Tag Archives: Pittsburgh

Then & Now 1926-2026: Pittsburgh’s Religious Buildings

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View of Pittsburgh from West End Overlook

Why Religious Buildings?

In 2010, as I travelled around different neighborhoods in Pittsburgh for work, school, and play, I began to notice a number of former religious buildings that were being used for secular purposes from child care to community centers to homes. Yet, I only heard people talk about one or two that made the news for the controversial way in which they were now used, particularly the brewpub that brewed in the former altar space. This inspired me to try to identify how many former religious buildings in Pittsburgh were being used for secular purposes and what those new uses were. While I have since learned that this is a moving target, I have become more and more fascinated about what these buildings tell us about the history of the city and the people who’ve lived here.

Eventually, I will write a book about Pittsburgh and its communities featuring Pittsburgh’s former religious buildings. In the meantime, I’m broadening the parameters of my research to gather information about former religious buildings that have been demolished or that sit vacant.

Why 1926?

The more I learn about 1926, the more it seems a significant moment in Pittsburgh’s history. It sits in the middle of the city’s final decade of significant population growth, which gets a boost from the numerous boroughs annexed that decade. The city’s boundary in 1926 only encompasses 85% of what will become the city’s full extent after the last annexation in 1955. While the City adopted zoning in 1923 with two types of residential districts (one for single-unit and two-unit dwellings and one for any number of units), in 1926, it added a third type of residential district for only single-unit dwellings.

Granted, given my day job, this last fact may be the reason I’ve become so focused on the year 1926. However, since we are now exactly 100 years later, it seems worth elevating 1926 and 2026 to another “Then & Now” series.

Scope of the Series

Polk’s Pittsburgh City Directory of 1926 identifies over 500 listings under the category “Churches.” Over the next couple of years, this Then & Now series will visit these sites by neighborhood to identify what they look like in 2026. I expect there will be 71 posts in this series occasionally interrupted by other posts, including the monthly public art posts and annual Bridge Madness series.

In 2026, there are 90 neighborhoods officially recognized by Pittsburgh’s Department of City Planning. Only 70 of these will be featured in this series. The others do not have religious sites that are listed in the 1926 city directory. This is because they were were largely undeveloped at that time, not yet annexed to the city, or both (parts of the neighborhood undeveloped and other parts not annexed).

  • Neighborhoods Featured in the Series
    • Allegheny Center
    • Allegheny West
    • Allentown
    • Arlington
    • Bedford Dwellings
    • Beechview
    • Beltzhoover
    • Bloomfield
    • Bluff
    • Brighton Heights
    • Brookline
    • California-Kirkbride
    • Central Business District
    • Central Lawrenceville
    • Central Northside
    • Central Oakland
    • Chateau
    • Crafton Heights
    • Crawford-Roberts
    • Duquesne Heights
    • East Allegheny
    • East Carnegie
    • East Hills
    • East Liberty
    • Elliott
    • Esplen
    • Fineview
    • Friendship
    • Garfield
    • Greenfield
    • Hazelwood
    • Highland Park
    • Homewood North
    • Homewood South
    • Homewood West
    • Larimer
    • Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar
    • Lower Lawrenceville
    • Manchester
    • Marshall-Shadeland
    • Middle Hill
    • Morningside
    • Mt. Oliver
    • Mt. Washington
    • North Oakland
    • North Shore
    • Perry North
    • Perry South
    • Point Breeze
    • Point Breeze North
    • Polish Hill
    • Shadyside
    • Sheraden
    • South Oakland
    • South Shore
    • South Side Flats
    • South Side Slopes
    • Spring Garden
    • Spring Hill-City View
    • Squirrel Hill North
    • Squirrel Hill South
    • Stanton Heights
    • Strip District
    • Swisshelm Park
    • Terrace Village
    • Troy Hill
    • Upper Hill
    • Upper Lawrenceville
    • West End
    • West Oakland
  • Neighborhoods Annexed after 1926
    • Carrick (1927)
    • Hays (1929 & 1951)
    • Knoxville (1927)
    • Lincoln Place (1929)
    • New Homestead (1931)
    • Northview Heights (1931)
    • Overbrook (1927)
  • Neighborhoods Largely Undeveloped in 1926
    • Arlington Heights
    • Bon Air
    • Chartiers City
    • Fairywood
    • Glen Hazel
    • Oakwood
    • Regent Square
    • Saint Clair
    • Windgap
  • Neighborhoods w/Portions Undeveloped in 1926 and Portions Annexed after 1926
    • Ridgemont (a portion annexed 1928)
    • Summer Hill (a portion annexed 1929)
    • Westwood (a portion annexed 1927)

