St. Matthew’s was a Slovak congregation; you can read the whole history of the parish up to 1955 in its golden-jubilee book at the Historic Pittsburgh site. The church closed some time ago and was converted to apartments; the convent is also secular now, but the front is beautifully maintained. It was built in 1926, and the architect was Albert F. Link. It’s a good example of Link’s style: he streamlines and modernizes a historical style—Jacobean here—and creates something that harmonizes well with the older church next door but still definitely belongs to our modern age of the 1920s.
Built in 1872 from a design by Andrew Peebles, this cathedral-sized church did become a cathedral about three years later for the short-lived Catholic Diocese of Allegheny, which was formed by taking the rich half away from the diocese of Pittsburgh and leaving all the debt with the poor half. The diocese was suppressed in 1889, but old dioceses never die, and there is still a titular Bishop of Allegheny. The current holder of the title is a retired auxiliary bishop of Newark.
This relief of the Resurrection takes on added drama at night.
Earlier we looked at the buildings on the south side of Hobart Street in this block and discovered that Spanish Mission and Tudor were the same thing, barring a few tweaks of the ornamentation. The buildings on the north side of the same block are at about the same scale, but they are a more eclectic bunch. Sometimes the individual building is about as eclectic as it can be.
Above, for example, you see one in a style old Pa Pitt calls German Jacobethan Spanish Mission.
This one, on the other hand, is so thoroughly Spanish Mission that residents ought to be required to wear Franciscan tunics.
The one above is quite eclectic, but it harmonizes its influences seamlessly.
This modernized Tudor conveys its architectural message with textured and patterned brickwork as well as the usual half-timbering.
Yesterday’s Rosary March comes up Sixth Avenue. It’s not a very good picture, but old Pa Pitt was not expecting this colorful procession, and did what he could in the seconds he had to record the event from the window of a moving vehicle.
Built in 1928, this Tudor firehouse was designed by Richard Neff, and it is one of the most charming public buildings in the Hilltop neighborhoods. It is now a paramedic station. A few years ago, the city spiffed up its historic firehouses, so this one looks almost new now.
It is a general principle of research that you can find anything as long as you’re not looking for it. Old Pa Pitt was leafing through a magazine from 1915 called The Construction Record, which has already given him dozens of entries for the Great Big List of Buildings and Architects, when he came across this little item:
Architects Kiehnel & Elliott, Keenan building, have plans for a three-story brick and hollow tile apartment building, to be built on Van Braam and Tustin streets for a private party.
Kiehnel and Elliott were among our most interesting early modernists, but Father Pitt had never heard this building mentioned. Surely it must be long gone—the Bluff has had some tough times. But still, one might take a look, especially since modern technology makes it possible to look at that intersection without leaving one’s comfortable chair. And there it was. Father Pitt leaped out of his chair and ran to the Bluff to get pictures:
Not only is it there and well preserved (except for the cornice, of course), but it has just recently been cleaned up and made to look almost like new. The Kiehnel-and-Elliott style is unmistakable. Look at the pilaster capitals at the entrance:
How much more Kiehnel-and-Elliott can you get?
Kiehnel and Elliott would later move to Florida and become the Art Deco kings of Miami, but in their Pittsburgh years they were heavily influenced by the Jugendstil architecture of Germany, where Richard Kiehnel grew up and studied. Ornamentation and decorative brickwork like this can be found in all the German architectural magazines of the early twentieth century.
On city planning maps, this house is in Chateau, but socially it was at the end of the Lincoln Avenue row of rich people’s houses in Allegheny West. Today it sits surrounded by robotics works and fast-food joints, but it is kept in beautifully original condition by its owners. The architects were Longfellow, Alden & Harlow (or some subset of those three), at the very beginning of their practice—just about the time they designed Sunnyledge, which is something like a stretched version of this house. Enlarge the picture and note the patterns in the brickwork.
Oaklander Hotel in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh (architects Raintree Architecture)
Built in 2017 from a design by Raintree Architecture, the Oaklander is a good example of what old Pa Pitt calls the neoneoclassical school of architecture. It fits well with its classical neighbors, but it is free from the ornamentation that makes them such an embarrassment to modern architectural tastes. Also, it is much cheaper. Father Pitt is not a great lover of the neoneoclassical school, nor does he dislike it strongly. It is unobjectionable. It does its job of making buildings that are good citizens of their neighborhoods. They are not very interesting, but they cooperate with the older architecture that surrounds them. “Look past me,” says this building. “I’ll get out of your way while you admire the Pittsburgh Athletic Association next door.”
The Baroque style is unusual, but St. Stephen’s is a Frederick Sauer church through and through, starting with that yellow Kittanning brick he favored. We’ll have to wait till the leaves drop to get a view of the front, but since the building is slowly crumbling, it’s good to get the details as soon as we can.
Main entrance.
Update: An Iranian correspondent who does not seem to be a spammer has left a remark that Google Translate renders as “We have a similar example in Iran from Sar Setun.” Although it would not have occurred to him before, Father Pitt now notices how much this ornate entrance porch resembles certain examples of Islamic architecture.
Left entrance.Right entrance.The Evangelists Mark and John.The Evangelists Luke and Matthew.One of the side windows.
There are countless pictures in Father Pitt’s archives that are not good enough to publish, but every once in a while he realizes that he has forgotten to publish a perfectly adequate one. He went looking for his article on this church in Allentown because he had just identified the architect, and the article was nowhere to be found. So here it is, almost a year after the picture was taken. The architect was E. V. Dennick, as we learn from The Construction Record in 1915: “Architect E. V. Denick, 1212 House Building, is taking bids on erecting a one-story and basement brick and sandstone church on Excelsior Street, Allentown, for the Bethlehem Lutheran Congregation.” (On another page of the same magazine, the architect’s name is spelled “Denick,” and it is usually spelled that way in other listings.)
From the front this appears to be another one of our churches with the sanctuary upstairs, but the building is set into the hill, and therefore justifies the magazine’s description as “one-story and basement.”
