A few more details of this splendid church, built in 1897, which probably will not stand much longer—although the demolition order had been removed from the front door when old Pa Pitt visited most recently. The architect was Frederick Sauer.1 We have many more pictures in an earlier article.
If the church is demolished, Father Pitt will buy these hinges. He has no idea where he would put them or even whether he could lift one, but they ought to be preserved.
We’ve seen this little church before, where we also learned some of its history, but we need no excuse for seeing it again other than that it is a charming little church with a long history. Built for a Lutheran congregation in 1894, it was sold to the African Methodist Episcopal congregation only eleven years later, and they worshiped here for a century.
Charles Z. Klauder designed all the buildings on the irregular trapezoid on which the Cathedral of Learning stands. Of the three, this is the one that gets the least attention, and therefore old Pa Pitt was able to have it all to himself for the entire time he spent wandering through it and taking pictures.
The cornerstone was laid in 1935, as it tells us in its own distinctly Deco Gothic way.
The Stephen Foster Memorial is home to two theaters. The larger, the Charity Randall Theatre, is right across the lobby from the main entrance. The Henry Heymann Theatre is down in the basement. It is dogma among theatrical types that “theater” must be given the English spelling, or the proscenium arch will fall on their heads.
Shakespeare and four of his most famous characters in stained glass.
Beethoven and a few lesser composers.
A bright passage illuminated by sunny southeastern windows leads from the lobby to the Stephen Foster Museum.
Along the way we pass Stephen Foster’s own portable melodeon, a little reed organ “used for serenading in Pittsburgh,” as the museum tag says. We have seen this little melodeon before: it is represented in stained glass in the great Stephen Foster window at the Allegheny Cemetery Mausoleum.
The stained glass in the mausoleum was by Willet of Philadelphia, and because the style is similar, and because Charles Z. Klauder was a Philadelphian, we strongly suspect (but would be delighted to be corrected) that the Willet studio did the stained glass for the Stephen Foster Memorial as well. Stained-glass vignettes in the windows along the hallway represent Foster songs (and there are several more stained-glass windows in the museum, which old Pa Pitt didn’t photograph this time).
Old Dog Tray.
Nelly Bly.
Mr. Stephen Foster himself.
Gentle Annie.
Old Uncle Ned.
The Stephen Foster Museum is in a domed room that is certainly one of Pittsburgh’s remarkable interior spaces. We pause for a moment to look up at the ceiling.
It has been Father Pitt’s contention that Americans don’t look up, and therefore architects feel entitled to ignore the ceiling. But Mr. Klauder did not make use of that privilege. This is a ceiling worth looking up at.
The museum feels timeless. If it were not for a few recent posters pointing out the interesting fact that some people are offended by blackface minstrels these days, you would hardly know you were in the twenty-first century.
Stephen Foster’s own piano, a Dubois & Stodart square grand. He must have bought it used, since the firm of Dubois & Stodart came to an end in 1834, when young Master Foster was eight years old.
A full-size melodeon donated by the McComb family, said to have been played by Stephen Foster when he was a guest at their house. At any rate, it may stand in for the countless melodeons Mr. Foster must have played as he visited friends and admirers, who must inevitably have asked him for a song or two. Melodeons and reed organs were much cheaper than pianos, and therefore likely to be found in any home from lower middle class on up.
We leave the museum by the same hallway and come back out into the lobby.
Wandering the grounds, we come across the Newton Apple Tree, a direct descendant of the tree that bonked Isaac Newton on the head, thus causing gravity.
From the outside, we can see that medieval baptisteries were the model for the room that holds the museum.
A well-kept little frame church covered in fake stone. It began as a mission church, according to old maps, and then became a full parish as Grace Evangelical Lutheran.
Although old Pa Pitt is not very fond of the fake stone blocks, they have preserved the little church and given it a tidy exterior that is better than the aluminum siding they probably replaced.
The parish house predates the church; there was a frame house here in 1872, which is the earliest plat map we could find. The church itself was probably built around 1900.
Now the Greater Allen African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the current owners keep it beautifully—including its historic Pittsburgh black stones, which give it weighty dignity. It was originally the Eleventh Presbyterian Church (of Allegheny; both Presbyterian and United Presbyterian churches on both sides of the river went well into the double digits), built in 1907. The architect was Thomas Hannah.1
The power was out for days in Brighton Heights after old Pa Pitt pulled down all the utility cables in the way of these pictures.
This is how it looked before Father Pitt got out his little hatchet.
We have more pictures of Eleventh Presbyterian on a cloudy day three years ago.
This is a church whose story would be worth going into in some detail, and old Pa Pitt hasn’t done that yet. It was built in 1918; the architect was Thomas Hannah, but at some point Cram & Ferguson—Cram being Ralph Adams Cram—were brought in as well, and it would be interesting to know how much was Hannah’s work and how much was Cram’s. Perhaps someone from the church knows more and could enlighten us.
We intend to get back to take some better pictures soon, but Father Pitt has been hoarding these pictures for months now and decided it was time to release them into the wild.
The Evangelists Luke (traditionally represented by an ox) and John (an eagle).
We have seen pictures of this building before, but a fine building in poor condition will disappear sooner or later without a miraculous intervention, so it is always good to seize the opportunity to harvest a few more pictures when one is in the neighborhood. (There’s a for-sale sign on the door: you could buy this building right now and make the miracle happen.) The educational wing was built in 1928; it was designed by Lawrence Wolfe, with O. M. Topp, one of the architects of the original 1911 church to which it is attached, as associate architect.1
Later known as the Mulberry Presbyterian Church. O. M. Topp and Charles W. Hutchison, “țhe well-known Pittsburg architect,” were the architects of this church, built in 1911.1
In spite of his self-declared notability, Charles W. Hutchison has not left much of a visible architectural legacy: after some searching, old Pa Pitt found only two projects definitely attributable to him, of which this is one. It was probably his own church: he lived in Wilkinsburg. His moment of greatest fame came the year after this church was built, when his honeymoon trip was interrupted by the wreck of the Titanic: he and his bride were passengers on the Carpathia, the ship that picked up Titanic survivors. He sold his story, with a well-made diagram of the scene of the rescue, to the Press, which put him on the front page as “the well-known Pittsburg architect.”
Olaf M. Topp, on the other hand, was a very successful architect with a long career ahead of him and much experience behind him. Half the prewar Lutheran churches in the Pittsburgh area were designed by Topp, in addition to a few for other denominations; and in secular buildings his greatest work was the still-lamented Jenkins Arcade.
A while ago this church was taken over by an organization with ambitious plans to turn it into a Center for Civic Arts. The plans seem to have run hard up against economic reality, however, and when old Pa Pitt visited recently the building was up for sale again.
These are far from the first pictures of this cathedral that old Pa Pitt has published, and they certainly will not be the last. A cathedral is too big a deal to take in all at once.
The west front (liturgically speaking1) is a towering Gothic fantasy whose scale is hard to convey in a photograph. Here the human figures on the steps give us some context.
The main doors turn on the mightiest hinges in Pittsburgh.
This would be a magnificent main front for any church; here it is just the façade of the south transept.
The south-transept entrance.
We have many more pictures of St. Paul’s from many years of passing by with a camera.
