Our 1872 map shows the house on the left as belonging to J. Rolfe and the one on the right to H. H. Rolfe. At some point the one on the left had a storefront added, which at some later point was blocked in by a competent contractor who was certainly not an architect. Otherwise, these two elegant houses on Carson Street probably look very much the way they looked a century and a half ago, when they entered the city of Pittsburgh with the annexation of Birmingham.
The Schenley Farms section of Oakland was crusty with clubs a century ago, but few were as influential as this one.
Charles Bickel designed this elegant clubhouse for a Jewish gentlemen’s club made up mostly of members of the Rodef Shalom congregation. To call it a gentlemen’s club brings up images of well-dressed men sitting inert with newspapers in their hands, but these gentlemen were far from inert. These were gentlemen who got things done. This club was the incubator of Reform Judaism; it was at the club (when it lived on the North Side) that the Pittsburgh Platform was signed.
This clubhouse was built in 1913, and the club continued to use it for almost a century. It finally fell to the same forces that evicted most of the other clubs in this section: declining membership in our antisocial age, and the bottomless well of money that the University of Pittsburgh can draw on. It was sold to Pitt in 2009, and is now known as the O’Hara Student Center.
These houses on South 26th Street are more than 150 years old, and nobody cares. That is one of the fascinating and delightful things about the South Side: you have to discover history for yourself, because history is not labeled and pickled in brine for you here.
As of this year, the South Side has been part of Pittsburgh for a century and a half. In 1872, the boroughs of South Pittsburgh, Birmingham, East Birmingham, and Ormsby were taken into the city. Since then quite a lot has changed, but it’s surprising how much has not changed. Father Pitt has decided to celebrate the 150 years of the South Side by looking for the things that were there in 1872 and are still there now. In the coming weeks you’ll see quite a few more remnants of old Birmingham and East Birmingham.
But how do we know which buildings date from that era? The Pittsburgh Historic Maps site is Father Pitt’s favorite research tool. You can look at a detailed house-by-house map from 1872, and then switch to a current satellite view. Many familiar shapes will appear on both maps. This row of once-identical houses is one of them.
Most of the oldest houses on the South Side are fairly modest, and these were more modest than most. In the years since they were built, each house has had its separate adventures. Today they all look different, each one bearing alterations from different eras. One of them has sprouted an outsized dormer that gives it a third floor. One has ornamental shutters by the windows. One has star bolts holding it together. One has smaller horizontal windows upstairs. Two of them have mid-twentieth-century picture windows in the front parlors. Two have aluminum awnings. Several have had the front doors reconfigured, losing the wooden doorframe and transom.
There were originally two identical rows of seven houses in this block of 26th Street, separated by the alley (Larkins Way). The second row is down to four houses now, all of which have been through similarly various adventures.
But if we put all these houses together in our minds, we can come up with the Platonic ideal of the South Side rowhouse of the middle 1800s. This is what we’ll be doing as we celebrate 150 years of the South Side: looking through the modern accretions to find the Birmingham and East Birmingham (and maybe South Pittsburgh and Ormsby) of a century and a half ago.
To judge by other pictures of E. Martina plaques on line, a decorative surface of exposed pebbles seems to have been this contractor’s trademark style. This sidewalk is along 18th Street on the South Side.
The delightfully eclectic Pittsburgh Orbit site has made a thorough study of sidewalk plaques and stamps. It will open your eyes to a whole world of artistic treasures literally under your feet.
Here is a large institutional building whose story of abandonment and decay has a happy ending.
South Hills High School was Pittsburgh’s second great palace of high-school education, right after Schenley High School. For this one, the city hired Alden & Harlow, arguably the most prestigious institutional architects money could buy. They were responsible for the Carnegie Institute and all the branch libraries, in addition to multiple millionaires’ mansions and skyscrapers downtown.
The site of the school is improbably vertical. In those days, “South Hills” meant the back slopes of Mount Washington, and a walk along the side of this school is a steep climb. But the architects met the challenge with a Tudor Gothic palace that seems to have grown on the site. It takes up a whole city block.
The Ruth Street side of the school opened in 1917; the rest of the school—planned from the beginning—opened in 1925. For many years the school took in students from the South Hills and beyond—“beyond” meaning Banksville, Beechview, and Brookline. In 1976, a monstrously modernist new school—Brashear—opened in Beechview, which took in all the students from the southern neighborhoods. With population declining and the building getting old, the city decided to close South Hills altogether in 1986.
And then it sat and rotted for 23 years.
But, as we said, the story has a happy ending. As you see from these pictures, the building is well taken care of now. In 2010 it reopened as apartments for senior citizens, so that once again it is an ornament to its neighborhood.
The wonderfully thorough Brookline Connection site has a long article about South Hills High School, including the architects’ plans.
We are going to use our imaginations here to bring the East Birmingham of a century and a half ago back to life.
Take a good look at this VFW hall. Now erase the belligerently patriotic mural. Then strip away the improvised vestibule at the end. Then take away the side entrance. Then unblock the windows along the side (old Pa Pitt does not know what demonic secret rituals the veterans practice that would be spoiled by natural light, but they seem to have an aversion to it).
What you will have left is a little old church building, probably from just after the Civil War. It appears on an 1872 map as “Welsh Cong. Ch.,” and so for many years after; but by 1923 it had been transferred to another congregation, and appears as a “Polish M. E. Ch.” (M. E. for Methodist Episcopal). At least half a dozen churches on the South Side were bought by East Europeans around the turn of the twentieth century. We might call it Nordic flight: people of northwestern European ancestry fled the South Side as undesirable East Europeans poured in.
