Father Pitt

Tag: Stained Glass

  • Inside the Second United Presbyterian Church, Highland Park

    Stained Glass, Second United Presbyterian

    We have seen pictures of the outside of this church before—here, for example, is a picture from May of 2021:

    Exterior of the church

    The other day the current inhabitants, the Union Project, were kind enough to turn old Pa Pitt loose in the sanctuary to take as many pictures as he wanted.

    Interior

    The architect was John L. Beatty, who designed the building in about 1900. A newspaper picture from 1905 (taken from microfilm, so the quality is poor) shows the exterior looking more or less the way it does now.

    Pittsburg Press, April 29, 1905.

    After a disastrous fire, much was rebuilt in 1915, again under Beatty’s supervision.1 Another fire in 1933 would necessitate rebuilding part of the tower.

    The church was built for the Second United Presbyterian congregation, which had moved out to the eastern suburbs from its former location downtown at Sixth Avenue and Cherry Way (now William Penn Place)—exactly one block from the First United Presbyterian Church, which moved to Oakland at about the same time. Later it became the East End Baptist Church, and then was renamed the Union Baptist Church. When that congregation folded, the church was bought by a Mennonite group that founded the Union Project. It is now a community center for pottery, because “everyone should have access to clay.” The sanctuary—which has been preserved mostly unaltered, except for the removal of pews and other furnishings—is available for large events.

    Ceiling

    The sanctuary is roughly square, which is typical of many non-liturgical Protestant churches in Pittsburgh at the turn of the twentieth century. Above, looking up at the center of the ceiling.

    Front of the sanctuary
    Side windows
    Stained glass in the side windows

    The stained glass was restored as part of a remarkable community effort in which people in the neighborhood learned the art of stained-glass restoration themselves. It would have cost more than a million dollars to have the work done professionally, but volunteers learned priceless skills, and the glass is beautiful.

    Stained Glass
    Stained glass
    Support
    Lantern
    View across the sanctuary
    Back of the sanctuary
    Back of the sanctuary
    Vestibule

    The vestibule includes some of the original furniture from the church, and some smaller stained-glass windows.

    Furniture
    Stained glass in the vestibule
    Sony Alpha 3000; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
    1. Source: The Construction Record, January 16, 1915: “The Second United Presbyterian Congregation has selected Architect J. L. Beatty, 146 Sixth street, to prepare plans for repairing the church on Stanton and Negley avenues.” ↩︎
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  • Store and Apartments by S. A. Hall, Oakland

    41–425 South Craig Street

    This building at the corner of Forbes Avenue and Craig Street was designed by S. A. Hall in 1904.1 It still holds down its corner very well, and most of the original details are preserved—including the art-glass transoms.

    Stained glass with torch
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
    1. Source: Pittsburg Press, April 26, 1904. “Architect S. A. Hall has awarded to the Iron City Construction Co. the contract for the erection of a two-story brick and stone store and apartment building on the corner of Craig and Forbes streets for George A. Charles. The structure will cost $25,000.” The building ended up with three floors instead of two, but Mr. Charles is shown as owner of the property on plat maps. Thanks to David Schwing for the information. ↩︎
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  • The Princess Ann, Mount Lebanon

    Marquee with “Princess Ann” in glass

    These splendid marquees with their Art Nouveau lettering in glass welcome us to the Princess Ann, an apartment building in the Colonial Heights plan in Mount Lebanon. Many of the external details of the building are beautifully preserved and maintained, including the art glass on the marquees and in the stairwells.

    Princess Ann apartments
    Stone railing with urns
    Courtyard
    Princess Ann apartments
    Entrance
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

  • Stained Glass in the Allegheny Cemetery Mausoleum

    America the Beautiful
    “America the Beautiful,” by Katherine Lee Bates.

    The Allegheny Cemetery Mausoleum is now advertised as the Temple of Memories, because our taste has gone in that direction. It’s a very large communal mausoleum, built in 1960, and walking through the doors feels like going through a time portal into the end of the Eisenhower era. By far the most striking feature of the mausoleum is the series of stained-glass windows by Willet in Philadelphia and Hunt in Pittsburgh. They are some of the best modern stained glass in Pittsburgh, and they commemorate great triumphs of religious literature and music. We have a lot of large pictures here, so we’ll put them behind a “read more” link to avoid weighing down the front page.

