Tag: Convents

  • St. Richard’s School and Church, Hill District

    St. Richard’s School

    St. Richard’s parish was founded in 1894 and immediately put up a temporary frame church. Two years later, a rectory—obviously meant to be permanent—was designed by J. A. Jacobs in a restrained version of the Queen Anne style.

    Rectory

    In 1907, the parish started building a school, which would also have temporary facilities on the ground floor for the church until a new church building could be built. It was partly financed by “euchre and dance” nights.

    St. Richard’s school and church

    Father Pitt has not yet succeeded in finding the name of the architect, but he has found a lot of newspaper announcements of euchre and dance nights.

    Convent

    The permanent church was not yet built in 1915 when this convent, designed by Albert F. Link, was put up. Although the second-floor windows have been filled in with much smaller windows, and the art glass has been replaced with glass block, the proportions of the building are still very pleasing.

    Third-floor decorations
    Front of the convent

    We note a pair of stained-glass windows in one of the filled-in spaces on the second floor. If Father Pitt had to guess, he would guess that they came from one of the central windows that are now filled in with glass block.

    St. Benedict the Moor School
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    It turns out that the permanent church was never built. The dwindling congregation continued to meet for Mass on the ground floor of the school until the parish was suppressed in 1977. The school became St. Benedict the Moor School, and the ground floor was finally converted into the classrooms it had been designed for. Later the school moved to larger facilities at the former Watt Public School, but the parish kept up the old building as an events center.


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  • Church of the Annunciation Convent, Perry South

    Church of the Annunciation convent

    Edward J. Hergenroeder, who worked with Benno Janssen on the school for Annunciation Parish, was the architect of this convent, built in 1928. The style is a sort of modernized Gothic, though the crenellations in the peak at the end of the building look back to the middle 1800s. The building is now home to Angels’ Place, so it is well kept.

    Entrance to the convent
    Church of the Annunciation Convent

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  • St. James Convent, Sewickley

    St. James Convent

    Even though it is on the grounds of a parish that is still open, with a school that is still open, this glorious Second Empire building is abandoned and crumbling, with scraggly Trees of Heaven—the badge of abandonment—taking root all around it. In its current state it looks like a drawing by Charles Addams.

    St. James Convent
    Roof woodwork
    Close-up of some woodwork
    Dormer
    Dormer from the side
    Dormer from the front
    Different dormer from the front
    St. James Convent
    St. James Convent
    St. James Convent
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
  • St. Scholastica’s Convent, Aspinwall

    St. Scholastica’s Convent

    Update: The architect was Edward Weber, one of our most distinguished ecclesiastical architects. You might say he wrote the book on Catholic Church Buildings, and this one is illustrated in it. We keep the original article below, with its incorrect speculations, because Father Pitt likes to emphasize his own fallibility.


    Old Pa Pitt does not definitely know who designed this old convent (now a “ministry center”), but he would not be at all surprised to learn that it was Aspinwall’s own resident big-time architect Frederick Sauer, who could have walked to this site from his house in five minutes, and who was a known lover of yellow brick like this.

    Inscription: “St. Scholastica’s Convent”
    St. Scholastica’s Convent
    St. Scholastica’s Convent
  • St. Matthew’s Convent, South Side

    St. Matthew’s Convent

    St. Matthew’s was a Slovak congregation; you can read the whole history of the parish up to 1955 in its golden-jubilee book at the Historic Pittsburgh site. The church closed some time ago and was converted to apartments; the convent is also secular now, but the front is beautifully maintained. It was built in 1926, and the architect was Albert F. Link. It’s a good example of Link’s style: he streamlines and modernizes a historical style—Jacobean here—and creates something that harmonizes well with the older church next door but still definitely belongs to our modern age of the 1920s.

    Front Door
    St. Matthew’s Convent
  • St. Michael’s Convent and Orphan Asylum, South Side Slopes

    St. Michael’s Convent and Orphan Asylum

    The line between painted and unpainted on this long building is an artifact of its history. For most of its life this building was divided in two parts: the painted part was the convent, and the unpainted part the orphan asylum. More recently it has been a Franciscan retreat center known as the Burning Bush House of Prayer, whose somewhat archaic site tells us that the building was put up “in three stages, from 1887 to 1889.”

    Oblique view
  • St. George’s Convent, Allentown

    St. George’s convent

    German influence was strong in the German neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, and the particular German variant of Romanesque called the Rundbogenstil—round-arch style—can be discerned in many of our buildings. Few offer it in as ostentatiously German a form as this one, which was the convent for St. George’s parish school in Allentown. It seems to old Pa Pitt that the rhythm of the front is just about perfect, and the three elaborate double arches place the proper emphasis on the upstairs chapel.

    The side was not really meant to be seen, so it is almost completely undecorated.

    Convent

    Addendum: The convent was built in about 1915; the architect was Herman J. Lang, who was also the architect of the church.

  • Holy Rosary Convent, Homewood

    Holy Rosary Convent

    Like the rectory behind it, this is a simple and dignified Renaissance palace that sets off the flamboyant Gothic of Holy Rosary Church.

  • St. Canice Church, Knoxville

    Tower

    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.

    St. Canice

    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.

    Entrance
    St. Canice

    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.

    Rectory

    The rectory, built in 1928. Addendum: The rectory was designed by William P. Hutchins.

    Convent

    The convent, built in 1913 with additions in 1930. Addendum: The original 1913 convent was designed by A. F. Link.1

    School

    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.

    Entrance to the school
    Gothic details
    1. Source: The Construction Record, September 13, 1913: “Architect A. F. Link, 407 N. Craig street is taking bids on erecting a two-story brick convent on Knox avenue and Orchard street, Knoxville, for St. Canice’s Roman Catholic Congregation.” ↩︎