Built in 1896, this eclectic pile seems not to be in use right now, but it is not in terribly bad shape. It was built as the Second Presbyterian Church of Braddock, but later took the name Calvary Presbyterian. Old Pa Pitt spent some time trying to figure out who designed the building, but none of the newspaper articles he found mentioned an architect.
These stubby entrance towers, with their double eyebrowed round windows, trigger a disturbing pareidolia in Father Pitt’s brain.
On the other hand, the whole building was worth putting up just to display this fan window.
The church is separated by less than a yard from its neighbor, the historically Black New Hope Baptist Church. It illustrates an interesting fact of social history: the separation of Black and White residents into different neighborhoods was largely a development of the second half of the twentieth century, and it was largely a conscious decision of the powers that were. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, our urban neighborhoods were the proverbial melting pots of all nations and races.
This historically Black congregation has been in Swissvale just about since there was a Swissvale. According to our correspondent “Calvin,” this building was originally the First Presbyterian Church of Swissvale. When that church built its new stone church in 1909, this building was sold and moved. (Moving buildings was surprisingly common, and there were firms that specialized in nothing else.)
This historically Black congregation has met in this building for more than 120 years. Some of the stained glass is being restored, so old Pa Pitt will have to return for more pictures when the work is done. The architect was Frederick Sauer,1 who specified his favorite buff Kittanning brick for the job. These streets in the central part of the North Side are tiny, and Sauer’s challenge was to cram as much church as he could into a minuscule lot. He employed the usual Pittsburgh expedient of putting the sanctuary upstairs, with Sunday-school rooms and offices on the ground floor. It seems, by the way, that old Pa Pitt succeeded in finding the architect where other local historians failed (or didn’t try), but the citation is no surprise. This buff Kittanning brick was almost Sauer’s signature, and the building looks like what would happen if you squished St. Mary of the Mount into an impossibly tiny lot.
Old Pa Pitt will admit that Braddock can be a sad place, but here is something to celebrate. This historic Black congregation is still going after nearly a century and a half, and its neat little building is beautifully kept.
The cornerstone of the building was laid late in 1906, when the Rev. Dr. J. T. Wanzer was pastor. The architect of the church was John Lewis Beatty,1 who was one of our most successful designers of Protestant churches. In this case the budget was small, but Mr. Beatty gave the congregation a building to be proud of. Certain economies were necessary: only the front is stone, the rest being ordinary red brick. But that front leaves an impression of solid respectability.
The Pittsburg Press used to publish an extensive column of “Afro-American Notes,” and in the edition for December 17, 1905 we find a paragraph about the plans for New Hope’s new building:
The New Hope Baptist Church of Braddock, Pa., is undoubtedly one of the most progressive churches in Braddock. They are making great preparations to begin their new building in the early spring. The Rev. J. T. Wanzer deserves great credit for the good work he is doing for the upbuilding of religious Christianity among the negro race. He is without doubt a good worker. Services every Sunday morning at 11 a. m. and evening at 7:30 p. m. All are welcome.
It was not always easy being Black in Braddock. While the plans for the church were in preparation, two of its most prominent members had a run-in with a gang of “hoodlums,” as we read in the Press:
Much bad feeling is being engendered by a gang of hoodlums, who infest the corner of Fourth street and Hawkins avenue, North Braddock, and attack negroes. Last night Reuben Poles and James Price, the former a trustee of the New Hope Baptist Church, colored, of Braddock, and the latter superintendent of the Sunday School, while on their way home from a church meeting, were called vile names, followed for several squares by five fellows, all over 20 years of age, and finally attacked. Poles was beaten into insensibility with a beer bottle.2
As we see from the language of the Press report, which describes the assailants as an infestation, most respectable citizens were disgusted and appalled by such “hoodlums.” But they were a fact that Black residents of the borough had to deal with. Undaunted, the members of New Hope finished their church—and they are still here, 120 years later, worshiping in the same building.
The addition to the left is well matched to the main church; it was probably built in the 1920s or 1930s.
