There were two large Presbyterian churches around the corner from each other in Bellevue, both called Bellevue Presbyterian. The other one was the United Presbyterian congregation, and old Pa Pitt will pause for a moment to let the laugh track do its job. The church we see here was later called Northminster Presbyterian, and it is now home to the New Life Community Church.
Of course, in the glory days of steel and coal, the building was not quite so pale, as we see in this old postcard:
David J. Vater was the architect of this building that went up just a few years ago in a shockingly neo-Gothic style. (Mr. Vater was also responsible for the Galliot Center for Newman Studies around the corner.)
This is a building that makes old Pa Pitt happy and sad at the same time. It makes him happy because someone in our present age was able to make an interesting and traditionally Gothic building out of modern stock materials. It makes him sad because so many of those materials look cheap.
It cannot be helped: this was a high-budget building by today’s standards, but today’s standards are so low that our high-budget buildings are bound to look cheap. Here is a point of comparison: when the City-County Building was built (1915–1917), Tiffany Studios got the contract for ornamental bronze in the building for $86,000. At that time, $4,000 would build a substantial two-and-a-half-storey house with five or six bedrooms for an upper-middle-class family with one or two servants. More than twenty upper-middle-class houses’ worth of ornamental bronze went into the City-County Building. We cannot have ageless buildings today because we refuse to spend the money for them.
The doors may be stock models from a catalogue, but the carved stone with Newman’s motto Cor ad cor (“Heart to heart”) is original.
Note the ornamental brickwork on that broad blank wall. Now note the broad blank wall and consider how completely our modern buildings—even Gothic ones—have come to depend on artificial lighting. There was a time when architects referred to windows as “lights” and considered how to place them so that the interior could be usefully illuminated.
Built in 1872 from a design by Andrew Peebles, this cathedral-sized church did become a cathedral about three years later for the short-lived Catholic Diocese of Allegheny, which was formed by taking the rich half away from the diocese of Pittsburgh and leaving all the debt with the poor half. The diocese was suppressed in 1889, but old dioceses never die, and there is still a titular Bishop of Allegheny. The current holder of the title is a retired auxiliary bishop of Newark.
This relief of the Resurrection takes on added drama at night.
There are countless pictures in Father Pitt’s archives that are not good enough to publish, but every once in a while he realizes that he has forgotten to publish a perfectly adequate one. He went looking for his article on this church in Allentown because he had just identified the architect, and the article was nowhere to be found. So here it is, almost a year after the picture was taken. The architect was E. V. Dennick, as we learn from The Construction Record in 1915: “Architect E. V. Denick, 1212 House Building, is taking bids on erecting a one-story and basement brick and sandstone church on Excelsior Street, Allentown, for the Bethlehem Lutheran Congregation.” (On another page of the same magazine, the architect’s name is spelled “Denick,” and it is usually spelled that way in other listings.)
From the front this appears to be another one of our churches with the sanctuary upstairs, but the building is set into the hill, and therefore justifies the magazine’s description as “one-story and basement.”
This house probably dates from the 1870s, making it much earlier than the city neighborhood that filled in around it. Because Point Breeze is such a desirable neighborhood (this house is just around the corner from the Frick Art Museum), it has been worth the expense to restore this house to something like its original appearance.
The tower of East Liberty Presbyterian dominates the neighborhood in a way few buildings do in any urban setting.
It is sad to report that the last Lutheran congregation in Sharpsburg has thrown in the towel. (There were once three Lutheran churches: this English one and two German ones.) The good news, however, is that Sharpsburg is becoming a trendier neighborhood, and it will be worth adapting this distinctive building to some other use. It is a sort of Jacobean Gothic with more than a whiff of Art Nouveau.
In 1956, twenty years after Charles Z. Klauder’s Cathedral of Learning opened, Clapp Hall opened its doors. It was designed by Trautwein & Howard, the successors to Mr. Klauder, but it was no longer possible to make an academic building in the ornate Gothic style that had been Klauder’s specialty. Instead, the architects gave us a restrained late-Art-Deco modernist Gothic that fits well with Klauder’s buildings but doesn’t embarrass postwar sensibilities too badly. The entrance is at an angle to the rest of the building so that the Cathedral of Learning is perfectly framed in the doorway as you walk out.
Below, three views of the Fifth Avenue side:
The Tennyson Avenue side has a similar face:
This elaborately stony Gothic church is small but rich; it seems to represent an American Christian’s fantasy of the Middle Ages. It is no longer active as a church, but the building is kept in good shape by the current occupants, “The Center of Bellevue.” The gargoyles on the tower are distinctive and impressive.
This was the Methodist Protestant church, as the inscription informs us. Bellevue’s Methodist Episcopal congregation built just across the border in West Bellevue, now Avalon, where the congregation still meets in what has become known as the Greenstone Church.
Father Pitt featured one picture of this church a couple of months ago, but he returned to get a few better pictures, including the composite one above, which took some effort. We repeat the information from the earlier article:
Now Madonna of Jerusalem Church of Christ the King Parish, which also includes the St. Joseph Church that once lived in this building but handed it over to Madonna of Jerusalem in 1960. This building was finished in 1874, but it was built around an earlier school from 1869. It is a typical nineteenth-century Pittsburgh Gothic church, with the buttresses and crenellations we expect from the style.
