Father Pitt

Tag: de Bobula (Titus)

Sts. Peter & Paul Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Carnegie

The mad genius, con man, and would-be dictator Titus de Bobula designed this church, which was built in 1906. Today and tomorrow the congregation is holding its annual Ukrainian food festival, which seems like a good time to celebrate the church and its ancillary buildings with a longer look than we’ve taken in the past.

The church has a complicated history, which you can read about on the parish site. We summarize it here. The congregation began as “St. Peter & St. Paul Russian Greek Catholic Church,” but what did “Greek Catholic” mean? The church was originally Byzantine Catholic, and just a few years after it was founded some members with Orthodox sympathies founded Holy Virgin Russian Orthodox Church, whose blue domes you see just down the street. Then the church separated from the Roman church and briefly became Orthodox; then for quite some time it was independent; then its priest put it back in the Byzantine Catholic orbit; then there were lawsuits; and finally, in 1951, the church became Ukrainian Orthodox, as it still is. (The Byzantine Catholics founded their own church, which still flourishes as Holy Trinity on Washington Avenue.)

This date stone seems to mark extensive renovations in 1961.

The original 1906 cornerstone is engraved in Titus de Bobula’s own distinctive Art Nouveau lettering—the same instantly recognizable lettering he used to sign his architectural renderings. On the other exposed side of the stone, we get to see his style applied to the Cyrillic alphabet.

Next to the church is the parish hall and school, which was designed by Harry H. Lefkowitz in 1928. Lefkowitz caught some of De Bobula’s quirks—note the tall, narrow blind side arches and the stonework over the central arch, for example—and created a building that fits with the church without being simply an imitation.

Finally, the rectory is a simple house, but built of the same brick and with quoins proportioned to echo the brickwork of the church next to it.

Olympus E-20N; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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September 12, 2025
Holy Cross Church, Glassport, by Titus de Bobula

From The New Holy Cross Church, 1954, a booklet published when the current Holy Cross Church opened.

This was perhaps the last church designed by Titus de Bobula in his short architectural career, and it was an extraordinary work. It was faced entirely with concrete, and the architect gave free rein to his love of sweeping curves and tapering forms—note, for example, how the continuous tapering of the tower was supplemented by an inverted tapering of the arch at the entrance.

In the 1950s, the congregation built a much larger church from a design by the prolific Monessen church architect H. Ernest Clark. But the old church was kept as a social hall, and—thanks to the eagle eye of our correspondent David Schwing—we have discovered that the building is still standing.

Almost everything that made the church a unique work of art is gone. The windows are blocked in; the decorations are stripped off; the spire is gone and the tower truncated. But we can still see the outline of that unique arch at the entrance. And this is the only one of Titus de Bobula’s concrete-faced churches to have survived at all—at least as far as old Pa Pitt knows. With just a few minutes to stop in Glassport on his way from here to there, Father Pitt took a bunch of pictures with three different cameras to document the church before it succumbs to complete decay.

Sony Alpha 3000; Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

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September 9, 2025
Old St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cathedral, Munhall

Back in 2014, old Pa Pitt took these pictures of the old St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Munhall. In the intervening years Father Pitt has learned much more about making adjustments to photographs to produce a finished picture that looks like the scene he photographed, so he presents these pictures again, “remastered” (as the recording artists would say) for higher fidelity.

The church was built in 1903 for a Greek Catholic (or Byzantine Catholic, as we would say today) congregation. When Pittsburgh became the seat of a Ruthenian diocese, this became the cathedral.

The mad genius Titus de Bobula, who was only 25 years old when this church was built, was the architect, and this building still causes architectural historians to gush like schoolgirls. It includes some of De Bobula’s trademarks, like the improbably tall and narrow arches in the towers and side windows and the almost cartoonishly weighty stone over the ground-level arches. It’s made up of styles and materials that no normal architect would put together in one building, and it all works. Enlarge the pictures and note the stonework corner crosses in the towers and all along the side, which we suspect were in the mind of John H. Phillips when he designed Holy Ghost Greek Catholic Church in the McKees Rocks Bottoms, which also makes use of De Bobulesque tall and narrow arches.

The rectory was designed by De Bobula at the same time.

This illustration of the church and rectory was published in January of 1920 in The Czechoslovak Review, but it appears from the style to be De Bobula’s own rendering of the buildings, including the people in 1903-vintage (definitely not 1920) costumes.

Kodak EasyShare Z1485; Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.

The Byzantine Catholic Cathedral moved to a modern building in 1993, still in Munhall, and this building now belongs to the Carpatho-Rusyn Society. According to the Web site, the organization is currently doing “extensive renovations,” which we hope will keep the church and rectory standing for years to come.

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June 22, 2025
Titus de Bobula, Before and After Pittsburgh

Until recently, architectural historians knew nothing of the career of the eccentric architectural genius and would-be Nazi dictator Titus de Bobula before and after his time in Pittsburgh. It was known that he had claimed to have worked in Ohio, and it was known that he moved to New York, but what he did there was a mystery.