Sources:

Polk’s Pittsburgh City Directory, 1926. Pittsburgh: R. L. Polk & Co. https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735056286846/viewer#page/4/mode/1up

Pedestrian Bridges: Oakland

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The Oakland neighborhoods in Pittsburgh’s East End are the home to a number of institutions. Among them are Carlow College, the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), multiple UPMC hospitals, the Phipps Conservatory (Phipps), the Western Pennsylvania School for Blind Children, and the Carnegie Institute complex (housing the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History, the main Carnegie Library, and the Carnegie Music Hall). Institutions seem to have a predilection for pedestrian bridges and the ones in Oakland are no exception.

My first encounter with an elevated, enclosed pedestrian bridge was one of the ones in the UPMC hospital complex. The summer I turned six, my grandfather was admitted to the hospital and our trip to Pittsburgh to visit him included many impressionable firsts for me:

  • First time in a hospital
  • First time to walk across an enclosed, elevated pedestrian bridge
  • First time to encounter trick candles on a birthday cake

While I can now appreciate the importance of an enclosed pedestrian bridge to transport patients between facilities in a hospital without having to expose them to the unregulated outside air, I found it an odd and foreign structure when I was six. Decades later, outside of the use for hospital patients, I still find enclosed pedestrian bridges to be odd and foreign. I much prefer getting a breath of fresh air (even if it’s below freezing) to the often stale, manufactured air of these bridges.

Pittsburgh’s Underpass Mural

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Pittsburgh has been redding up for the NFL Draft with increasing fervor over the last several weeks. Among the actions taken was painting a series of railroad trestles that pass over a number of streets downtown. I was prepared to say, “how cool, but why couldn’t we spruce up the pedestrian experience with these trestles while we’re at it?”

However, gearing up to make that compliant, I finally noticed that two of them already have murals, despite my rant a few months ago about the lack of murals to spruce up the pedestrian experience when passing underneath railroad bridges in Pittsburgh compared to other cities. One takes it a step further and also has a series of lights strung over the sidewalk. I don’t know how long the mural or the lights have been in place, but my reaction to the mural this week was “oh yeah, I forgot this was there.”

In my defense, the third of the newly painted trestles I explored this week is the longest and darkest of these three, and the one I’ve walked under the most. It is also one of the top three I pictured when making my compliant in February. The other two being the one where this same railroad crosses over Merchant Street on the North Side and the one carrying the T tracks over First Avenue on the opposite side of downtown. I still maintain that these would benefit from the addition of a mural or other intervention.

In the meantime, I will enjoy the approach to our new black & gold trestles.

Washington, DC, Mural

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On Day 2 of my April 2025 Washington, DC, trip, I needed to take it easy. However, I couldn’t sit inside all day. On a short excursion near Union Station, I got uncomfortable as I approached the underbelly of the railroad bridge over K Street. My experience of similar structures in Pittsburgh is that they are dark, dirty, untended, and creepy. Bird droppings or bridge droppings are likely to land on you at any point.

The underbelly of this bridge over K Street defied my expectations. A light mural created a welcoming and engaging experience that felt more like Buffalo’s Seneca One murals than the underbelly of Pittsburgh’s railroad bridges. Because light was used instead of paint, it lit up a dark place and incorporated engaging animation:

Gateway Park, Arlington

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While walking from the Rosslyn Metro Station to the Francis Scott Key Memorial Bridge over the Potomac, we walked over a surprise bridge. If we had chosen to walk over on the upriver side of the Francis Scott Key Memorial Bridge, I may have completely missed that we walked a bridge over I-66.

