Unlike its neighbor, the Knoxville Presbyterian Church, this little Gothic church has no one to cut down the weeds and the Pittsburgh palms. It is already half-swallowed by jungle, and it may soon be nothing more than a roughly cube-shaped lump of vegetation. Wouldn’t it make a fine studio for some ambitious artist?
Addendum: The architect was E. V. Denick, who also designed the Hill-Top YMCA nearby; the church was built in 1904. Source: Pittsburg Press, May 26, 1904, p. 2. “Foundations have been started on the buff brick stone and terra cotta church being built on Charles and Knox avenues, Knoxville, for the Knoxville Christian congregation from plans drawn by Architect E. V. Denick.”
Someone left one of those temporary storage modules in front of the building, which mars our otherwise architecturally perfect picture of the Fifth Avenue façade. There is only so much old Pa Pitt can do.
This Flemish Gothic palace, built in 1894, was designed by Edward Stotz, who would later give us Schenley High School. His son Charles Morse Stotz was more or less the founder of the preservation movement in Pittsburgh: he wrote the huge folio The Early Architecture of Western Pennsylvania, still an invaluable reference as well as a gorgeous book. It is fitting, therefore, that the father’s great landmarks have been among our preservation success stories.
The school was closed in 1976, and after that it sat vacant for more than three decades. A generation knew it only as that looming hulk Uptown. It is a tribute to the architect that it survived in fairly good shape. In 2009 it was finally brought back to life with a years-long restoration project that turned it into loft apartments, which sold well and suggested that there might be some potential in the Uptown neighborhood. (It certainly helped that the new arena—currently named for PPG Paints—opened at about the same time.)
St. Paul’s German Evangelical Lutheran Church was built in 1872. Since Uptown was a dense rowhouse neighborhood, the church had a tiny lot, and resorted to the common expedient of putting the sanctuary on the second floor. Today it is home to the Shepherd’s Heart Fellowship, and we caught it in the middle of some spiffing up.
We might point out that this church is marked on an 1882 map as “Dutch Lutheran Church.” When misinformed pedants insist on calling East Allegheny “Deutschtown” (a pedantry that is flat-out wrong and makes old Pa Pitt’s skin crawl every time he hears it), you can point out that “Dutch” was the usual word for “German,” and English-speakers in Pittsburgh commonly referred to the Germans as “Dutch” even as late as the 1880s.
Here is a large institutional building whose story of abandonment and decay has a happy ending.
South Hills High School was Pittsburgh’s second great palace of high-school education, right after Schenley High School. For this one, the city hired Alden & Harlow, arguably the most prestigious institutional architects money could buy. They were responsible for the Carnegie Institute and all the branch libraries, in addition to multiple millionaires’ mansions and skyscrapers downtown.
The site of the school is improbably vertical. In those days, “South Hills” meant the back slopes of Mount Washington, and a walk along the side of this school is a steep climb. But the architects met the challenge with a Tudor Gothic palace that seems to have grown on the site. It takes up a whole city block.
The Ruth Street side of the school opened in 1917; the rest of the school—planned from the beginning—opened in 1925. For many years the school took in students from the South Hills and beyond—“beyond” meaning Banksville, Beechview, and Brookline. In 1976, a monstrously modernist new school—Brashear—opened in Beechview, which took in all the students from the southern neighborhoods. With population declining and the building getting old, the city decided to close South Hills altogether in 1986.
And then it sat and rotted for 23 years.
But, as we said, the story has a happy ending. As you see from these pictures, the building is well taken care of now. In 2010 it reopened as apartments for senior citizens, so that once again it is an ornament to its neighborhood.
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.
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.
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.
The rectory, built in 1928. Addendum: The rectory was designed by William P. Hutchins.
The convent, built in 1913 with additions in 1930. Addendum: The original 1913 convent was designed by A. F. Link.1
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.
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.” ↩︎
Take a look at this old Methodist church on the South Side. Do you notice anything unusual about it? Yes, you do notice, because you already read the title of this article. But just passing by, you might not have noticed that the sanctuary—the main worship space—is on the second floor.
When he was publishing his pictures of the old St. John’s Lutheran Church on the border of Bloomfield and Lawrenceville, old Pa Pitt ran across an interesting article about the conversion of that church to apartments, which apparently was done with minimal alteration. In fact the whole “Urban Traipsing” site is worth a long exploration, and you can go there and spend a few hours as soon as you’ve finished here. To stick to our current subject, Father Pitt was struck by the author’s reaction to finding that the sanctuary was upstairs:
This is the only church building I have been in where the sanctuary is a full flight of stairs above ground level. I’m very curious to know if there are any others—please share, if you’ve come across one!
