Smithmeyer & Pelz designed Andrew Carnegie’s first library donation—though, as the people of Braddock are proud to point out, it was the second Carnegie Library to open, since the smaller Braddock library took less time to build. The same architects had designed the Library of Congress, which turned into a quagmire from which they had a hard time extricating their careers intact. (The library part was a piece of cake; it was the Congress part that was impossible to manage.) Unlike the classical Washington library, though, this one was done in a Romanesque style, which architects seem to have instinctively hit on as more suitable for muscular industrial Pittsburgh.
After the library was damaged by a lightning strike, the Carnegie Library moved out and built a smaller branch library northward on Federal Street. This building now is the Museum Lab of the Children’s Museum.
St. Joseph the Worker is an eight-church Catholic parish in the near eastern suburbs. Seven of those churches are scheduled to close this month. A Wikimedia Commons user got in touch with Father Pitt and asked if he could document some of those churches before they close, and it seemed nothing less than a duty to respond.
We begin with the exterior of the church that, of the seven, Father Pitt would most like to see preserved: St. Anselm in Swissvale. We have pictures of the interior as well.
Albert F. Link was the architect of this magnificent Romanesque church, which opened in 1925. It shows Link’s usual adroit combination of historically informed detail with modern Art Nouveau veering toward Art Deco feeling.
David J. Vater designed this distinctive Gothic building, built in 2007 from modern materials in a style we might call “postmodern Gothic.” It’s the home of the National Institute for Newman Studies, one of those fascinating cultural treasures few Pittsburghers even know about. The Institute is devoted to the study of the works and teachings of John Henry Newman (1801–1890), an English convert to Roman Catholicism who rose to become a cardinal in the Catholic Church. In 2019, Newman was canonized as a Catholic saint, and just three months ago (on November 1, 2025) he was declared a Doctor of the Church, one of only 38 people so far whose teachings are regarded as so extraordinarily important that they merit that title.
The arms of Cardinal Newman, with his motto: Cor ad cor loquitur—“Heart speaks to heart.”
Casimir Pellegrini Associates were the architects of this church, whose cornerstone was laid in 1963. It was a Franciscan parish until just a few years ago. Unlike some other abandoned Catholic churches, this one has a happy ending: it was bought by the thriving Lebanese Maronite Catholic congregation of Our Lady of Victory, which began in Brookline (or arguably earlier in the Lower Hill) and spent years banished to the wilds of Scott Township. In honor of Pittsburgh’s best Lebanese festival, which begins today and lasts all weekend, here are quite a few pictures of St. Pamphilus/Our Lady of Victory, which old Pa Pitt has done his best to make look like period-appropriate Kennedy-era Kodachrome slides.
The Our Lady of Victory congregation has graciously allowed St. Pamphilus to stay in his home on the front wall of the church, where he distributes bread to begging hands.
Father Pitt will admit that he does not find the nave the most attractive of all our church buildings. It is dignified and spacious, and that is enough. But the tower, a mailbox on stilts, captures his imagination, and he would hate to see anything happen to it.
The church was dedicated to St. Pamphilus, but it is St. Francis who greets you at the door with his usual motto “Pax et bonum.”
This shrine to Our Lady of Victory is now in its third location.
Father Pitt makes it a practice to try to record all the names on a war memorial, because sometimes things happen to inscriptions. If you enlarge this picture, every name should be clearly legible.
A plaque remembers Msgr. Elias P. Basil, the founding pastor of Our Lady of Victory parish. He had been pastor of St. Anne’s, the Maronite church in the Lower Hill. The story is that he promised St. Mary that, if all his parishioners came home safe from the Second World War, he would build a church in her honor. They did, and he did.
St. Anne Church was on Fulton, later Fullerton, Street, one of the Lower Hill streets that no longer exist because they were urban-renewaled to death. This cornerstone was preserved from the demolished church.
Walking down Perrysville Avenue one day not long ago, Father Pitt spotted a distinctive outline through the branches. It was the tower of a Second Empire mansion.
Old Pa Pitt was very excited. Here was a Second Empire mansion he had not known about before. That was very interesting. He started investigating, and found that the discovery was actually much more interesting than that.
Historians of Perry Hilltop are earnestly invited to help us out with the history of this house, which has caught old Pa Pitt’s imagination. The house is in deplorable shape—especially the side you can see through the overgrown shrubbery from Perrysville Avenue, where billows of garbage seem to be spilling out of the building.
But what is fascinating is that, where old Pa Pitt expected a Second Empire mansion, he found something much older. The shallow pitch of the roof and the broad expanse of flat white board underneath the roofline say “Greek Revival” in a loud voice.
This appears to be the side of the house, although Father Pitt has reason for believing that it was originally the front. The large modern Perrysville Plaza apartment building is next to it, but walking around to the back of that building reveals the front of the house—with its distinctive Second Empire tower.
The tower is pure Second Empire, but the roof still says Greek Revival. The house must have been Second Empired, probably in the 1880s. The attic windows in the gable ends were added then: they match the ones in the tower.
The Second Empire remodeling was not the last big change. You may have noticed that there is something a little off about the brick walls. This appears to have been a frame house originally. Old plat maps show it as a frame house through 1910; later maps show it as brick. A brick veneer must have been added at some time around the First World War. The new brick walls swallowed all the window frames and other trim that would have given us more clues about the original date.
There was a house here belonging to the “Boyle Heirs” in 1872, the earliest plat map we have found. An 1882 map shows a carriage drive leading to the plank road that became Perrysville Avenue, with a circle at the end of the house near the road—bolstering old Pa Pitt’s guess that the end was originally the front.
There are few Second Empire mansions remaining in Pittsburgh, and even fewer Greek Revival ones. This house ought to be preserved, but it probably will not be. The neighborhood is neglected enough that it has not even been condemned yet, which means that it will continue to decay until either it becomes an intolerable nuisance or the land becomes valuable enough to build something else on. Father Pitt will label it Critically Endangered.
All we can do, therefore, is document that it exists, and Father Pitt has done the best he can do without trespassing.
The slopes of Knoxville, an independent borough until it was taken into Pittsburgh in 1927. Below, two very different towers: the tower of St. Canice on the left and the U. S. Steel Tower on the right.
