Built in about 1893, this church was designed by James N. Campbell, who gave it his usual outsized corner tower with enormous open arches for the belfry. It was later known as Carnegie United Methodist Church, which left it a few years ago. But it appears to have been adopted as a community center by the prospering Attawheed Islamic Center next door in the old Presbyterian church, which the new owners obviously treasure and pour a lot of labor into, so we hope the future of the building is secure.
McDonald was a very Presbyterian town, with at least four Presbyterian churches all within an easy walk of one another. In 1897, two Presbyterian churches went up in McDonald side by side—a Presbyterian church and a United Presbyterian church. They seem to have been called First Presbyterian and First United Presbyterian at first, but later took the names Trinity and Calvary. After the denominations merged, so did the congregations—but they kept the two buildings, now called the Calvary Center and the Trinity Center of McDonald Presbyterian Church.
The United Presbyterian church, now Calvary Center, was the larger of the two. The architect was James N. Campbell.
Behind the church is a neat and prosperous-looking foursquare parsonage built of matching brick.
The smaller Presbyterian church, now the Trinity Center, was designed by the Washington (Pennsylvania) firm of McCallum & Ely.
No longer a firehouse, but the building has been adapted to other uses with care to preserve as much of its original stocky Romanesque look as possible.
High-school dropout James E. Allison would go on to have a long and distinguished career as an architect, much of it with his younger brother David in California as Allison & Allison. When he designed this little school,1 though, he was 24 years old, and he had just set up his own practice. Although he had no diplomas, he had worked for the Pittsburgh office of Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge (the successors to the sainted Richardson), and then for Adler & Sullivan in Chicago. No one needs more education than that.
The Romanesque style was all the rage in 1894, and Allison made sure his clients got their fill of round arches, emphasizing them with darker brick. It looks as though he had a lot of fun drawing the belfry.
Whoever designed the inscription—possibly some high-school dropout—made an elementary mistake in Roman numerals that has persisted for 131 years. There is no sane way to read the date “MDCCCICIV.” But change the incorrect subtractive notation to MDCCCXCIV, and it gives us the date 1894, which matches our source.
The school has been turned into apartments, but the exterior appearance has been kept close to original. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places.
This old church was built in 1872, just a few years after the Civil War. It is now (according to neighbors) used for storage of lumber and building materials. Because money is not spent on extensive alterations, storage is, from a preservation point of view, one of the best uses that can be found for a church. Several Southern churches from the 1600s were preserved because they were turned into barns in the late 1700s, when the future Bible Belt was the most irreligious section of the country.
Inscription: “St. John’s German United Evangelical Protestant Church, A. D. 1872.”
Built in about 1898, this church was designed by James N. Campbell,1 and it displays all the usual quirks of his style, including the corner tower with tall, narrow arches and the half-round auditorium made into the most prominent feature of the building: compare, for example, Beth-Eden Baptist Church in Manchester. It has been a Masonic hall for quite a while now. There are, however, still Presbyterians right across the street: the First United Presbyterian congregation was there, and the two denominations merged in 1959.
In this case the Masons have not blocked in most of the windows the way men’s clubs usually do when they take over a building. An old postcard from the Presbyterian Historical Society collection shows that the basement windows have been filled with glass block, and the open tower has been bricked in. But the stained glass is still intact through most of the church.
This church at the eastern end of the Great Soho Curve is one of our endangered landmarks. It is a great masterpiece of ecclesiastical architecture by the Pittsburgh genius John T. Comès, who died at the age of 49 but had already built a legacy of glorious churches and schools across the country. However, it belongs to Carlow University, and universities hate historic buildings with a burning passion—Carlow more than most. All that stands in the way of a multimillion-dollar building with a rich donor’s name on it is this stupid church, which isn’t doing anybody any good. All it’s useful for is assembling large numbers of people for some sort of religious observance, and what good is that to a Catholic university?
So we document its details as well as we can. There is a strong movement to preserve the church, but universities usually win these fights in the end.
The martyrdom of St. Agnes.
In the center: a Chi-Rho monogram with the Alpha and Omega. Left to right are the symbols of the four Evangelists: the lion of Mark, the eagle of John, the human face of Matthew, and the ox of Luke.
There’s still a bell in this tower.
The rectory next door is designed to match the church. It shows the Art Nouveau influence that Comès could combine effortlessly with historical models to produce a style uniquely his own.
That sounds like the title for a very complicated farce, but these are actually the names of six apartment buildings in Oakland, all of which share a common style. First, on Oakland Avenue, we have Harry, George, Matilda, and Laura, which look like four buildings but are really two identical buildings, each divided in two parts. The romantic battlemented fronts give tenants the chance to imagine themselves as medieval lords and ladies fresh out of a Walter Scott novel. These fantasies were effective in selling apartments, and probably still are.
Around the corner on Dawson Street are two other buildings that share many of the same details. They had the same owner—John Dimling (note the sign for the private alley Dimling Way in the picture above)—and we can guess that they were probably drawn by the same pencil. These are called Hilda and Herbert.
Here the architect has responded to the challenge of a lot that is not rectangular with a pair of asymmetrical designs that resemble but do not repeat Harry, George, Matilda, and Laura.
John Dimling was also the owner of the rainbow terrace on Dawson Street, and it is a good guess that the same architect was responsible for that as well. That architect was almost certainly Frederick Sauer, who is best remembered for his churches (like St. Stanislaus Kostka and St. Stephen Proto-Martyr) and his backyard whimsies, but who was very busy with all kinds of work. Father Pitt has not found these particular buildings in construction listings yet; but John Dimling was responsible for quite a bit of development in this part of Oakland, and in looking through the trade magazines for Mr. Dimling’s name, we find that, whenever an architect is mentioned, it is always and without exception F. C. Sauer during the period when these buildings went up (around the turn of the twentieth century). We therefore attribute them to Sauer until someone proves otherwise.
This church, formerly First Presbyterian of Carnegie, now belongs to the Attawheed Islamic Center, which keeps the building up beautifully and lavishes a lot of attention on the landscaping. We can see from an old postcard from the Presbyterian Historical Society collection (undated, but probably about 1900) that this side of the building has hardly changed at all—except for the improvement in the landscaping. Even the stained glass is intact, since it is not representational and therefore causes no offense to Islamic principles.
At least two layers of educational buildings are behind the church.
Diagonally across Washington Avenue is another Presbyterian church…
…but this one was First United Presbyterian. The United Presbyterians were a Pittsburgh-based denomination that finally merged with those other Presbyterians in 1958. The building now is used as a banquet hall.