Methodists were never a large segment of the Polish population, and at some point the church changed hands again, going out of the religion business entirely. But not much has really changed about the exterior. The outlines of a typical small middle-1800s church are clearly visible. It would be fairly easy and inexpensive to restore it to something like its original appearance, and—unlike large churches—small churches like this have many uses. If the Veterans of Foreign Wars are ever interested in selling, they should ask Father Pitt first.
Like the rectory behind it, this is a simple and dignified Renaissance palace that sets off the flamboyant Gothic of Holy Rosary Church.
You might pass this little building by without a second glance as you walked along Poplar Street, if you ever did walk along Poplar Street (a very pleasant street) in Castle Shannon. But if you did pause, you might notice the tall Corinthian columns and sturdy-looking quoins (those patterns in the bricks that are meant to look like cut stone) and think, “I wonder whether that used to be a bank.”
Then you would look up at the pediment, and all doubt would be removed.
The electric vault alarm still sits prominently in the pediment where a richer bank might have had an allegorical figure of Commerce.
To judge by old maps, this bank was built between 1890 and 1906.
St. Canice is an unusual Romanesque church that closed in 2005. Since then it has sat vacant. It was sold to Lion of Judah Church in 2012, but it seems nothing came of the plans to refurbish the building, and as it ages it will only get more expensive to refurbish. Churches are hard to find alternate uses for, and Knoxville is not a neighborhood where trendy loft apartments—the only consistently profitable use Pittsburghers have found for old church buildings—would sell. This is an endangered landmark.
It took eleven separate photographs to make this composite of the Orchard Place front of the church. Except for the inevitable distortion of the tower, this is a very close approximation of the way the architects imagined these buildings. The main Romanesque church was built in 1894, according to this city architectural inventory (PDF); the Gothic chapel additions were built in 1928 and 1932.
Like many Catholic churches in Pittsburgh, St. Canice was not just a church: it was a whole village, forming the heart of a community. There was a school, and a convent for the sisters who taught for the school, and a rectory for the priests who served in the church. The tragedy of decaying communities like this is that, at a certain point, it becomes too expensive to maintain the church; but, once the heart is ripped out, the decay is immeasurably accelerated.
The rectory and convent are in good shape.
The rectory, built in 1928.
The convent, built in 1913 with additions in 1930.
The school, on the other hand, is half-swallowed by jungle. It was repurposed as Hilltop Catholic High School for a while, and more modern buildings (from 1960) are behind this entrance; but the school has been abandoned for years, and will eventually have to be demolished. It was bought by a Baptist church at the same time St. Canice Church was bought by Lion of Judah, but the church seems not to have been able to do anything with the buildings.
Take a look at this old Methodist church on the South Side. Do you notice anything unusual about it? Yes, you do notice, because you already read the title of this article. But just passing by, you might not have noticed that the sanctuary—the main worship space—is on the second floor.
When he was publishing his pictures of the old St. John’s Lutheran Church on the border of Bloomfield and Lawrenceville, old Pa Pitt ran across an interesting article about the conversion of that church to apartments, which apparently was done with minimal alteration. In fact the whole “Urban Traipsing” site is worth a long exploration, and you can go there and spend a few hours as soon as you’ve finished here. To stick to our current subject, Father Pitt was struck by the author’s reaction to finding that the sanctuary was upstairs:
This is the only church building I have been in where the sanctuary is a full flight of stairs above ground level. I’m very curious to know if there are any others—please share, if you’ve come across one!
Well, that article was written nine years ago, so Father Pitt will not bother the author with comments now. But this is actually a very common adaptation in Pittsburgh. Churches in dense rowhouse neighborhoods had tiny lots, and they had to make the most of those lots. If you can’t build out, you build up. It would be aesthetic nonsense to have any other facilities above the sanctuary, so obviously the sanctuary goes at the top.
The South Side has a larger collection of these churches than any other neighborhood, so we’re going to stay there for this article. In fact Father Pitt believes that this article will give you a complete census of the remaining churches on the South Side with the sanctuary upstairs; if anyone knows of any others, please step forward.
The grandest of the lot is South Side Presbyterian. It was originally more modest, looking like many of the other churches here, but the congregation prospered and added the impressive front with bell tower.
Here is the sanctuary of South Side Presbyterian, which is reached by a pair of stairways at the front of the church.
The Bingham United Methodist Church is now the City Theatre; the building dates from 1859. Birmingham and East Birmingham, the boroughs that became the South Side, were full of Methodists and Presbyterians in the middle 1800s, and many of the churches on the South Side began as Methodist or Presbyterian churches.
This was also built as a Methodist church, but at some time around the First World War it became St. George’s Serbian Orthodox Church. The onion dome cannot disguise the typically American Protestant shape of the rest of the Victorian Gothic building.
The German Baptist Church on 19th Street is now Holy Assumption of St. Mary Orthodox Church.
First Methodist Episcopal Church, East Birmingham, became a nest of Polish Falcons; then the Falcons moved to a smaller nest a block and a half away, and this building was converted to apartments as “Falcon Court.”
The First Associated Reformed Church of Birmingham was built in 1854.
The Tabernacle of the Union Baptist Church was built in 1881 in a curiously angular style, an abstract machine-age Gothic.
These are eight churches on the South Side alone that have their sanctuaries upstairs. Have we missed any? There were almost certainly others; if Father Pitt recalls correctly, the Walton Church, demolished more than twenty years ago, was one of them, and there are other churches that did not make it into our century.
There are also others in other neighborhoods: we already mentioned St. John’s Lutheran in Bloomfield/Lawrenceville, and we have pictures of Grace Lutheran in Troy Hill and the Union Methodist Church in Manchester. These are all churches built in densely crowded neighborhoods where they had to make do with a tiny patch of land.
Now that you have been alerted to their existence, you will start to see these churches everywhere, and you will have old Pa Pitt to thank for your new hobby.
