape. Note that this old house, which old Pa Pitt would tentatively date to the 1870s, has also preserved its fine Victorian woodwork in front. The original wood siding can still be seen under the porch roof.
The splendid Queen Anne mansion next door looks as though it needs a new roof, but is otherwise in a good state of preservation.
What this remarkable and slightly fantastical rectory needs is a nice church to go with it, but St. Peter’s was demolished several years ago. The rectory, however, has been restored and sensitively updated.
The architectural style is a Gothic fantasy that even includes some Moorish-looking decorations. The emphatic vertical in the front creates the impression of a tower without exactly being a tower.
These are all high-dynamic-range pictures, each made from three different photographs at different exposures.
Since the clouds were picturesquely textured that day, old Pa Pitt thought he might try the effect of black-and-white pictures with a (simulated) red filter to bring out the clouds. The results are worth seeing, if you care to continue.
This Queen Anne house in McKeesport is probably doomed as soon as the city has the budget to demolish it. Something could be made of it, but it would take a complete reconstruction of the interior, and in a city where the median property value is about $20,000 that is not likely to happen. In Shadyside, it could be profitably restored, but not in McKeesport.
Google Street View shows this house in the same condition as far back as 2007, the first year of Street View. Until recently, another equally decrepit and equally splendid Queen Anne house sat right next to this one, but it was demolished some time after Google Street View pictured it in 2019, possibly because someone was fixing up the baroque mansion on the other side.
This is Father Pitt’s favorite newspaper building anywhere, without exception. It looks more like a newspaper building than any other newspaper building on earth.
In fact, with its stark horizontals in black and white, it looks like the front page of the Daily News. In its heyday, the Daily News had a distinctive style: well into the 1990s it looked like a very modern paper for 1936, and it usually had one big headline striped across the front page in thick black gothic caps.
In these photographs we have used a red filter (simulated in the GIMP), which has the interesting side effect of making the red light in the intersection almost pure white.
The Daily News was owned and edited by the powerful Mansfield family for many years, and it might be hard to say whether it exposed or enabled more political corruption in the Mon Valley. It was, in the words of its masthead, “More than a Newspaper—a Community Institution.” In 2007, it was swallowed by Richard Mellon Scaife, the Charles Foster Kane of southwestern Pennsylvania, joining every other paper in the Pittsburgh area that was not the Post-Gazette. When Scaife died and his news empire was revealed to have been built on a rickety financial foundation (he had burned up $450,000,000 from a trust fund to keep the empire going), the Daily News was one of the casualties. It closed in 2015.
The exterior of this building is still in good shape. Trib Total Media donated it to the city after the Daily News closed, and it has been kept from falling into a pile of bricks, unlike some other buildings we could mention.
Addendum: The architects were Hunting, Larsen & Dunnells, who were also responsible for the remodeling of the Pittsburgh Press building.
