Father Pitt

Tag: Gothic Architecture

  • St. James Church, West End

    St. James, West End

    St. James Church was a Catholic parish that closed in 2004. For a while, when the West End was unsuccessfully vying with Lawrenceville to become the next artsy-trendy neighborhood, the building was an art gallery; then, in 2015, it reopened as “St. James Roman Catholic Church.” The slightly ostentatious adoption of the title “Roman Catholic” might suggest to the initiated that this is not a church in the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh. It belongs to a congregation of the Society of St. Pius X, the followers of Archbishop Lefebvre, who repudiate Vatican II and all its works and all its pomps.

    Rededication stone

    The building was put up in 1884 for a congregation founded thirty years earlier; old Pa Pitt has not been able to determine who the architect was. (The name is not mentioned in the centennial book the congregation published in 1954.) Neighbors in the West End are delighted to have the church building well taken care of.

    Entrance

    Relief

    From the rear

    From Main Street

  • Tower of Calvary Episcopal Church at Sunset

    Tower of Calvary Episcopal Church

    The tower of Calvary Episcopal Church, one of three Ralph Adams Cram churches in Pittsburgh, bathed in sunset light, from pictures Father Pitt took in 1999.

    Tower

  • Arsenal Bank Building, Lawrenceville

    Arsenal Bank Building

    Built in 1884 in a Victorian Gothic style—Father Pitt calls it Commercial Gothic—this was a bank until 1943, according to the Lawrenceville expert Jim Wudarczyk. After that it was offices for quite a while, and then was refurbished as a restaurant and apartments above. This is not a great work of architecture, but the details are interesting and worth a close look. The builder reveled in his corner location and made that corner the focus of the whole building. Old Pa Pitt can’t help thinking that the treatment of the windows could have been improved by making it either more interesting or less interesting; the stone accents are either too much or too little.

  • A Dim Religious Light

    Interior of Heinz Chapel

    But let my due feet never fail
    To walk the studious cloister’s pale,
    And love the high embowed roof,
    With antique pillars massy proof,
    And storied windows richly dight,
    Casting a dim religious light.
    There let the pealing organ blow,
    To the full-voic’d quire below,
    In service high, and anthems clear,
    As may with sweetness, through mine ear,
    Dissolve me into ecstasies,
    And bring all Heav’n before mine eyes.

    ——Milton, Il Penseroso.

    It is difficult to convey in a photograph the impression we get from entering a glorious Gothic church like Heinz Chapel. In general photographs are too light, either because the photographers laudably attempted to capture the many artistic details of the Gothic interior, or because they used automatic exposure and let their cameras do the thinking. Old Pa Pitt has tried very hard in these pictures to give some impression of the relative lighting as we enter the chapel from the bright light outside. Most of the light is dim, but a pool of light shines in the distance, drawing us toward the altar.

    Toward the altar
    Toward the rear

    No matter how bright it may be outside, turning to leave the church is walking away from the light.

  • Working on the Roof of Heinz Chapel

    Workers on the roof of Heinz Chapel

    It’s easy to forget how tall Heinz Chapel is until we see people working on the roof.

    Heinz Chapel with roof work

  • Sixth Presbyterian Church, Squirrel Hill, in 1994

    Sixth Presbyterian

    One of the many black stone buildings that still remained in Pittsburgh in the 1990s. Like almost all the others, Sixth Presbyterian has since been cleaned and restored to its original color.

    Father Pitt has always wondered why the Presbyterians kept numbering their churches. “First Presbyterian” is an honorable distinction. “Fifth Presbyterian” just sounds tired. And then why stop at six? There is a Seventh Presbyterian in Cincinnati, for example.

  • Community of Christ, Beechview

    Community of Christ, Beechview

    A fine example of the modest Arts-and-Crafts interpretation of Gothic that was fashionable for small churches in the early twentieth century. The building has hardly changed at all since it was put up in 1921, and it is still in use by the congregation that built it. The Community of Christ was formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; it is a fairly liberal church that accepts but does not insist on the Book of Mormon as scripture and otherwise gets along better with mainstream Protestant denominations than it does with the much larger Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which accounts for about 98% of Mormons.

    Addendum: The architects were Carlisle & Sharrer, productive architects of small and medium-sized churches and houses for the upper middle classes.1

    1. Source: The Construction Record, April 22, 1911: “Architects Carlisle & Sharrer, Jenkins Arcade building, have plans in progress for a one-story brick veneered church, to be erected at Beechview, for the Latter Day Saints’ Congregation. Cost $10,000.” ↩︎

  • Gothic House in Shadyside

    House on Morewood Avenue

    Old Pa Pitt is not quite sure how to classify this house. It is a sort of Jacobean or Tudor Gothic, but with very Victorian woodwork on the gables. We shall call it “Jacobean with gingerbread.”

    Addendum: This is the Remsen V. Messler house; the architects were Peabody & Stearns, who designed several other Tudorish mansions around here, as well as the Liberty Market (now Motor Square Garden) and the Horne’s department store.

  • Beechview Methodist Church

    Beechview Methodist Church

    This neat little church was probably the first church to be built in the new neighborhood of Beechwood, which was later renamed Beechview when it was taken into the city of Pittsburgh. It has been well refurbished for a Spanish-speaking congregation. Some of the original stained glass is gone, and the tower is bricked in, but on the whole it looks much the way it looked more than a century ago. We also note the aggressive slopes for which Beechview is notorious.

    Date stone

    Beechview itself was laid out in 1905, so this would have been one of the earliest buildings.

    Street names

    Beechview’s streets changed their names when the neighborhood entered the city, because Pittsburgh didn’t need yet another set of numbered streets. Sixth Avenue is now Methyl Street; Pennsylvania Avenue is now Hampshire Avenue.

  • First Unitarian Church, Shadyside

    First Unitarian Church

    A small but substantial Gothic church that could easily pass for a church from any other denomination.