Father Pitt

Category: Munhall

  • Old St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cathedral, Munhall

    St. John the Baptist Byzantine Cathedral

    Back in 2014, old Pa Pitt took these pictures of the old St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Munhall. In the intervening years Father Pitt has learned much more about making adjustments to photographs to produce a finished picture that looks like the scene he photographed, so he presents these pictures again, “remastered” (as the recording artists would say) for higher fidelity.

    The church was built in 1903 for a Greek Catholic (or Byzantine Catholic, as we would say today) congregation. When Pittsburgh became the seat of a Ruthenian diocese, this became the cathedral.

    The mad genius Titus de Bobula, who was only 25 years old when this church was built, was the architect, and this building still causes architectural historians to gush like schoolgirls. It includes some of De Bobula’s trademarks, like the improbably tall and narrow arches in the towers and side windows and the almost cartoonishly weighty stone over the ground-level arches. It’s made up of styles and materials that no normal architect would put together in one building, and it all works. Enlarge the pictures and note the stonework corner crosses in the towers and all along the side, which we suspect were in the mind of John H. Phillips when he designed Holy Ghost Greek Catholic Church in the McKees Rocks Bottoms, which also makes use of De Bobulesque tall and narrow arches.

    St. John the Baptist Cathedral
    Rectory

    The rectory was designed by De Bobula at the same time.

    Architectural rendering of the cathedral and rectory

    This illustration of the church and rectory was published in January of 1920 in The Czechoslovak Review, but it appears from the style to be De Bobula’s own rendering of the buildings, including the people in 1903-vintage (definitely not 1920) costumes.

    Old St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cathedral
    Kodak EasyShare Z1485; Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.

    The Byzantine Catholic Cathedral moved to a modern building in 1993, still in Munhall, and this building now belongs to the Carpatho-Rusyn Society. According to the Web site, the organization is currently doing “extensive renovations,” which we hope will keep the church and rectory standing for years to come.

    Comments

  • St. Michael the Archangel Church, Munhall

    This Slovak church is no longer used, but the building is still kept in good condition.

    The Romanesque façade, with its colorful inlays, is something extraordinary even in a region of extraordinary churches.

    The relief of Ss. Cyril and Methodius, apostles to the Slavs, shows more than a little Art Deco influence.

    Until a few years ago, the tower held up a fine statue of St. Joseph the Worker, one of the last major works of the great Frank Vittor. It has been moved to St. Maximilian Kolbe parish, where you can see it at eye level.

  • Homestead and Munhall

    Homestead and Munhall, seen from across the Monongahela River.

  • Old St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cathedral, Munhall

    Update: Some of the information about the architect was wrong in the original version of this article. Back in those days, the Society of Architectural Historians article on this church said, “Little is known about Budapest-born Titus de Bobula.” But Old Pa Pitt has fixed that. Now you can read his article about Titus de Bobula and know way too much.

    The cathedral moved farther out into the suburbs (though still in Munhall borough), and this is now the National Carpatho-Rusyn Cultural and Educational Center—an institution that keeps no regular hours and obviously can barely afford to keep the building standing. But the church is loved, and we may hope that whatever love can accomplish will be done for it. The architect was Titus de Bobula, a Hungarian who designed several churches around here. He is a fascinating character: he went back to Hungary in the 1920s and was imprisoned for plotting to overthrow the government; then he came back here and became an arms dealer, while simultaneously working on the designs for the structural aspects of Nikola Tesla’s fantastic, and possibly delusional, electronic superweapons, which of course were never built. It is not often that we find such a direct line from a Carpatho-Rusyn cathedral to the world of science fiction.

    Connoisseurs of elegant lettering should not miss the plaque identifying the architect, contractor, and building date. Father Pitt suspects that de Bobula himself designed it: there is nothing else quite like it in Pittsburgh, and the style seems very much like the Art Nouveau of Budapest. (Update: The style is identical to the lettering De Bobula used to sign some of his drawings, so we may be confident that it is his.)