Father Pitt

Tag: Gothic Architecture

Atherstone

This is a strangely elaborate gateway for a postwar modernist apartment building. But anyone who knows the history of Fifth Avenue can guess that the gateway indicates where a grand mansion once stood on the Shadyside Millionaires’ Row. (Although city planning maps make Fifth Avenue the boundary between Shadyside and Squirrel Hill, traditionally both sides of the street were counted as “Shadyside.”)

Atherstone was the mansion, or “castle” as locals would have said, of hardware and steel magnate John Bindley.

From the Bulletin Index, December 8, 1939.

It was built in 1890, greatly expanded during the First World War (when these pillars were built), abandoned in 1929, and torn down in 1938.

When the demolition began, the Bulletin Index, Pittsburgh’s high-toned society magazine, ran an article about the house that we reproduce below. The magazine had been infected by Timestyle with its horror of conjunctions and its quirky capitalization, but we trust our readers to interpret it without too much difficulty. The article gives us a picture of Depression-era Fifth Avenue at its lowest point, before the postwar housing boom filled many of the vacant estates with modern apartment buildings.

Atherstone

Forty years ago young Theodore Dreiser used to spend his evenings reading Balzac in the Allegheny Public Library, his Sunday afternoons walking out Fifth Avenue and back again. It was then one of the wealthiest, swankiest, most famous streets in the world. Dreiser gaped at the great mansions, marvelled years later in his autobiography that “even the lamp posts were better than in other parts of the city.” One of the most magnificent of the castles he gaped at was “Atherstone” (see cut).

Atherstone was a work of art, a baronial symbol of the great-spending paleo-industrial age of which William Randolph Hearst is the sole remaining big figure. Pittsburgher John Bindley, having grown rich with his Grant Street hardware store, richer as co-founder of the Pittsburgh Steel Co., built his four-story gargoyled castle (in 1890) in the grand manner, with crenellated turrets and 80 windows with leaded panes, named it after his ancestral home place in England. A widower with only two of his six children living, he travelled through Europe every year with his niece Elmina, brought back paintings, furniture, hand-carved panelling, marble mantel-pieces in the fashion of one who feels it a class privilege and duty to patronize the arts. Fixtures he had made to order in Manhattan to match the furniture he bought, for the Chippendale dining room, the Japanese room that was his favorite. During the prosperous war years Steelman Bindley spent $200,000 to remodel, add a wing to his castle. In an enlarged residence of 24 rooms, six baths, he installed an electric elevator, new copper drains, plumbing and kitchen equipment, added cupboard space that virtually equalled the room volume of an ordinary house, put two carved stone pillars at the driveway entrance, two huge solid oak doors at the entrance of the hand-carved oak panelled hall.

Four years later, at the age of 75, Steelman Bindley died. Atherstone and contents were left to Son Edward Houston Bindley, who died in 1929, to Daughter Adelaide Bindley Davidson, who closed up the castle, put most of the furniture (including the Japanese room) into one end of the Hoeveler warehouse, moved to California. Installed above the spacious six-room coachhouse in the rear was Niece Elmina McMillin, her four servants.

Many a great mansion Theodore Dreiser looked upon forty years ago now stands boarded up and weed-choked, many another has been torn down to leave great toothless gaps in swank Fifth Avenue. Fortnight ago came word that John Bindley’s Atherstone, scene of many and lavish entertainments, was to be given into the hands of home-wrecking Austin Givens, Inc. (who eleven years ago tore down John Bindley’s hardware store to make way for the Gulf Building). Last week the curious and buying public poked and peered through the cold bare rooms of Atherstone, being auctioned bit by bit. This week Wrecker Givens began to tear down, cart away.

—The Bulletin Index, December 8, 1938, p. 33.

Sony Alpha 3000; Nikon COOLPIX P100.

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August 25, 2025
Third Presbyterian Church, Shadyside

“Mrs. Thaw’s chocolate church” was what the neighbors called it, since the brownstone church was largely built with Thaw money. The architect was Theophilus P. Chandler, Jr., a name that sounds as though its bearer was summoned into being to have his suspenders cut by the Marx Brothers.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Sony Alpha 3000.

More pictures of Third Presbyterian.

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August 24, 2025
Waverly Presbyterian Church, Park Place

A magnificent building that takes full advantage of a magnificent site, right at the busy corner of Forbes and Braddock Avenues. It was dedicated in 1930; the architects were Ingham & Boyd, who abstracted the Gothic style into a cool and elegant modernism that does not look dated at all almost a century later.