“Will Build Churches,” Press, October 30, 1906, p. 7: “J. A. House, of West Homestead, has the contract for building the New Hope Baptist Church at that place, to cost $14,000. It was designed by Architect J. L. Beatty.” Though the article says the church is in West Homestead, that is an error. The Post for the same day mentions the contract, but leaves out the architect, and places the church correctly in Braddock. Notes of the Builders, Post, October 30, 1906, p. 13: “A two-story brick and stone church for the New Hope Baptist Church of Braddock, to cost $14,000, will be built by Contractor J. A. House, of West Homestead.” ↩︎
This odd-looking building has looked odd for nearly a century, but it was not meant to look this way. It has a story—one that it shared with a number of other churches in our area, but this one almost uniquely was frozen in the middle of the story.
On September 26, 1926, the Press reported that a permit had been issued for building the Carter Chapel of the Colored Methodist Episcopal church. (The denomination is now called Christian Methodist Episcopal, indicating that it is not limited to any particular race.)
The Carter chapel of the Colored Methodist Episcopal church congregation, through their pastor, the Rev. W. H. Wiggins, has applied to the bureau of buildings for a permit to construct a two-story brick and stone church edifice on a site at 2332-34 Bedford ave, to cost $50,000. The plans call for a building 48×97 feet, highly ornate in appearance, with all modern church conveniences and a seating capacity of approximately 500. L. O. Brosie, of this city, is the architect, and Miss Olivet [sic] Day, of Indianapolis, is the contractor.
Louis O. Brosie was a successful and well-established Pittsburgh architect who had been in business on his own since 1903. Olive A. Day (apparently misheard as “Olivet Day”) was an Indianapolis contractor who seems to have been a low bidder on small projects.
It seems that things did not run smoothly, and something interrupted the construction. On May 28, 1927, the Press reported,
Work on the new Carter Chapel of the C. M. E. church will be resumed. Laying the cornerstone will take place next Sunday at 3 p. m.
Still there were difficulties, and somewhere along the line the construction ceased with only the first floor built. It would have been a sanctuary-upstairs church, with this first floor dedicated to Sunday school and social hall, but the “highly ornate” sanctuary was destined never to be. On March 18, 1928, we read in the Press:
The Carter chapel of the C. M. E. church, recently put in usable shape, at Bedford ave. and Somer st., will be formally dedicated to religious worship Sunday, April 2.
An improvised roof had been put on the building, doubtless with the intention that the real church would be finished when times were better. But the Depression came a year and a half later, and the building was never finished.
It was not uncommon to use the basement or ground floor of a half-finished church for some time before the sanctuary could be built. The second Presbyterian congregation in Beechview never got further than the basement of their church before they overcame their differences with those other Presbyterians and sold the unfinished building, which became the foundation for the Beechview firehouse. Nativity parish in Observatory Hill was finished after some years with a temporary roof over the basement.
But this church, perhaps uniquely in Pittsburgh, has kept its temporary arrangement for nearly a hundred years. It is a tribute to the persistence of its congregation, which stayed in this building for decades, and perhaps a tribute to the contractor and builders, who came up with a temporary solution that still serves a Christian community—now the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith.
William Arthur Thomas, who was very active in the Hill District, was the architect of this building, which is famous in jazz lore as the location of the second Crawford Grill.
The Crawford Grill lingered on into our current century, the last and most famous of the Wylie Avenue jazz clubs. (Father Pitt took the picture above in 2000.) It was in some ways a victim of its own success: it moved to the Freighthouse Shops at Station Square just when shopping arcades in general were beginning to decline, and closed there after a few years.
Today the building has been stabilized (though the fine Queen Anne house next to it could not be saved), and there is some hope that it can be an asset to the community again. We may yet hear the wail of a saxophone coming through that front door.
This is the most important remaining work of Louis Bellinger, who for his entire career was the only Black architect in Western Pennsylvania. It was built as the Pythian Temple, an exceptionally grand lodge house. It opened in 1928; but after less than ten years it was sold and became a movie theater, the New Granada, with the ground floor redesigned in streamlined Art Deco by Marks & Kann. Both as a lodge and as a theater it was one of the great jazz venues of all time, and the roster of stars who performed here is long and dazzling—Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and our own Lena Horne, just to name four.
