A splendid industrial building on Penn Avenue. The offices and showrooms were placed in a single row in the front, making an impressive and ornamental face for what would otherwise be a drab factory building.
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First Methodist Episcopal Church, Carnegie
Built in about 1893, this church was designed by James N. Campbell, who gave it his usual outsized corner tower with enormous open arches for the belfry. It was later known as Carnegie United Methodist Church, which left it a few years ago. But it appears to have been adopted as a community center by the prospering Attawheed Islamic Center next door in the old Presbyterian church, which the new owners obviously treasure and pour a lot of labor into, so we hope the future of the building is secure.
Olympus E-20N; Canon PowerShot SX150IS; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
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Bricks and Blocks
Nikon COOLPIX P100. Looking down a steep slope on Fallowfield Avenue in Beechview. Bricks were used to pave relatively flat sections of streets in hilly neighborhoods, because bricks were cheap and durable. But bricks are slippery when wet or icy. More expensive Belgian block, which gives better traction, was used for slopes.
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Holy Cross Church, Glassport, by Titus de Bobula
From The New Holy Cross Church, 1954, a booklet published when the current Holy Cross Church opened. This was perhaps the last church designed by Titus de Bobula in his short architectural career, and it was an extraordinary work. It was faced entirely with concrete, and the architect gave free rein to his love of sweeping curves and tapering forms—note, for example, how the continuous tapering of the tower was supplemented by an inverted tapering of the arch at the entrance.
In the 1950s, the congregation built a much larger church from a design by the prolific Monessen church architect H. Ernest Clark. But the old church was kept as a social hall, and—thanks to the eagle eye of our correspondent David Schwing—we have discovered that the building is still standing.
Almost everything that made the church a unique work of art is gone. The windows are blocked in; the decorations are stripped off; the spire is gone and the tower truncated. But we can still see the outline of that unique arch at the entrance. And this is the only one of Titus de Bobula’s concrete-faced churches to have survived at all—at least as far as old Pa Pitt knows. With just a few minutes to stop in Glassport on his way from here to there, Father Pitt took a bunch of pictures with three different cameras to document the church before it succumbs to complete decay.
Sony Alpha 3000; Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.
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East Busway at East Liberty Station
The busways in Pittsburgh are built mostly along old railroad right-of-way, and most of the stations are placed very near where the old commuter-rail stations stood. The Martin Luther King Jr. East Busway is unique in that the railroad still runs next to it; space for the busway came from the abandonment of extra parallel tracks on the busy Pennsylvania Railroad main line. Above, an outbound bus stops at the East Liberty station.
These views were taken from the Highland Avenue bridge across the railroad and busway. The bridge bears the Pennsylvania Railroad emblem in concrete.
Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G. The use of the old railroad right-of-way, which runs in a series of hollows below the main street level of the neighborhoods it goes through, makes the East Busway a true rapid-transit line, as much grade-separated as a subway.
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Double Presbyterians in McDonald
McDonald was a very Presbyterian town, with at least four Presbyterian churches all within an easy walk of one another. In 1897, two Presbyterian churches went up in McDonald side by side—a Presbyterian church and a United Presbyterian church. They seem to have been called First Presbyterian and First United Presbyterian at first, but later took the names Trinity and Calvary. After the denominations merged, so did the congregations—but they kept the two buildings, now called the Calvary Center and the Trinity Center of McDonald Presbyterian Church.
The United Presbyterian church, now Calvary Center, was the larger of the two. The architect was James N. Campbell.
Behind the church is a neat and prosperous-looking foursquare parsonage built of matching brick.
The smaller Presbyterian church, now the Trinity Center, was designed by the Washington (Pennsylvania) firm of McCallum & Ely.
Sony Alpha 3000.
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Paul Presbyterian Church, Brookline
Paul Presbyterian Church, built in 1923, was named not for the Apostle Paul, as you might suppose, but for Elizabeth Paul, who donated the land on which the church was built along with $1,000 toward the cost of the building. After the congregation dissolved in 2001, the building passed to the Providence Reformed Presbyterian congregation. Now it belongs to Freedom Fellowship Church of Pittsburgh.
The amazingly thorough Brookline Connection site has a long history of Paul Presbyterian Church, all written in bold Comic Sans, like the rest of the site.
Stained glass with a depiction of Christ as Good Shepherd was in the front windows until the Reformed Presbyterians took over. The windows needed expensive repair, and, according to the Brookline Connection article, “with this being a rather conservative Presbyterian denomination, displaying the image of Jesus above God ran contrary to the First Commandment, and replacing them was more in line with their beliefs”—a weirdly Arian argument that we hope was garbled in transmission.
Nikon COOLPIX P100.
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