    (more…)

  • Montours Church, Robinson Township

    Montours Presbyterian Church

    The current building is only a century old, but the congregation of Montours Church—also spelled Montour’s or Montour, depending on where you look—was founded in 1778, and the adjoining cemetery is full of Revolutionary War veterans.

    Date stone: “Montours Presb. Church, 1778–1832–1924”
    Montours Presbyterian Church
    Montours Church
    Chapel

    A modern chapel built in 1978 is as tall as it is long, with a striking window at the far end.

    Interior of the chapel
    Window from the outside
    Montours Cemetery, chapel, and church
    Cemetery, chapel, church
    A bell cast in 1888

    A bell cast in Cincinnati in 1888 sits beside the church; it probably came from the older building that the 1924 church replaced.

    Van Duzen & Tift, Cincinnati

    “Van Duzen & Tift Cincinnati.”

    Buckeye Bell Foundry, 1888
    1888
    Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G with Open Camera.

    “Buckeye Bell Foundry 1888.”

  • Storefront on Potomac Avenue, Dormont

    Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

    A beautiful storefront with veiny marble and a large panel of stained glass spanning the whole width. Note the properly inset entrance, so that the door does not fly open into passing pedestrians’ faces—a requirement we have forgotten.

  • Chandelier in the Manor Theatre, Squirrel Hill

    Chandelier in the Manor Theatre

    Though the Manor has long been subdivided into four small theaters, part of the original ceiling remains in the lobby, and this chandelier, according to staff at the theater, is an exact replica of the original.

  • Skylight in Baker Hall, Carnegie Mellon University

    “My heart is in the work,” said Andrew Carnegie in 1900, and it was a good enough slogan to be immortalized in glass, especially if Carnegie himself was paying for it.

  • Stained Glass in the Church of the Assumption

    Stained glass, Church of the Assumption

    The drama of salvation plays out in glass in the Church of the Assumption, with each pair of windows illustrating events from the Old and New Testaments related by a common theme. We have only a few of the windows here; it would be worth spending an hour or two to examine all of them. Above left: King Achab sends Micheas to prison; the Agony in the Garden; King Joram rejects the prophecy of Eliseus. Above right: Abner is slain treacherously by Joab; Judas betrays Christ with a kiss; Tryphon deceives Jonathan with gifts.

    Stained glass

    Left: Joseph is sold by his brethren; Judas conspires with the priest and magistrates; Absalom entices the men of Israel. Right: Melchisedech meets Abram; the Last Supper; the manna from heaven.

    Stained glass

    Left: Esau sells his birthright to Jacob; the Temptation of Christ; the tempting of Adam and Eve. Right: Moses heals Miriam; Mary Magdalene at the feet of Christ; the repentance of David.

    Stained glass

    Left: Enoch is borne to heaven; the Ascension; Elias is raised into heaven. Right: Moses receives the tables of the Law; the descent of the Holy Ghost as fire from heaven; the sacrifice of Elias.

    See the whole collection of the Church of the Assumption.

  • Alumnae Memorial Window, Chatham University

    A window by Louis Comfort Tiffany, donated to the Pennsylvania Female College (now Chatham) in 1888. The figure is taken from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling: the Erythraean Sibyl, “here transformed into a symbol for women’s education,” as a plaque nearby says. This was an early work of Tiffany’s, believed to be his earliest in the Pittsburgh area. It was put away in about 1930 and sat in storage for seventy years, because who needed a window by Tiffany? In 2000 it was finally brought out of storage—old Pa Pitt imagines a janitor starting the ball rolling by saying, “Hey, can we get this thing out of the way?”—and restored for a place in the science building.

    Note that Shakespeare’s name appears twice in the pantheon of great figures every young lady should know. No one else gets that honor, and—though Shakespeare certainly is worth twice as much as any of the others to an English-speaking college student—one wonders who specified the duplication, or even whether it was intentional.