After half a century of vacancy and multiple schemes for restoration, the New Granada is finally getting the love it deserves. It will have performance spaces and offices, and the whole block has been redeveloped with colorful new apartments and restored older buildings.
Except for the ground floor, the building still stands very much as Bellinger designed it. Shields and helmets in terra cotta remind us of the building’s Knights of Pythias origins.
In seventeen and a half years of writing about Pittsburgh, few things have made old Pa Pitt happier than seeing the progress on this building. It will stand for years as a tribute to a neglected architect, to the history of the Hill, and to the great legacy of jazz in Pittsburgh.
For his entire career, Louis A. S. Bellinger was the only Black registered architect in western Pennsylvania. His most famous work today is the Pythian Temple, later the New Granada Theater, on the Hill. This is a much smaller project—a six-room house built in 1929 for a middle-class client.1 But the client got his money’s worth. It’s not a work of towering genius: it’s just the best house you could get for the money, designed by a man who knew how to take the ordinary Pittsburgh house and make it a little bit special.
The house is abandoned and overgrown, and it will probably not last much longer. It would take a miracle to save it—a miracle that made the location suddenly valuable, since it will require a nearly complete gutting to put the house back in livable shape. All we can do, therefore, is document that it exists now, so that future historians will know that Louis Bellinger made it.
It appears that the house originally had an open porch with an arched entrance; later most of the porch was closed in to make another room. The large window opening in front was a good bit larger when it was an open porch, as we can tell by the slight difference in mortar in the bricks to either side of the window.
Source: The Charette, January, 1929, p. 12. “602. Architect: Louis A. S. Bellinger, 525 Fifth Ave., Pittsburgh, Pa. Owner: Robert T. Smith. Title: One family dwelling, six rooms and bath. Location: 85 Sylvania Ave. Contract awarded to Vincent Mingers. Contract price: $8700.00.” ↩︎
A detailed history of Allen Chapel (PDF) was written by the late Carol Peterson with her usual thoroughness, so old Pa Pitt will only summarize very briefly. The building was put up by the Bethel English Lutheran Church in 1894, but that congregation outgrew it rapidly and built a new church (long gone) a few blocks away. In 1905 this building was bought by the African Methodist Episcopal congregation that worshiped here for the rest of the century. When that congregation moved, it kept the building as a youth ministry center.
Evening sun paints the front of one of our most interesting churches—interesting both architecturally and historically. Father Pitt will admit that he is ignorant of most of the history, but perhaps a member of the congregation can fill in the rest.
The building originally belonged to a Presbyterian church; it was probably constructed in the 1890s. The Presbyterian congregation, however, did not last much more than twenty-five years; by 1923, the building is marked as “Tabernacle Cosmopolitan Baptist Ch. (Colored),” and it has remained in the hands of that congregation for more than a century. The congregation appears to have moved to this building from a smaller church in the East Street Valley.
When we look at this building, the thing that immediately strikes us is that there ought to be more church on top of it. Here is where Father Pitt does not know the whole story.
On the one hand, congregations would often build a foundation and roof it over just enough to make it serviceable until the money could be raised to complete the superstructure. We have seen that in the church-turned-firehouse in Beechview, for example, and it could have happened here.
But, on the other hand, a 1943 cornerstone tells us that there was a disastrous fire just before Christmas in 1936.
It’s clear that the front of the church dates from the 1890s; this Romanesque detail would have been not just out of fashion but impossible in 1943. It could be that a higher roofline was destroyed by the fire, and the resourceful congregation made use of what was still standing and finished it off into the church that stands today.
The building as it stands is a very good neighbor on its street. It is similar in height to the rowhouses that line the rest of the street, and it sits against the sidewalk at the same setback.
Some of the carved stone ornament has decayed, though we can still make out the lacey foliage it was intended to be.
