The rectory for Most Holy Name of Jesus Church, built in about 1875 in an elaborate Second Empire style—quite possibly with Father Suitbert Mollinger’s own money, since he had quite a fortune and nothing to spend it on but his parish and his collection of relics.
This picture is impossible, but old Pa Pitt did it anyway. Claim Street in front of the church is narrow, with Japanese knotweed and a drop on the opposite side from the church; so there is nowhere to stand except more or less right in front of the church to get its picture. Naturally some technical hocus-pocus involving multiple photographs was necessary to make this picture, but Father Pitt has never been one to let any rigid ideas of photographic honesty stand in the way of getting a picture of what a thing actually looks like.
The famous Father Suitbert Mollinger, best known for his enormous collection of relics housed around the corner in St. Anthony Chapel, was the founding pastor of this church. The date stone tells us (in German, of course, since this is Troy Hill) that the church was founded in 1868 and enlarged in 1896.
These tall and narrow houses on Goettmann Street cling to the edge of Troy Hill, with spectacular views across the Allegheny.
Joseph Stillburg, toward the end of an illustrious career, designed this very firehousey-looking firehouse for the city of Allegheny. It later became Truck Company No. 39 in Pittsburgh before being diverted to other uses.
Obviously the top of the tower has gone missing; Mr. Stillburg would not have put in Corinthian pilasters to hold up a strip of aluminum. Somebody ought to take those utility cables out of the picture.
And here are some more historic utility cables.
The main building of North Catholic was put up in 1939. The architect was Edward J. Hergenroeder, a disciple of Benno Janssen, who became one of the favorite architects for Catholic institutions around Pittsburgh in the middle twentieth century.
From Janssen, Hergenroeder seems to have learned the art of making every line count. His style departed from the master’s, however, toward the modernistic, whereas Janssen retired to Charlottesville, the land of his favorite architect Thomas Jefferson, before he was forced to come to terms with modernism altogether.
The school has been given up by the Catholics, but fortunately was taken over and is well maintained as the Provident Charter School.
Charles Bradley Warren did the reliefs on the school. This one, Pursuit of Knowledge, shows us monks performing all kinds of scientific experiments and passing their knowledge on to children. (The same relief is reversed on the other end of the building, so that the monks are always gazing out from the top of the bluff at the vast panorama of the Allegheny valley before them.)
A smaller relief shows a monk cultivating a bonsai Tree of Knowledge with an open Bible in his lap.
Father Suitbert Mollinger was the founding pastor of of Most Holy Name of Jesus parish on Troy Hill. He was also rich: he had inherited a good bit of money, and he used it in travels through Europe to buy up saints’ relics that were otherwise being tossed out in the waves of revolutions that were washing across the continent in the middle 1800s. He built this chapel to house the collection, which is probably the largest accumulation of relics in one building in the world. He dedicated it to his patron St. Anthony of Padua.
Here is St. Anthony of Padua himself, shown as he often is in art with a book on which the Christ child is sitting, referring to the story that Anthony was once meditating on Scripture when the child Jesus himself appeared to him.
Building in honor of St. Anthony of Padua…
…erected 1882, enlarged 1890.
The tiny lots and narrow streets of Troy Hill forced many of the buildings to grow tall and narrow.
A church crammed into a tiny lot, so that it is as tall as it is long. This is one of the many city churches with the main worship space upstairs, the ground floor being devoted to Sunday-school rooms and offices.
The architect was Edward M. Butz, most famous today for the colossal Western Penitentiary.1 The construction was begun in 1894, but the church was built in two stages: at first only the ground floor was put up, with a temporary roof.
This was designed as a large open space that, when the main sanctuary was built above it, could be converted to Sunday-school rooms divided by folding doors.
The congregation grew rapidly, and less than five years later the church was completed.2
A Pittsburg Press article published when the church was dedicated in February of 1899 describes the building:
The new church is one of the handsomest church buildings in that section of Allegheny. Its dimensions are 60×75, and it is built of red brick with stone trimmings. The style is purely Gothic, and it has beautiful large glass painted windows. The building contains two stories, the lower floor being used for Sunday school purposes. It is divided in seven separate class rooms, which are connected by sliding doors. On this floor also is the pastor’s study. About 450 children are enrolled at present as Sunday school pupils.
The auditorium is situated in the second story. It has a seating capacity of 500, the seats being arranged in amphitheater style. A bell, which is said to have a more beautiful tone than any other church bell in Allegheny, has been given by William Eberhardt, of the Eberhardt & Ober Brewing company, and it is hoped that Andrew Carnegie will provide a pipe organ for the church. The members recently applied to the generous iron king and hope that their petition will receive favorable consideration.
A double house that presents the appearance of a single Second Empire mansion. French architects of the Second Empire might have turned up their Gallic snoots at the crust of lavish details, but those details are carefully balanced and create a pleasing composition, even if they are gaudy in a cheerfully Victorian way.
A “flatiron” building is a wedge-shaped building, like an old-fashioned clothes iron. There are many in Pittsburgh: our irregular streets leave odd-shaped parcels that naturally fill up with whatever buildings will fit. This one made the most of its corner location by putting a storefront there, now filled in for an apartment. The ornamental brickwork is attractive, and a few carved-stone decorations give the building properly Romanesque credentials.
