A three-alarm fire destroyed a former Ebenezer Baptist Church in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District early Tuesday morning.
Firefighters first responded to the blaze before 3 a.m. at 85 Miller St. at the corner of Colwell Street, according to Pittsburgh public safety spokesman Chris Togneri.
No injuries were reported.
The fire quickly went to three alarms. Pittsburgh Deputy Chief Michael Mullen told Post-Gazette news partner KDKA-TV that the roof of the church sanctuary eventually collapsed, allowing firefighters better access to fight the blaze, “which actually was a good thing.”
Firefighters were able to bring it under control by 4 a.m., although crews remained on the scene to continue pumping water “into the bell tower and other areas,” Mr. Togneri said.
The cause of the fire is under investigation.
The church, which was the original Ebenezer Baptist Church, had been empty for a number of years. It hadn’t been used as a church since the congregation moved a few blocks away to Wylie Avenue, its current location, around a century ago.
Into the 1930s, newspapers referred to the structure as Liberty Hall and announced meetings there of the local branch of an organization led by black nationalist Marcus Garvey.
By 1955, a company called M. Mallinger’s owned the whole building and used it for bottle-washing, manufacturing and storage.
The building has been empty since the early 2000s.
The city owns the property, which it bought for the Urban Redevelopment Authority on behalf of a local developer in 2012. Tim McNulty, spokesman for Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, said that remediation and demolition turned out to be far more costly than the URA could afford.
“These kinds of former industrial properties are hard to address,” he said in 2016, when the Post-Gazette chronicled the histories of empty churches. “There are a lot of unfunded preservation efforts out there.”
First Published: April 24, 2018, 10:25 a.m.