In the last few weeks, however, old Pa Pitt has been on the trail of de Bobula, and he has found a few more pieces of this ever-odder jigsaw puzzle.

First, there is the advertisement de Bobula ran in the American School Board Journal every month for several months running in 1902 and 1903, before he showed up in Pittsburgh. Here he claims to have a “main office” in Zanesville, with some form of practice in Marietta and Cambridge. Father Pitt suspects all three of these addresses might be bars where the landlord agreed to receive de Bobula’s mail. He was twenty-four years old at the time, and we have not been able to identify a single remaining building by him in Ohio yet; it is unlikely that he had three offices.

The drawing of a school in Byesville is the earliest known drawing attributable to de Bobula—the earliest known to Father Pitt, at any rate. It may never have been built. A school of similar age and almost exactly the same dimensions still stands in Byesville (you can see it on Google Street View), but it is not at all the same building.

The biggest surprise comes from after de Bobula moved from Pittsburgh to New York, and it was hiding in plain sight in a major magazine: a mansion overlooking the junction of the Harlem and Hudson Rivers in the Spuyten Duyvil section of the Bronx. Unfortunately the building no longer exists, as far as old Pa Pitt can tell, but that it was built is unquestionable. It was the subject of a prominent photo feature in the June 2, 1920, issue of the American Architect, where you can see the front, the back, some of the interior, and the floor plans. This view of the river front shows that here, at last, Titus de Bobula’s prodigious imagination had been allowed to run wild.

Not long after this house was built, de Bobula was in Hungary, loafing about on winnings from gambling in currency exchange and plotting to take over the government.

Father Pitt’s article on Titus de Bobula in the Pittsburgh Encyclopedia keeps expanding, and these are not the only surprises we have turned up. You can now read the complete text of de Bobula’s influential and insane talk on “American Style.” And if you are in the mood for more complete texts, we have also unearthed the complete text of de Bobula’s 1923 agreement with Adolf Hitler.

January 9, 2024
St. Peter & St. Paul Ukrainian Orthodox Church and Hall, Carnegie
Originally Ukrainian Greek Catholic, this church, built in 1906, was designed by Titus de Bobula with an extravagantly broad range of materials that no sane architect would attempt to harmonize. We are tempted to say it was fortunate that De Bobula was no sane architect; at any rate, he has pulled the rabbit out of his hat and made harmony out of dissonance.

De Bobula did not sign the cornerstone, as he did at the First Hungarian Reformed Church and St. John the Baptist, but the lettering is certainly in his style.

Next door to the church is a parochial hall. If we interpret our sources correctly, the architect was Harry H. Lefkowitz, and the building was put up in 1928 or shortly after.¹ It successfully matches the church by incorporating some of Titus de Bobula’s most distinctive quirks—the freakishly tall and narrow arches at the sides of the façade, the stonework at the top of the two-storey entrance arch, the horizontal scores in the brickwork around the entrance.

Father Pitt, who admits he does not speak Ukrainian, would translate “Ukrainska Parochiyalna Galya” as “Ukrainian Parochial Hall.”
1. “SS. Peter and Paul Church Takes Bids,” Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, May 27, 1928, p. 45. “The SS. Peter and Paul Greek Catholic Church is taking bids for a school and auditorium in James street, Carnegie. H. H. Lefkowitz is the architect.” “James Street” must be a mistake for “Jane Street,” the old name of Mansfield Boulevard, though there is a James Street a block away. The two names would be indistinguishable over the telephone. ↩︎
December 19, 2023
Art Nouveau Apartment Building in Allentown

You walk up Walter Street past the usual Hilltop cacophony of vernacular houses with aluminum and vinyl siding, and then suddenly you come upon this explosion of Art Nouveau. The building has lost its balconies (a long time ago, to judge by that tattered aluminum awning) and its cornice, but it retains its utter uniqueness, right down to the balcony doors to nowhere on the second and third floors, which appear to be original and designed specifically for this building rather than ordered from a catalogue.

This strange and wonderful little building is obviously the work of a strange and wonderful architect. But which one? It was built after 1903 but before 1910, and we are sorely tempted to attribute it to Titus de Bobula, whose entire Pittsburgh career blossomed and faded in that period. The treatment of the decorations strongly reminds old Pa Pitt of the Everett Apartments in Shadyside—in fact the decorations are so similar that Father Pitt is nearly convinced they have to be by the same architect. He is not the only one to notice the similarity. A city architecture inventory (PDF) also points it out: “Its similarity to another apartment building in the East End (at Ellsworth Avenue and Copeland Street in Shadyside) further sets the design of 404 Walter apart from the local vernacular found throughout the rest of Allentown.”

To see what both Father Pitt and the city’s architecture experts are talking about, consider these decorations:

Now compare this decoration from the Everett in Shadyside:

The similarity is certainly marked; many of the pieces are identical. Since the Everett is attributed to Titus de Bobula, we are justified in saying that he is a strong possibility for this one, too.

