The East Liberty Presbyterian Church is impossible to miss. The current structure, completed in 1935, is a soaring Gothic masterpiece that occupies an entire city block at the intersection of Penn Avenue and Highland Avenue in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood. Its $4 million construction costs were fully funded by the famed Pittsburgh industrialist and philanthropist Mellon family, and the land on which it stands was donated in 1819 by the Negley family, another titan clan from the city’s storied industrial past. Its architect, Ralph Adams Cram, designed New York City’s St. John the Divine Cathedral and Princeton University’s chapel, but he was quoted in March of 1935 saying, “of all the cathedrals and churches I have built this is my masterpiece. This church has been the most profound spiritual experience of my life.”
East Liberty’s Continuing Renovations
The church’s website – a necessary evangelical tool in today’s world – describes the congregation as “a diverse community of believers extending Christ’s radical hospitality to all,” and you’ll find pages dedicated to racial justice and full inclusion, community events, summer concerts and film series, and Taizé prayer services, which date back to France in the 1940s as a means of reconciling divisions among different Christian denominations, Catholic and Protestant alike. Regular tours of the space are on offer, and, perhaps unsurprisingly with the above programming in mind, there are several yoga classes from which one can choose, too.
Across from the church on Highland Avenue and the south side of Penn Avenue, newly arrived commercial tenants hawk high-end salads and French pâtisseries alongside sushi and designer spectacles. On Baum Boulevard, which borders the southern edge of the structure, artisanal brick oven pizzas (vegan options available, naturally) come out alongside craft cocktails and Alpine-inspired beers and wines. A block to the east of the church is language-learning app Duolingo’s headquarters, complete with its very own taqueria that is open to the public. An Ace Hotel, emblematic of the neighborhood’s cachet, even enjoyed a brief tenure in the old YMCA across from the church on Whitfield Street before changing hands and becoming part of the Kasa portfolio of properties post-COVID.
A Hint of the Past on the Other Side
But on the north side of Penn Avenue – a mere 8 or 9 steps away – you see the neighborhood as it was pre-“revitalization” programs in recent decades. The local pizza joint on the corner buzzes as residents meet and greet, and a stroll down the block reveals wig shops and inexpensive clothing stores separated by boarded-up storefronts. Students from the nearby Obama Academy chatter after school while walking home, their conversations punctuated by the vocabulary of youth. The Kelly Strayhorn Theater, named after neighborhood legends Gene Kelly and Billy Strayhorn, focuses its services on black women, members of the queer community, and, per their website, “will continue centering historically resilient folks.” Its neighbors are an AIDS task force office and an outpost of Pennsylvania’s Department of Human Services, as well as a trendy café that seems unique in the area for its broad cross-section of clientele.
Combining the New and Old of East Liberty
I’ve walked through and around this intersection – these intersections, really, in all of their forms – in the church’s shadow countless times since moving to Pittsburgh nearly 15 years ago. From errands to groceries to social gatherings, this city block has become a central pole in my Pittsburgh experience. In the time since my arrival, the transformation has been swift and significant; when the Target down the block from the church opened in the summer of 2011, it was abundantly clear that the neighborhood had, indeed, shifted. But for all that was changing in front of my eyes, it was in looking skyward toward the East Liberty Presbyterian Church’s soaring 300-foot reinforced concrete steeple last February that I discovered the neighborhood’s newest residents, a pair of peregrine falcons, and, in turn, the perfect metaphor for the neighborhood: flight.
Read More about the city’s peregrine falcons in part two and East Liberty’s future in part three.
Story by Adam Knoerzer
Photo Courtesy of East Liberty Presbyterian Church
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