Gateway Park is a “cap” over the freeway and is both a park and a bridge. Unlike Pittsburgh’s CAP or Frankie Pace Park, Gateway Park was built in the 1980s at the same time as the freeway it covers. It also distinguishes itself from Pittsburgh’s park/bridge by appearing to be fully integrated with the surrounding city and having well-utilized programming.

Murray Avenue Bridge 2012-2025

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Ironically, a few days after my catch-up post about the Murray Avenue Bridge in Squirrel Hill went live, I unexpectedly found myself walking that bridge for the first time since 2012. The bridge looks mostly the same, slightly rusted but presumable functional as it hasn’t collapsed or been closed following a regular inspection. The stairs have been replaced though. I didn’t have a reason to go down them in 2012 and didn’t feel comfortable testing them out for the heck of it then. In 2025, the Urban Hike walk I was on came at the bridge from the street below and we climbed up the newish, solid-looking steps; a few of us (me included) pausing “for the view” on our way up.

The before and after photo pairs below don’t exactly line up, given the different angles and orientations of the photos, but it seemed a good opportunity to try out the image compare option. Before: August 2012, After: August 2025.

Duck Hollow Bridges

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Duck Hollow is a mini neighborhood where Frick Park’s Nine Mile Run meets the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh. A handful of houses sit in the Hollow accessible only by an old one-lane bridge on a small spur of Second Avenue or the new bridge on McFarren Street that opened in 2020 (though it was only 2 years old at the time of the Bridge Report and presumably doesn’t see much traffic, it only received an overall grade of “good”). The houses of Duck Hollow are separated from the river by the railroad that crosses Nine Mile Run on the bridge above Second Avenue. These photos are from a walk my COVID-pod and I took of Frick Park in Fall 2020.

What is a Bridge? Chambersburg Edition II

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As I continue to explore the question “What is a Bridge?” I find that there is a structural, or form, perspective and a more philosophical, or function, perspective. In asking if the building in Chambersburg pictured above is a bridge, I earlier came to the conclusion that it is. That answer required searching beyond two standard dictionary definitions both of which required that the structure carry a path or roadway to qualify as a bridge. The Encyclopedia Britannica did not have that qualification and so I embraced their definition as I felt that this Chambersburg building and the backyards and buildings I discuss in Millvale should be called bridges. Structurally, these may be bridges, but philosophically are they bridges? Does a bridge need to allow movement across it to fulfill the purpose of a bridge?

Up to this point, I’ve been primarily focused on Merriam-Webster’s definition of bridge as a structure found in the built environment. There are many other definitions and types of bridges under their entry for “bridge,” starting with a time, place, or means of connection or transition. Other examples of “bridges” include the bridge of a nose, the bridge of a violin and other string instruments, the passage of music called a bridge that links two sections of the piece, a dental bridge, and a ship’s bridge. For each of these examples, the function of connection or transition seems to be the crucial part that makes them bridges.

In Buffalo, I also questioned the different between a structural bridge and a philosophical bridge. I proposed then that an overpass may be structurally a bridge, but philosophically if the primary purpose of the structure is to pass over instead of to connect then it is not a bridge.

Putting these ideas together, there is a difference between a structural bridge and the concept of a bridge. The Chambersburg and Millvale examples are structurally bridges, I believe, but their main purpose is to expand the buildable area. They are not intended to create connection and therefore they are not bridges.

Additional Posts in the Series:

What is a Bridge? Chambersburg Edition I

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In Chambersburg, PA, a historic town along the Lincoln Highway, the question of what is a bridge comes up again. This time, the specific iteration is: “Is a building a bridge?”

This question is a continuation of the one inspired by Millvale. When I shared my thoughts on the building/bridge and backyard/bridge in that town, I focused on the fact that those bridges were hidden from sight and are likely an important factor contributing to the town’s flooding issues.

