After a brief Hollywood role in 1998, when it was a location in the fantasy faith farce “Dogma,” a former Catholic church on Larimer Avenue in East Liberty has been spooky in its silence.
Light illuminates the saints in the stained-glass windows that remain, the walls are covered in graffiti, and dust floats in shafts of light coming through gaps in boarded-up windows and doors.
The former SS. Peter and Paul church was last used for regular Catholic worship in 1992 and seemed doomed to eternal vacancy or demolition until East Liberty Development Inc. was granted conservatorship last year. This year, it initiated public brainstorming for a feasible reuse with a series of tours and meetings.
Kendall Pelling, ELDI’s director of land recycling, said interest from residents, artists and architects has generated “a hopeful process for an overwhelming project. We have to make this a collective reuse, make it work economically and meet community goals.”
ELDI will hold a public event Aug. 2 to report the findings and talk about next steps in the process. A time and place have yet to be announced. (For those details closer to the event, call ELDI at 412-361-8061 x18.)
ELDI, a nonprofit community development organization, has an obligation to make something work, Mr. Pelling said.
A remedy for the eyesore was implicit in the $30 million grant Pittsburgh won from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2014 for a 350-unit, mixed-income housing development in Larimer and East Liberty, which surrounds the church property.
“When HUD came out for the site visit, they said, ‘You have to deal with that,’” Mr. Pelling said.
The new Liberty Green Park is expected to be built directly across the street from the church as part of the Choice Neighborhoods development.
With help from the URA, ELDI has put $400,000 into the church, including $30,000 to become the conservator. The city demolished the rectory in 2017 after it had begun to collapse.
A 2013 survey by Conway Engineering found the church and school structurally sound.
About 200 people took part in tours and talks this year, mostly area residents and people who had family ties to the church. Their suggestions for reuse include a community gathering and arts space, a workforce training center, a brewery, a restaurant, a day care center and a house of worship. People suggested programming including lectures, yoga classes, after-school activities, a climbing wall, festivals and concerts.
The church building has a footprint of 10,405 square feet. The three-story school behind it has 6,170 square feet per floor.
Six designers and architects toured the church during a weekend charrette in mid-June. They concluded that the church itself could have multiple uses.
Ernest Bellamy, an urban designer for AE7, said the group agreed that whatever reuse is chosen for the church and school, the site must be accessible physically and through programming options to the entire community.
“A lot of people feel isolated from how East Liberty was redeveloped,” he said. “This has been a beautiful process — engaging the residents and taking their narrative to the next level. I want to make sure that whatever we do is collaborative.”
Joshua Castano, director of community engagement with Partners for Sacred Places, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit, told the architects at their charrette that the public attitude was to keep at least a portion of the graffiti.
“A lot of the stuff on its own merit is really interesting,” Mr. Castano said.
Partners for Sacred Places normally helps existing congregations use their church buildings more efficiently and more economically, he said, but it has helped a number of organizations on reuse plans as well.
Matt Conti, an architect with GBBN Architects in Garfield, said the design group agreed that it does not want the church to be chopped up.
“We like the way it appears today,” he said. “There are countless examples of churches turned into housing, offices, shopping centers, and there are ways to do those things well, but we felt the statement we wanted to make to start with is to intervene minimally.”
The church was built in 1891 by a German Catholic congregation, with stained-glass windows imported from Munich.
The congregation had the bricks covered in concrete in the 1920s. When ELDI procured the property, it invested in a new lower roof, repaired the historic slate and flashing, and knocked off loose concrete to reveal the original brick.
Before selling the church to the Everlasting Covenant Church of Beacon, N.Y., in 1997, the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh removed side altars, devotional sculptures and the altar stone but left the stained-glass windows. Many have been broken since.
“If we repaired windows and added new windows that are representative of our community’s history and diversity, that could be really exciting,” Mr. Pelling said.
The biggest challenge, after finding funding and willing developers, is to make sure the uses on the site are sustainable.
“The building has to earn a living,” said Matthew Craig, president of the Young Preservationists Association of Pittsburgh.
YPA listed the church on its 2011 top 10 preservation opportunities.
The church is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Even in the relative dusty darkness of the interior, the building’s old-world grandeur is apparent.
“Its height to width is pretty remarkable,” Mr. Castano said during a tour of the building. “It is an artifact of East Liberty’s early wealth and it survived urban renewal.
“It’s a unique landmark that lends much character to the neighborhood. The drama of its architectural character is inspiring to everyone who walks through the doors. It is poised for a new chapter.”
Diana Nelson Jones: djones@post-gazette.com or412-263-1626. Twitter@dnelsonjones
First Published: July 10, 2019, 11:00 a.m.
