It is sad to report that the last Lutheran congregation in Sharpsburg has thrown in the towel. (There were once three Lutheran churches: this English one and two German ones.) The good news, however, is that Sharpsburg is becoming a trendier neighborhood, and it will be worth adapting this distinctive building to some other use. It is a sort of Jacobean Gothic with more than a whiff of Art Nouveau.
This block-long palace is a startlingly imposing building to run across in the residential back streets of Shadyside. The dwellers in the houses surrounding it must feel a glow of confidence knowing they are well protected should the Prussians invade. The building was designed by the W. G. Wilkins Company, also responsible for the Maul Building and the Frick & Lindsay Company Building (now the Andy Warhol Museum). It opened in 1916.
Seen from the Birmingham Bridge, this row of Italianate storefronts retains most of its Victorian magnificence, although the newer windows blight the one on the end.
An old firehouse converted to a commercial building on Main Street in Sharpsburg. It still has its bell.
Sharpsburg, including St. Mary’s Church, reflected in the windows.
In 1956, twenty years after Charles Z. Klauder’s Cathedral of Learning opened, Clapp Hall opened its doors. It was designed by Trautwein & Howard, the successors to Mr. Klauder, but it was no longer possible to make an academic building in the ornate Gothic style that had been Klauder’s specialty. Instead, the architects gave us a restrained late-Art-Deco modernist Gothic that fits well with Klauder’s buildings but doesn’t embarrass postwar sensibilities too badly. The entrance is at an angle to the rest of the building so that the Cathedral of Learning is perfectly framed in the doorway as you walk out.
Below, three views of the Fifth Avenue side:
The Tennyson Avenue side has a similar face:
This elaborately stony Gothic church is small but rich; it seems to represent an American Christian’s fantasy of the Middle Ages. It is no longer active as a church, but the building is kept in good shape by the current occupants, “The Center of Bellevue.” The gargoyles on the tower are distinctive and impressive.
This was the Methodist Protestant church, as the inscription informs us. Bellevue’s Methodist Episcopal congregation built just across the border in West Bellevue, now Avalon, where the congregation still meets in what has become known as the Greenstone Church.
Father Pitt featured one picture of this church a couple of months ago, but he returned to get a few better pictures, including the composite one above, which took some effort. We repeat the information from the earlier article:
Now Madonna of Jerusalem Church of Christ the King Parish, which also includes the St. Joseph Church that once lived in this building but handed it over to Madonna of Jerusalem in 1960. This building was finished in 1874, but it was built around an earlier school from 1869. It is a typical nineteenth-century Pittsburgh Gothic church, with the buttresses and crenellations we expect from the style.
Here is one of two streets in the Strip that exist mostly under bridges. Two blocks away, 33rd Street is entirely under a railroad bridge.
Here is a little Arts-and-Crafts Romanesque church that had money at the wrong time. The modern addition (probably 1960s or early 1970s) is not sympathetic to the church behind it. The elaborate modernist window in the front probably replaced an earlier decorative window; perhaps the church had a fire. If a member of the congregation has any information, old Pa Pitt would be grateful for it.
The Springfield Public School, built in 1871, closed as a school in 1934, which was 89 years ago as Father Pitt is writing. It was preserved because it was useful as a warehouse in the increasingly industrializing Strip. Later it became loft apartments, and is now being sold as luxury condos.
The architect was T. D. Evans, about whom old Pa Pitt knows nothing except that he designed the very similar (though more elaborate) Morse School on the South Side. Compare the two buildings: the Morse School is a little larger, but built on almost exactly the same plan.
Springfield Public School.
Morse School. Father Pitt guesses that the tower in the center of both buildings was a belfry.
If you buy an apartment in the Springfield Public School, you don’t have to walk far to find delicious Asian food of all sorts.
