Father Pitt

Tag: Urban Renewal

  • Church of the Epiphany, Lower Hill

    West front of Epiphany Church

    Edward Stotz was the architect of the building for Epiphany Church, with considerable interior work done by John T. Comès. It was built in 1903 to replace the old St. Paul’s Cathedral downtown as the downtown parish church after Henry Frick made the Catholic Diocese an offer it couldn’t refuse, and Epiphany served as the temporary cathedral for three years while the new St. Paul’s was going up in Oakland.

    Epiphany Church

    When the Lower Hill was demolished for “slum clearance,” Epiphany and its school were the only buildings allowed to survive. Thus Pittsburgh accomplished, here and at Allegheny Center, what Le Corbusier had failed to do in Paris: we created a sterile modern wasteland punctuated by a few ancient landmarks pickled in brine.

    Detail of the West Front

    These Romanesque columns and arches strongly remind old Pa Pitt of organ pipes.

    Rose Window
    West Front
    Statue of Christ

    Christ stands at the peak of the west front.

    Statue of St. Peter

    On Christ’s right hand, St. Peter with his key.

    Statue of St. Paul

    On Christ’s left hand, St. Paul with his book.

    Angel

    An angel with plenty of anti-pigeon armor prays for worshipers as they enter.

    Epiphany Church
    Epiphany School

    The school is built in a simpler Romanesque style that links and subordinates it to the church.

    “Epiphany” inscribed on the school
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    Officially the Lower Hill has ceased to exist. It is counted as part of downtown in the city’s administrative scheme. But it has never been integrated into downtown, and indeed was forcibly cut off from downtown by the Crosstown Boulevard—a bad mistake recently ameliorated somewhat by building a park on top of the boulevard. With the new FNB Financial Center and other developments, there is some hope that this neglected wasteland may become city again. Meanwhile, Epiphany, now part of Divine Mercy Parish, still serves downtown worshipers, and perhaps will be there for new residents as the neighborhood grows and changes.

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  • A Stubborn Survivor from the Lower Hill

    Beth Hamedrash Hagadol–Beth Jacob Congregation
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    The destruction of the Lower Hill and the destruction of central Allegheny were the two great urban-renewal catastrophes in Pittsburgh’s history. A century ago, the Lower Hill was the classic American melting pot, where black and white, Christian and Jewish, and every other kind of people all lived together in a crowded but lively neighborhood. That made it a slum, according to middle-twentieth-century definitions. When “slum clearance” became an urban-planning buzzword, the Lower Hill was the prime target.

    Many of the synagogues had moved to Squirrel Hill and other neighborhoods in the East End by that time. The Beth Hamedrash Hagodol congregation had not. It had stayed in its 1892 building right next to Epiphany School, where downtown workers could easily walk to prayers.

    From a Hopkins plat map at Pittsburgh Historic Maps. At this time the congregation was known as B’nai Israel.

    When the Lower Hill was demolished (except for Epiphany Church and School, which we’ll be seeing shortly), the old synagogue was one of the buildings in the way. But the congregation didn’t give up. It built a new synagogue just around the corner on Colwell Street, taking the elaborate Torah ark from the old building.

    The new synagogue lasted for about forty years, but then it, too, found itself in the way. It was torn down when the new arena was built.

    Still the congregation didn’t give up. Architect Harry Levine remodeled an abandoned building into a new synagogue, and in 2010 the congregation, after meeting in borrowed space at Duquesne University for a couple of years, moved into its current home on Fifth Avenue at Diamond Street. Here it is still convenient for downtown worshipers, and here it stands, a block away from its Lower Hill location, an indomitable survivor.

    Father Pitt’s information in this article comes from the article on Beth Hamedrash Hagodol Congregation at the Jewish Encyclopedia of Western Pennsylvania, along with the story “ ‘A Hidden Gem’: The history of Beth Hamedrash Hagodol-Beth Jacob Congregation” at the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle.

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  • City View Apartments, Lower Hill

    A fairly early work of I. M. Pei (built in 1964), this was part of the massive redevelopment of the Lower Hill that cleared out all the poor people and replaced their houses, stores, clubs, bars, synagogues, churches, and schools with a modernist wasteland. It was originally called Washington Plaza, and it was meant to be an International Style city-in-a-tower, with everything you would need on the premises and no reason ever to go out into the grubby outdoors. For most of its life, it was gleaming white; the muddy brown came in with the new name.

    Correction: Father Pitt had originally mistyped the date as “1864,” which in geological time is not much of a difference, but in stylistic time is almost enough for the universe to have been destroyed and created again. Much gratitude to “sandisk” for the correction (see the comment below).

  • Allegheny Center

    Urban renewal hit Pittsburgh hardest in three places: the Lower Hill, East Liberty, and central Allegheny. Of the three, the Lower Hill was definitely the worst hit, with an A-bomb’s worth of destruction leaving a scoured and sterile landscape that is only now recovering. Second-worst was probably Allegheny Center.

    Both here and in East Liberty, the visionaries imagined an urban paradise freed from automobiles. The central business district would be pedestrianized, and vehicles would be diverted to a broad loop around the edge. Anthony Paletta came up with a useful term for this design, which was repeated wherever the urban-renewal movement really got going: “strangulation by ring road.” The center ends up isolated from residential neighborhoods around it by a broad boulevard that is forbidding for pedestrians to cross, so they don’t cross it.

    On the North Side, almost the entire business district of old Allegheny was destroyed. A few landmarks were left—more than in the Lower Hill—but the streets full of shops were flattened and the very streets themselves eliminated. More than 500 buildings were obliterated. In their place was a modernist paradise of office blocks and a shopping mall (marked by those half-moon arches in the picture) called Allegheny Center. In the picture above, the only visible landmark from the old center of Allegheny is the tower of the Carnegie Library poking up just behind the building that is now called “NOVA Place.”

    In hindsight it seems obvious that it was a bad idea, but we should give the planners their due. The new urban paradise seemed like a hit for a while. The shopping mall at Allegheny Center was lively and successful for twenty years after it opened in 1965. It did not really start collapsing until about 1990. Twenty years is not a long time in the history of Pittsburgh and Allegheny, but it was something.