Father Pitt

Tag: Arts and Crafts Style

  • Emmanuel Baptist Church, Brighton Heights

    Built in 1914, this little church (now Emmanuel Christian Church) is a fine example of the simple Arts-and-Crafts interpretation of Tudor Gothic that was fashionable for small churches in the early 1900s. The only specifically Gothic detail is the large front window; the tower has a bit of decorative half-timbering, but the rest is unadorned and built with cheap but attractive materials.

    Addendum: According to the Construction Report for August 23, 1913, the architect was Pierre Liesch. “Architect Pierre Lessch, 18 East Fourth street, Aspinwall, is taking bids on erecting a one-story brick veneer church on Davis avenue near Brighton road, Northside, for the Emanuel Baptist congregation. Cost $15,000.” It should be noted that this magazine is poorly edited and frequently misspells names.

  • Old Woods Run Branch Library

    Woods Run Branch Library

    The city of Allegheny was conquered by Pittsburgh in 1907, but the Carnegie Free Library of Allegheny—the first municipally run public library—was an independent institution until 1956. The main library was in the center of Allegheny, where it still stands (though the library has moved out). It had one branch library, opened here in 1916; the first librarian was Helen R. Langfitt, a 1916 graduate of the Carnegie Library School. This little arts-and-crafts building cannot match the elegance of the Alden & Harlow branch libraries in Pittsburgh, but it was a pleasant ornament to the neighborhood.

    Oblique view

    In 1964, the library moved to a modern building around the corner on Woods Run Avenue—a building that itself became dated and was remodernized in 2006.

  • Knoxville Baptist Church

    Knoxville Baptist Church

    Now Iglesia de Cristo León de Judá, the Knoxville Baptist Church was built in 1909; it is a typical small vernacular-Gothic church with some Arts and Crafts details. The attractive indigo paint applied by the current congregation makes it stand out from others of its type.

    Cornerstone

    Fundamentalist Christians in the United States have always had a deep suspicion of stained glass as creeping idolatry, but the Spanish-speaking Evangelical congregations are the most vengefully thorough about it. As soon as they take over an old church building, the stained glass is removed. Usually it is replaced with clear glass, but this congregation has blocked all natural light from entering the building. Photographs of services on line show that the interior is set up like a theater, and natural light would only interfere with the projections and spotlights.

    Knoxville Baptist Church
    Entrance
    Tower entrance

  • Arts-and-Crafts Storefront, Mount Oliver

    212 Brownsville Road

    This tiny building has a simple but rich front; we suspect that the projecting roof was originally covered with green tile, which would have set off the Arts-and-Crafts stained glass even more.

  • Grace Lutheran Church, Brookline

    Grace Lutheran Church

    Since 1959 this has been Pittsburgh Baptist Church, our first Southern Baptist congregation. But it was built in 1908 as a Missouri Synod Lutheran church, Grace Lutheran. It is perhaps Brookline’s most striking church, built in a unique variant of the Arts-and-Crafts Tudor Gothic style that was popular then. The massing of the forms is particularly pleasing.

    Pittsburgh Baptist Church
    Grace Lutheran, originally

    Addendum: The architect was John A. Long, as we discover in the Construction Record, September 16, 1911: “Martsolf Brothers, House building, have secured contract for the erection of a two-story cement stucco church and parsonage, on Pioneer avenue, Brookline, for the Grace Evangelical Lutheran Congregation. Architect John A. Long, Machesney building, prepared the plans.”

  • Regal Shoe Company Building

    An elegant little storefront designed by Alden & Harlow in 1908. It now houses a men’s clothing store.

  • Beltzhoover Presbyterian Church

    Since 1969 this has been the home of South Hills Baptist Church, but it was originally Presbyterian. It is a tidy and well-kept example of a small corner-tower church from the late 1800s or very early 1900s, modest but very tasteful, combining Romanesque style with the Arts-and-Crafts trend of the 1890s. Fortunately the current congregation has maintained it in beautiful and original shape.

  • The Bandstand at West End Park

    Bandstand

    Thomas Scott designed this elegant Arts-and-Crafts bandstand for West End Park, and it must have been a fine thing to sit out on the grass and hear a thumpy brass band on a lazy summer evening. It has probably been many years since a brass band played here, but the bandstand itself has been restored and is kept in excellent shape. Here we have similar pictures from two cameras with wildly different ideas of color balance.

    Bandstand

  • Community of Christ, Beechview

    Community of Christ, Beechview

    A fine example of the modest Arts-and-Crafts interpretation of Gothic that was fashionable for small churches in the early twentieth century. The building has hardly changed at all since it was put up in 1921, and it is still in use by the congregation that built it. The Community of Christ was formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; it is a fairly liberal church that accepts but does not insist on the Book of Mormon as scripture and otherwise gets along better with mainstream Protestant denominations than it does with the much larger Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which accounts for about 98% of Mormons.

    Addendum: The architects were Carlisle & Sharrer, productive architects of small and medium-sized churches and houses for the upper middle classes.1

    1. Source: The Construction Record, April 22, 1911: “Architects Carlisle & Sharrer, Jenkins Arcade building, have plans in progress for a one-story brick veneered church, to be erected at Beechview, for the Latter Day Saints’ Congregation. Cost $10,000.” ↩︎

  • Craftsman-Modernist Apartment Building, Mount Lebanon

    Apartment building on Academy Avenue

    Well, this one didn’t quite work.

    Old Pa Pitt has mentioned how he enjoys seeing the experiments builders try with small apartment buildings. Here we see a builder who seems to have absorbed some of the ideas of modernism and added some Craftsman-style details: the three-over-one windows, the decorative brickwork, the wood-framed entrance. But the details seem applied at random, and a modernist architect would have been more regular in the geometry. Note the lack of rhythm or alignment in the windows, which throws off the whole façade. The second and third floors have windows in groups of 2, 1, 3, 2; the first floor has groups of 2, 1, 2, 1, and they do not line up at all with the windows above them. The entrance does not line up vertically or horizontally with anything else in the building; its awkward corner placement seems to leave some of the trim hanging off the edge.

    Someone will probably come along and tell Father Pitt that this building is by a famous modernist architect, and old Pa Pitt will only say that the architect was having a bad day.