Well, that article was written nine years ago, so Father Pitt will not bother the author with comments now. But this is actually a very common adaptation in Pittsburgh. Churches in dense rowhouse neighborhoods had tiny lots, and they had to make the most of those lots. If you can’t build out, you build up. It would be aesthetic nonsense to have any other facilities above the sanctuary, so obviously the sanctuary goes at the top.
The South Side has a larger collection of these churches than any other neighborhood, so we’re going to stay there for this article. In fact Father Pitt believes that this article will give you a complete census of the remaining churches on the South Side with the sanctuary upstairs; if anyone knows of any others, please step forward.
The grandest of the lot is South Side Presbyterian. It was originally more modest, looking like many of the other churches here, but the congregation prospered and added the impressive front with bell tower.
Here is the sanctuary of South Side Presbyterian, which is reached by a pair of stairways at the front of the church.
The Bingham United Methodist Church is now the City Theatre; the building dates from 1859. Birmingham and East Birmingham, the boroughs that became the South Side, were full of Methodists and Presbyterians in the middle 1800s, and many of the churches on the South Side began as Methodist or Presbyterian churches.
This was also built as a Methodist church, but at some time around the First World War it became St. George’s Serbian Orthodox Church. The onion dome cannot disguise the typically American Protestant shape of the rest of the Victorian Gothic building.
The German Baptist Church on 19th Street is now Holy Assumption of St. Mary Orthodox Church.
First Methodist Episcopal Church, East Birmingham, became a nest of Polish Falcons; then the Falcons moved to a smaller nest a block and a half away, and this building was converted to apartments as “Falcon Court.”
The First Associated Reformed Church of Birmingham was built in 1854.
The Tabernacle of the Union Baptist Church was built in 1881 in a curiously angular style, an abstract machine-age Gothic.
These are eight churches on the South Side alone that have their sanctuaries upstairs. Have we missed any? There were almost certainly others; if Father Pitt recalls correctly, the Walton Church, demolished more than twenty years ago, was one of them, and there are other churches that did not make it into our century.
There are also others in other neighborhoods: we already mentioned St. John’s Lutheran in Bloomfield/Lawrenceville, and we have pictures of Grace Lutheran in Troy Hill and the Union Methodist Church in Manchester. These are all churches built in densely crowded neighborhoods where they had to make do with a tiny patch of land.
Now that you have been alerted to their existence, you will start to see these churches everywhere, and you will have old Pa Pitt to thank for your new hobby.
The outstanding feature of this church is its outsized corner tower; the architect has cleverly emphasized its height with strong vertical lines. Corner towers are common in churches on corner lots, but seldom do they reach these proportions.
There are also smaller towers at three of the other four corners of the building, and a matching Sunday-school wing is attached.
This is one of several abandoned churches in Knoxville, but at least somebody mows the lawn and sweeps away the trash. Note the steep slope that makes two floors’ difference between the front of the lot and the back of the lot.
In many neighborhoods this would be the most distinguished building, but of course Homewood has Holy Rosary Church. Nevertheless, this is an important building in its own right. It was built in 1904 as St. James Episcopal Church, but in 1953 it was bought by a Black Episcopalian congregation, which obviously showers love on this building. It was designed by Carpenter & Crocker, and the grandson of William James Carpenter gives us the story of the church on a site dedicated to his grandfather’s work. You can also read the story of the congregation from the church’s own site (the link goes to a page where you can download a PDF file).
This splendid Tudor Deco palace takes up a whole large city block; in fact, it’s the symbolic center of Knoxville, occupying the lot where the original W. W. Knox house stood until the early twentieth century. The school was built in stages, beginning in 1927; the Charles Street front was finished in 1935. The architects were Press C. Dowler and Marion M. Steen, and the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places for its architectural significance, as part of a package deal with a number of Pittsburgh public schools.
The school closed in 2006. It may stand for many more years, since Knoxville is not a prosperous enough neighborhood to make it worth demolishing; but it will eventually become too dangerous to let stand, so it is in danger until another use is found for it.
The main entrance is designed to impress us with the idea that education is important but also delightful.
These shields above the entrance express an ideal of balance in public education: Art, Science, Trades, Play.
This is the neighborhood library every neighborhood dreams of. It was designed by Alden & Harlow (according to Wikipedia, Howard K. Jones, who worked for the firm, may have been principally responsible for this library), and it is the most palatial of their branch libraries in the city. Most of the others are classical, but this is institutional Gothic. Restored to its original splendor, it is kept immaculately beautiful, and it seems to be busy. Old Pa Pitt promised the librarian he would not capture any patrons in the interior shots—which necessitated some patience, because people would keep walking in front of the woodwork.