Another De Bobulesque feature is the lack of a main entrance: instead there is a small door off to one side that appears to lead into a stairwell. This is also the case with his Glen Tenement House in Hazelwood and with the Everett. The narrow verticals with asymmetrically staggered windows remind us of St. Michael’s School in Braddock, another De Bobula design (Father Pitt promises to make a pilgrimage to Braddock soon and come back with pictures).

Father Pitt will regard this as a De Bobula building until someone proves otherwise. But he would be delighted to have someone prove otherwise, because then he would be introduced to another eccentric but talented architect.

September 27, 2023
Glen Tenement House by Titus de Bobula, Hazelwood

This tenement house in Hazelwood was built in 1903, making it one of Titus de Bobula’s early commissions in Pittsburgh. It is very conventional for De Bobula, but it represented him in a Pittsburgh Press roundup of local architects in 1905 (“Able Architects the Authors of City’s Architectural Beauty,” April 29, 1905), where this picture was published (we regret that we have not been able to find a better copy than this ugly microfilm scan):

From what we can see in the indistinct old photograph, the building has not changed much at all, though Gertrude Street in front of it has been regraded.

The Gertrude Street face. It is likely that many of the first residents were Hungarian millworkers: that is a bit of De Bobula’s First Hungarian Reformed Church peeking out from behind the building.

Entrance on the south end of the building. The entrances originally had some sort of triangular pediment or small projecting roof; the Press photo is too indistinct to make out any details, but we can see the shadow of a triangle over the entrances at both ends.

The Elizabeth Street end of the building.

September 24, 2023
Concrete Rowhouses by Titus de Bobula, Greenfield

These tiny houses on Frank Street have a historic importance far out of proportion to their cost and size. First of all, they are among the relatively few remaining works of the eccentric architectural genius and flimflam artist Titus de Bobula, the man who would have been Fascist dictator of Hungary if he had had better luck. Second, they are built of reinforced concrete, some of the very first American houses so built. Titus de Bobula was the apostle of concrete in his brief architectural career, and his influence would be hard to overestimate.

The houses have had their separate adventures since they were built, including some artificial siding. This one has had windows and front door replaced, but at least it shows the simple outlines of the design, including the bay window in front.

The house on the end may be the best preserved of the row.

Many sources say that twenty of these houses were built. Six remain, and old Pa Pitt believes there were never more than nine. The architect claimed to have built more, but we cannot rely on anything Titus de Bobula says about his work, because he was prone to exaggeration and outright fabrication.

The houses were an investment by multimillionaire newspaper magnate Eugene O’Neill, owner of the Dispatch and no relation to the playwright of the same name. He owned the land on Frank Street and along Greenfield Avenue to either side. Some architectural historians say that De Bobula rowhouses went up on Greenfield Avenue, but that is contradicted by old maps and today’s evidence.

These rowhouses on Greenfield Avenue, on the land once owned by Eugene O’Neill, were built at about the same time as the De Bobula houses, but these are standard brick. Old maps do show three more concrete houses on Lilac Street, perpendicular to the row on Frank Street, but those were replaced after the Second World War by two larger and more expensive houses:

These two houses stand where a row of three concrete houses, probably by De Bobula, stood in the first half of the twentieth century.

For more on Titus de Bobula and his very surprising career, you can see the article on Titus de Bobula in Father Pitt’s Pittsburgh Encyclopedia.

September 22, 2023
First Hungarian Reformed Church, Hazelwood

And then there’s Titus de Bobula.

There are few real outliers among the architects who worked in Pittsburgh before the First World War; we had brilliant architects, but we can sort most of them into groups by the styles they worked in. Titus de Bobula’s work, however, is unique here. He brought us a breath of Budapest Art Nouveau, and for a few years he was the favorite architect for East European churches of all sorts.

And then he was gone—back to Hungary, where his regular job seems to have been trying and failing to overthrow the government. Later he ended up back in the United States, but he never again had a great architectural career. Perhaps that was because he worked with Nikola Tesla, designing the structural parts of Tesla’s never-built (and possibly delusional) superweapons. It might have been a good job at the time, but no permanent structures ever came of it.

So we should try as hard as we can to preserve what remains of de Bobula’s work. Fortunately this church, built in 1903, still belongs to its original congregation and is still active.

The shape of the building is similar to the shape of your average Pittsburgh Gothic church, but the details are straight from fin-de-siècle Budapest—right down to Titus de Bobula’s trademark Art Nouveau lettering in the inscriptions.

The wildly irregular stonework around the uniquely shaped windows may remind you a bit of Gaudi.

“Welcome” in stained glass over the main entrance.

Titus de Bobula made a habit of signing his buildings. The rail of a later wheelchair ramp obstructs part of this inscription (the contractor was Bodine and Co.), but we can see enough to appreciate the Art Nouveau lettering.

June 14, 2022
Art Nouveau Apartment Building in Shadyside

This would be a fairly ordinary building, in what we might perhaps call Renaissance style, except for its curious Art Nouveau ornamentation.

Addendum: According to a city architectural survey, this building, the Everett Apartments, was a work of the extraordinary Hungarian Art Nouveau architect Titus de Bobula.

October 15, 2021