The structure in Chambersburg, on the other hand, sits in plain view. To tackle this question, I think it is time to return to the formal definition of a bridge. I looked up a definition of a bridge for the first Pittsburgh edition of this series and seemed to accept that definition at face value. I returned to a definition of a bridge in the second Chicago definition to help define what a viaduct is. I again did not question the definition of bridge. Perhaps it is time to change that?

Merriam-Webster defines bridge as a structure carrying a pathway or roadway over a depression or obstacle.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines bridge as a structure forming or carrying a road, path, or (in later use) a railroad, etc., which spans a body of water, a roadway, a valley, or some other obstacle or gap, and allows a person or vehicle to pass unimpeded over or across it.

Both of these definitions avoid the interaction of buildings and bridges.

My first encounter with buildings on bridges was Pulteney Bridge in Bath, UK (photo of photo below). I was 13. It would be over a decade before I would start intentionally walking bridges. At that time, I declared, “That is one of the coolest bridges I’ve ever been on. There are shops on both sides of the road. You can’t tell you’re on a bridge.” (Notice the echoes of my later musings on the “bridges” of Chicago.)

The next most memorable building/bridge encounter was in Istanbul. The Galata Bridge is a 2-decker bridge with the lower deck full of restaurants with open seating facing the Bosphorus.

While both of these bridges also carry multi-modal roadways and therefore meet the two dictionary definitions of a bridge, they suggest the possibility of a broader definition of bridge.

As I did with viaducts, I next turned to “How to Read Bridges” by Edward Denison and Ian Stewart. Interestingly, they do not provide a definition for a bridge. They discuss bridge types – if the Chambersburg building is a bridge, it would be a beam bridge. They also discuss bridge uses. “Bridges are designed to satisfy a wide range of different uses from the obvious, such as vehicle, railroad, cycles, and pedestrian traffic, to the more obscure, such as carrying water. Many are even designed to cater to multiple uses.” (68) While they hint at “more obscure” uses, their chapter on uses goes on to talk specifically about pedestrian, water, vehicular, rail, and military uses. Buildings are missing from that list. However, their case studies do include Bath’s Pulteney Bridge and Florence’s Ponte Vecchio, which also includes buildings featuring shops and apartments on the bridge.

The Encyclopedia Britannica (Britannica.com) has the broadest definition of a bridge that I’ve encountered so far: Bridge, structure that spans horizontally between supports, whose function is to carry vertical loads. The prototypical bridge is quite simple – two supports holding up a beam – yet the engineering problems that must be overcome even in this simple form are inherent in every bridge: the supports must be strong enough to hold the structure up, and the span between supports must be strong enough to carry the loads.

By that criteria, the building/bridge in Chambersburg meets the definition of a bridge as it is a horizontal structure “whose function is to carry vertical loads.”

Moreover, this criteria suggests a broader interpretation of my framing question than I intended. “Is a building a bridge?” was intended to ask if a building built over a stream is considered a bridge. However, I wasn’t that specific in my wording and reading Britannica’s description of a bridge, it sounds like any building floor that is not the equivalent of concrete poured on the ground would count as a bridge. . . .Supports, beams, arches, piers, and cantilevers are all elements used in both bridges and buildings. . . .And so, the answer to the unintended broader question of “is a building a bridge?” may in fact be “yes.”

While there absolutely are structural similarities between buildings and bridges, I am not comfortable with a definition of bridge so broad that it includes all multi-story buildings and perhaps even some single-story ones. Perhaps a common distinguishing element between a building and a bridge is that bridges are designed to allow the free passage of air underneath the horizontal structure. That would make my working definition of a bridge: a structure that spans horizontally between supports, whose function is to carry vertical loads and that allows unobstructed passage of elements, objects, or animals, etc., underneath.

By this version of a definition of bridge, the building in Chambersburg is a bridge, the backyards and buildings in Millvale are likely bridges (assuming the stream has unobstructed passage below them all), but Heth’s Run Bridge while it was buried was not a bridge.