When the cornerstone was laid on November 17, 1928, the Press described the planned facilities:

The new church will be of early English gothic style of architecture. The contract for the erection of the church has been awarded to Edward A. Wehr, noted builder of a number of famous churches in Pittsburgh and other cities. The seating capacity of the new edifice will be slightly in excess of 600. The exterior walls will be of Indiana limestone. The roof will be an “open timber” roof, with wood trusses exposed. In the vestibule, oak paneling will be used to the top of the doors, with plaster above and an oak beam ceiling. The floor of the vestibule will be tile. Paneled and carved woodwork will be used at the front of the auditorium, the pulpit, reading desk, choir gallery and organ screen being designed as a unit to create a focal point in the design at this location. Temporary windows will be of leaded glass of good quality, in the hope that from time to time these temporary windows may be replaced with memorial windows of stained glass, of high quality in design and workmanship.

That the assembly room on the ground floor may be used as a social room as well as for Sunday school purposes, a temporary kitchen has been arranged for, adjoining. At the opposite end of the assembly room, shower baths and locker rooms have been provided in accordance with the original intention of using this room for recreational purposes also.

—“Sunday Service to Mark Start on New Church,” Pittsburgh Press, November 17, 1928, p. 5.

Pittsburgh Press, May 18, 1930, p. 23.

Olympus E-20N; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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August 24, 2025
Pittsburgh New Church, Point Breeze

This picturesque church, built for the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem in 1930, still serves its original congregation, now under the name “The New Church.” The architect was Harold Thorpe Carswell, who had been an apprentice of Ralph Adams Cram; to judge by the few references to him on line, this is one of his best-known works. Few Pittsburghers ever see it, however, because it sits at the end of a one-block dead-end residential street in Point Breeze.

The inscription, in florid medievalistic lettering, reads, “Nunc licet intrare in arcana fidei”—an abridged quotation from Swedenborg, which we may translate as “Now we are permitted to enter into the hidden things of the faith.”

The attached school is in a complementary Tudor style.

Olympus E-20N.

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August 17, 2025
Church of the Atonement, Carnegie

Utility cables were removed from this picture, because Father Pitt could not remove them from the street.

With almost complete confidence, old Pa Pitt attributes this Episcopal church to Ingham & Boyd. It speaks the same dialect of Gothic as some of their other churches, and they are known to have designed the parish house that was built just before the church. However, Father Pitt has not yet found the documentary evidence that would remove the “almost” from his statement.

The cornerstone was laid on October 5, 1930. At the same time, one stone taken from the foundation of Old St. Luke’s in nearby Woodville was also laid in the foundation of this church, to tie it to the pre-Revolutionary tradition of Episcopalianism in Allegheny County.¹

Olympus E-20N.

This parish house is known from several listings to have been the work of Ingham & Boyd,² and it was built just a little before the church itself. The architects looked to vernacular Western Pennsylvania farmhouses for their inspiration. We do not know what inspired the designer of the modern vestibule.

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August 10, 2025
Gustavus Adolphus Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Church, Bloomfield

Gustavus Adolphus was a Swedish congregation that began in Lawrenceville, but in 1908 it bought this lot at Evaline Street and Friendship Avenue. O. M. Topp, the favorite architect among Lutherans, was commissioned to design this imposing Gothic building.¹

Topp’s design, from “Cornerstone Laid in Storm,” Pittsburgh Gazette Times, July 13, 1908.

The cornerstone was laid in a howling storm on July 13, 1908,² and the church was completed in seven months—except for the main auditorium. It seems the congregation ran short of money and worshiped in the basement social room for several years. The main church was finally finished in 1916.

The church is now called Evaline Lutheran, but it is still Lutheran, and its spires still point heavenward—an unusual survival: probably a majority of churches of the era have lost their spires and must be content with bareheaded towers. It also has not been cleaned of its historic soot, making it one of our increasingly rare black stone churches.

Olympus E-20N; Samsung A15 5G.

The Tudor-style parsonage next door was also designed by Topp and built at the same time; it was connected with the church through the pastor’s study.

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August 3, 2025
Beechview Christian Church

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.

Olympus E-20N.

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July 31, 2025
Old St. Luke’s Church

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.

Sony Alpha 3000; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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July 20, 2025
St. Mary Memorial Protestant Episcopal Church, Oakland

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.

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July 16, 2025
St. Ignatius de Loyola Church, Glendale

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.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

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July 6, 2025