T. Ed. (for Thomas Edward) Cornelius was the architect of this little Arts-and-Crafts Gothic church.1 Cornelius was a lifelong resident of Coraopolis, but he flourished for decades as a designer of small to medium-sized projects all over the Pittsburgh area. This building has not been a church for quite a while, but its current owners keep it up neatly, though they have adapted it to radically different uses.
Built in 1852 for a congregation established in 1765, Old St. Luke’s is a picturesque country church with a churchyard stuffed with Revolutionary War veterans. For some time it was abandoned and falling to bits, but over the past few decades careful restoration has gradually turned it into a picture-perfect wedding chapel. Much work has recently been put into the churchyard, with illegible tombstones supplemented by new granite monuments that duplicate the old inscriptions.
This plaque honors congregation founder John Neville, George Washington’s childhood friend and the man who, as tax collector for the district, found himself on the wrong side of the Whiskey Rebellion. His house at Bower Hill was burned by the rebels. The plaque was installed only when everyone who would have spat on it was dead.
This huge oak is probably as old as the congregation, and certainly older than the present building. It was recently recognized as a “witness tree”—a tree that has seen the whole history of the United States from the beginning. Wisely, the tree keeps its opinions on that history to itself.
It feels like a little old country church in the middle of the city—and indeed, when this church was built in 1899, it was in the middle of a wide open space, with only two other houses on this block of the newly constructed McKee Place. By 1910, the block had filled in with apartment buildings and other accoutrements of city life, but the gated front yard of this church still leaves an impression of village serenity.
The church has been a school more recently, and now appears to be turning into apartments.
Glendale is a semi-urban neighborhood of Scott Township, just outside Carnegie, that was heavily Polish. The center of social life was St. Ignatius de Loyola parish, which until 1952 was housed in a combined school and church building. In that year the school burned. Fortunately the parish had the resources to build on a much larger scale. The result was a beautiful late-Gothic church and a separate school building. Although the Catholic parish is gone now, the buildings are still in use as the Red Balloon Early Learning Center.
The church was designed by Ermes Brunettini, whose simple but traditional church bridges the gap between Gothicism and modernism.1
The front of the church was once adorned with a crucifix by Oakmont sculptor Louis Vergobbi, but it was taken away, along with most of the stained glass by the Henry Hunt studio, when the Catholic congregation moved out. All that remains is the cherub that served as the base.
Angels by Vergobbi still guard the two towers.
The school is in a more straightforwardly modernist idiom, but the stone matches the stone of the church. Since it was built at the same time as the church, it is very probable that Brunettini was the architect of the school as well, along with the additions to the convent. The architect’s drawing shows that, except for new tinted windows, very little about the outside of the school has changed.
The convent was originally a splendid Queen Anne mansion, the Dr. Henry House. It was expanded with additions that match the architecture of the church (and fight noisily with the architecture of the house), including a chapel with a round apse.
The roofline of the original house still sticks up behind the large additions in front, including the tower with balcony and a Richardsonian eyebrow dormer.
This little country church in the village of Woodville kept going when its neighbor, Old St. Luke’s, was abandoned and crumbling. But now the tables are turned: Old St. Luke’s has been gradually restored and is now associated with a rich Episcopalian congregation, whereas the Presbyterians have given up—and their building has been bought by the owners of Old St. Luke’s. It is now officially the Annex of Old St. Luke’s Church.
Ralph Adams Cram considered this church his greatest accomplishment, and it would be possible to argue that it is the greatest work of Gothic architecture in North America. Cram was intensely aware of the Gothic tradition, but he was not an imitator: he was as unique and original among the Gothicists as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe among the modernists. The tower of this church is a feast of Gothic detail, but it also takes inspiration from American skyscrapers, and it looms higher than the Highland Building, a steel-framed skyscraper across the street.
Cram himself was a high-church Episcopalian, a monarchist, and a member of the Society of King Charles the Martyr, so it is one of history’s amusing little jokes that his greatest work was built for Presbyterians. But the Mellons, Richard Beatty and Jennie King, gave him complete freedom—a privilege seldom granted even to the greatest architects. The Mellons poured so much money into this church that locals still call it the Mellon Fire Escape, and the late Franklin Toker guessed that it was probably, per square foot, the most expensive church ever built in America.
This church, formerly First Presbyterian of Carnegie, now belongs to the Attawheed Islamic Center, which keeps the building up beautifully and lavishes a lot of attention on the landscaping. We can see from an old postcard from the Presbyterian Historical Society collection (undated, but probably about 1900) that this side of the building has hardly changed at all—except for the improvement in the landscaping. Even the stained glass is intact, since it is not representational and therefore causes no offense to Islamic principles.
At least two layers of educational buildings are behind the church.
Diagonally across Washington Avenue is another Presbyterian church…
…but this one was First United Presbyterian. The United Presbyterians were a Pittsburgh-based denomination that finally merged with those other Presbyterians in 1958. The building now is used as a banquet hall.
Dedicated in 1873, this church for an Irish parish was designed by James Sylvester Devlin, about whom old Pa Pitt knows only that he designed this church. It has closed as a parish, and when Pittsburgh Catholics leave a church they take everything distinctive and valuable with them, so that, for example, all the stained glass is gone. But the building is still in good shape.
A good summary of the history of the church is in James Wudarczyk’s Faith of Our Fathers: Religion in Lawrenceville.
Clear glass reveals that there is still at least part of an organ in the building.
For hardware connoisseurs, a door pull on one of the side entrances.
The altar end of the church.
Behind the church is the Lyceum, built in 1914.
Built in 1920 in an angular modern-Gothic style, this church served its original congregation until 2013, the year of the great collapse of Dormont mainline churches, when the Presbyterians, the Methodists, and the Baptists all threw in the towel. The building became a Buddhist temple for a while (the Buddhists gave it the current paint scheme), but it seems not to be active right now. It is, however, kept up well.
Thanks to the Gazette Times of September 13, 1920, we have a picture of Bishop McConnell of the M. E. Church laying laying “a copy of the Gazette Times containing announcement of the corner stone laying, coins of the present day, a list of trustees and a list of members of the Dormont and Banksville churches, recently combined” in the cornerstone.
This cornerstone is a top contender for the coveted title of Most Awkward Word Break on a Stone Inscription Outside a Country Graveyard.
It seems that another capsule was laid in 2009, four years before the church dissolved.
None of the news stories we found mentioned an architect, but we hope to find a name eventually.
Andrew Peebles was the architect of St. Peter’s, which was dedicated in 1874. In 1876, it became the cathedral of the new Roman Catholic Diocese of Allegheny, carved out of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, which was left with all the debt while the new Diocese of Allegheny took all the rich churches. That went about as well as you might expect, and in 1877 the Diocese of Allegheny was suppressed and its territory reabsorbed by Pittsburgh. But a church never quite gets over being a cathedral.
In 1886, a fire ravaged the building and left nothing but the walls standing. Fortunately Peebles’ original plans were saved, and so the restoration, which took a year and a half, was done to the original design.
The rectory was built with a stone front to match the church, but the rest of the house is brick.
We also have a picture of the front of St. Peter’s at night.
