Father Pitt

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Dormont United Methodist Church

The year 2013 was a bad year for older churches in Dormont: three of them—the Presbyterians, the Baptists, and the Methodists—gave up trying to maintain their fine old buildings with diminished congregations. The Presbyterians sold their building to a suburban megachurch; the humbler Methodists sold their building to Buddhists who used it as a temple. But the Buddhists, after having painted the building in this attractive bright yellow and red, have given up as well; and as of October 2019 the building is for sale again.

Map

October 7, 2019
Tabernacle of the Union Baptist Church

The curiously angular Gothic of this 1881 church might have pleased a congregation that wanted a building that looked like a church, but not one that looked too medieval. Like many other churches in the most crowded Pittsburgh neighborhoods (including several on the South Side), it adapts to its tiny lot by placing the sanctuary on the second floor, leaving the ground floor for Sunday-school rooms and social halls.

Map

October 7, 2019
Heinz Chapel

More pictures of Heinz Chapel, the last major work of Charles Z. Klauder, who designed the whole Gothic city of buildings at the heart of the Pitt campus.

October 7, 2019
Front Doors of the South Side

The famous Victorian front doors of the South Side are featured on posters and in picture books on coffee tables all over western Pennsylvania. There is an endless variety to the woodwork on these South Side rowhouses. Old Pa Pitt was out walking on the South Side and decided to concentrate on doors: here is the collection he made in just half an hour’s stroll. Click on any picture to enlarge it.

Many of these doorways have decorative stained-glass transoms over the door, often with the address worked into the glass:

Of course, no collection of South Side front doors would be complete without a Kool Vent awning on an alley house:

October 5, 2019
Tower of St. Bernard’s, Mount Lebanon

The tower of St. Bernard’s peers over the trees in Mount Lebanon, brought to you in old-postcard colors thanks to the Two-Strip Technicolor plugin for the GIMP.

October 5, 2019
Four Gateway Center

The gleam of early-morning sun warms the chilly modernist elegance of Four Gateway Center. This 1960 modernist tower is one of a number of contributions to our skyline by Harrison & Abramovitz, whose most notable (which is to say inescapable) work in Pittsburgh is the U. S. Steel Tower.

October 5, 2019
Reflections in the Software Engineering Institute

Three landmark buildings reflected in a corner of the Software Engineering Institute on Fifth Avenue: St. Paul’s Cathedral, Webster Hall, and the Mellon Institute.

October 2, 2019
Three Gateway Center

Three Gateway Center (1952, architects Eggers & Higgins), seen down the western end of Forbes Avenue from the Diamond. The distinctive stainless-steel facing of the first three Gateway Center towers was an afterthought, and a very lucky one. They were to be faced with brick, which would have made them humdrum undistinguished vertical warehouses like a thousand other modernist cruciform brick towers around the world. But bricks were in short supply after the Second World War, and for once budget constraints led to a much more pleasing result.

October 2, 2019
Dormont Presbyterian Church

The old Dormont Presbyterian Church dominates the business district on Potomac Avenue, making that corner of Dormont look almost like a medieval English city. The church was built in 1923 (or in 1907, with an expansion in 1923; Pa Pitt’s sources are a little fuzzy). The Presbyterians, along with the Baptists and Methodists, threw in the towel in 2013, and this is now a branch of North Way Christian Community.

October 1, 2019
House on Carson Street

Carson Street is the commercial spine of the South Side, but occasionally we run across a house left over from the time before Carson was almost exclusively commercial. Most of them have small offices on the ground floors now, but they retain their domestic external appearance. This house strikes Father Pitt as a halfway point between Second Empire and Italianate styles in local rowhouses; it’s notable for its prickly decorative ironwork on the roof.

October 1, 2019