Father Pitt

Category: Munhall

  • St. John the Baptist Greek Catholic Church, Munhall

    Old St. John the Baptist Cathedral

    Of all Titus de Bobula’s remaining works, this is the building that most astonishes architectural historians—the one architects study in their history classes—and we are pleased to say that it has had a good bit of money spent to stabilize and adapt it to its life as the National Carpatho-Rusyn Cultural and Educational Center. For a long time it was the cathedral of the Byzantine Catholic Archeparchy, until a new cathedral was built in a more suburban section of Munhall.

    Dome of the Old St. John the Baptist Cathedral
    Plaque with architect and contractor
    “Architect: de Bobula. Contractor: Bodine and Co. MCMIII.”

    Titus de Bobula himself designed this plaque, as we can tell because the lettering is in his own very distinctive hand—the same style of lettering he used to sign his drawings. It was not common for architects to put their names on their buildings, but Titus de Bobula was not a common architect.

    Old St. John the Baptist Cathedral
    Side of the building
    Cross ornament
    Dome
    Rectory

    The rectory has been decaying, and we hope there will be enough money to carry the rehabilitation of the church into the rectory. They were built as a set, and Bobula’s rendering of the pair shows that the rectory was originally designed for a slightly higher budget. The places where it was cheapened are precisely the parts that are decaying now.

    De Bobula’s rendering of church and rectory

    From the Czechoslovak Review, January, 1920 (but it is clearly De Bobula’s original rendering); found at Wikimedia Commons.

    Porch columns

    Some of the wooden porch columns have been lost; the ones that remain are getting crumbly.

    Detail of porch roof
    Detail of the rectory
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.

  • Ruthenian Catholic Bishop’s Residence, Munhall

    Bishop’s residence with cathedral in the background

    In 1924, the Vatican made a separate exarchate, or mission diocese, for Ruthenian Catholics in the United States. Rome imagined it as based in New York, but there were few Ruthenians in New York. The largest concentration of them was in Pittsburgh, and the congregation of the Church of St. John the Baptist in Munhall (which you see in the background here) offered land and resources to the new bishop, Basil Takach (also spelled Wassil Takacs), which he accepted. So St. John the Baptist became a cathedral—thus making the extravagantly eccentric Titus de Bobula a cathedral architect retroactively, giving him one more thing to boast about when circumstances required him to boast.

    More to the point, it meant that Munhall suddenly had a bishop, who had to be stored somewhere, and an entire diocesan administration. Adam Wickerham of Homestead, whose office was a short walk from here, was hired to design this eminently respectable-looking palace, which he did in a very Western style.1 The gables originally had Tudor half-timbering, which has been covered over with siding; but otherwise the building has not changed much from Wickerham’s original design.

    Bishop’s residence

    The exarchate of Pittsburgh became an eparchy in 1963 and an archeparchy in 1969, so that the Byzantine Rite Archeparch (or Archbishop) of Pittsburgh outranks the Latin Rite Bishop of Pittsburgh.

    Entrance

    There are many bishops in Pittsburgh from many different rites and denominations, but this may be the only purpose-built bishop’s palace in the area.

    Bishop’s residence
    Canon PowerShot SX20 IS.
    1. American Contractor, December 20, 1924, p. 48. “Munhall, Pa.—Res.: 2 sty. & bas. 42×65. Brk. & stone. 10th & Dickson sts., Munhall. Archt. A. G. Wickersham [sic], 135 E. 6th st., Homestead, Pa. Owner St. John’s Greek Catholic Congr., Rt. Rev. Wassil Takacs, Homestead. Drawing plans.” For date: “Many Visitors to Attend Greek Church Dedication,” Pittsburgh Press, July 4, 1926, p. 56, where a rendering is printed. ↩︎

  • 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.

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  • 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.)