The dormant smokestacks that hover above The Waterfront don't stand alone as Homestead's monuments to the past. If the brick towers represent the area's industrial significance, a nearby cluster of churches is the link to its rich ethnic heritage.

	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Some of the 60 stained glass windows in St. Mary Magdalene Church in Homestead depict the workers who once populated the area. An example is this image of a man hammering a piece of iron. Click photo for larger image. Map of church locations More photos

A symbol of both is the 24-foot tall statue of St. Joseph the Worker.

Not quite 40 years ago, when the U.S. Steel Homestead Works ran as if it would produce steel and jobs and smoke forever, Diocese of Pittsburgh Bishop John J. Wright went to Kennywood with Canon Joseph S. Altany, pastor of St. Michael the Archangel Church in Munhall.

That's where they hatched a plan to establish a "National Memorial to the Working Man" at St. Michael, a church built by Slovaks at East Ninth Avenue at Library Place near the gigantic U.S. Steel Homestead Works.

The idea led to the commission of the statue of St. Joseph the Worker, designed by local sculptor Frank Vittor, which was made in Italy, blessed in Rome by Pope Paul VI, transported to Munhall and placed on the campanile of St. Michael in an elaborate ceremony in 1966 at a cost of about $25,000.

Altany asked his friend, Homestead businessman Perry DeBolt, a steel hauler, to send a tractor-trailer to a New York pier to pick up the statue, said DeBolt's son, George, owner of DeBolt Unlimited Travel Services.

"Bishop Wright blessed the statue and the tractor-trailer and the truck that pulled it and the owner of the truck, my father, who was a staunch Presbyterian," said DeBolt, who remembers the ceremony and the great honor his family felt in participating in it.

That's how St. Joseph ended up on the bell tower of St. Michael, one of a cluster of ethnic and historic churches that stretch from Library Place in Munhall to Amity Street in Homestead.

The churches, which were built by Scots, Irish, Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles, Carpatho-Rusyns and African Americans, are markers of a time when religious faith, ethnic heritage and the prosperity from the region's role as an engine in the Industrial Revolution came together to produce an architectural mosaic of onion domes, cross-topped spires, saints and roosters.

"There are historic churches all over Western Pennsylvania, but I think Homestead is unique in that it has so many in such a small area," said DeBolt.

"No one seems to realize what gems they are," said Mary Ellen Leigh, a freelance journalist who wrote a brochure this year featuring a self-guided walking tour of the churches, for the Homestead-area Economic Revitalization Corp.

Beyond their architectural beauty and value, the churches tell stories that were never written down. Many of them were built by their parishioners, mill workers and laborers who contributed their skills and time after pulling long shifts. In communal efforts, ethnic neighborhoods pooled money and talent and organized themselves to undertake the daunting project of designing, raising money for and constructing elaborate buildings. Working people, small-business people, community and religious leaders -- they all joined in the undertaking to make their own ethnic church the best.

The result was that Homestead became a community known for its churches -- and its bars, said Mayor Betty Esper, 71, a lifelong resident.

"I don't know if they prayed and drank or drank and prayed," joked Esper, mayor of a community with 4,100 people and about 20 churches -- old historic ones, and newly formed congregations using old abandoned church buildings.

Despite the resources and organization required, there is little written record of the origins of most of the churches that stand today or the buildings they replaced. (A number had to be rebuilt up the hill when the Homestead Works was expanded in 1941 by the Defense Plant Corp., and several were rebuilt because of fires.)

The story of the robust late-19th and early-20th-century period is there, nevertheless, recorded in stained glass, Old World symbols, and the work of master craftsmen who devoted their energies to re-creating old religious traditions and architecture in the New World.

Hungarians and Slovaks of the Calvinist faith laid the cornerstone for the yellow brick First Hungarian Reformed Church at 416 E. Tenth Ave. in 1904, modeling it after an old Hungarian church in Calvin Square, Budapest. Some of its stained glass windows depict Old World scenes, such as the plains in the Zemplen District.

"This is part of us," said Bill Horosz, 82, of West Homestead, a retired teacher and chief elder in the church, where he was baptized and married.

"We grew up in this church," said his wife, Ethel Horosz, remembering Scouting, choirs and youth fellowships that became like family after her parents left their biological families back in Hungary. Another Old World marker belongs to one of the oldest congregations, St. John Mark Lutheran Church, 225 E. Tenth Ave., dating to 1874. It is a consolidation of St. John Evangelical Lutheran Church and St. Mark Evangelical Lutheran Church, a German-speaking church torn down a decade ago that was known as "the rooster church."

The copper rooster weather vane from St. Mark is on display in a homemade shadowbox in the church basement. The Rev. Robert Gago said that in Germany, Protestant churches put roosters on their steeples to distinguish them from the Catholic churches, which had crosses. The rooster symbolizes Christ's admonition to the Apostle, Peter, that "before the cock crows, you shall deny me three times."

"Ours is pretty fragile," Gago said. "Its legs are broken, and it has been shot at several times."

But while parishioners sought to recapture their heritage in their churches, they also expressed the pride they felt in their new country's history and in their role as workers.

In addition to religious stories, some of the 60 stained-glass windows belonging to St. Mary Magdalene Church, at Amity Street and Tenth Avenue, tell stories about the history of Pittsburgh and praise the attributes of the labor movement.

A Pittsburgh-themed window shows young George Washington arriving with Indian guides in a canoe in 1753; the launching of the first river steamboat from Pittsburgh in 1806; songwriter Stephen Foster (1826-64) and astronomer James Keeler (1857-1900), both native sons; and orator Horace Greeley addressing an 1856 meeting of abolitionists that marked the founding of the Republican Party here.

There's also a window depicting the virtues of labor, the strength and perseverance of farming and manufacturing, combined with symbols of democracy, education, art and music.

Stories of determination

The people who built and attended the churches of Homestead and Munhall were in the thick of the fierce struggle between management and labor, and their pride in their hard-won rights was strong because they were on the front lines of the fight -- from the Battle for Homestead lockout in 1892 to the labor struggles of the 1920s and 1930s. When church members died in those struggles, the priests and ministers of these churches buried them and spoke about the issues of the day.

The dangers of industrial life were routine parts of their lives.

Only a few months after the dedication of the new First Hungarian Reformed Church in Homestead, 58 of its members died in the Harwick mine explosion on Jan. 25, 1904, in Cheswick. According to John and Linda Asmonga of the Homestead & Mifflin Township Historical Society, this was one-third of the congregation. They researched the link and found that Hungarians from Homestead were boarding in Cheswick and working there when the accident occurred.

That disaster, which cost the lives of 179 miners, led industrialist Andrew Carnegie to establish the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission, which still awards grants for heroism in the United States, Canada and parts of Europe. But information about the Homestead link in the story of the Cheswick disaster is scant, the Asmongas have found. The impact of the loss of so many members of a church can only be imagined. Many of the stories connected with churches in that era have been lost over time, said the Asmongas, who are trying to gather information about Homestead's cluster of churches.

The fierce dedication that communities had to their churches is shown in the story of St. Mary Magdalene Church, a stately church that sits on what is reportedly the oldest worship site in the area. When the church was nearly destroyed in a spectacular fire during the Depression, and damaged by fire again in 1977, its members raised the money to rebuild and repair. When the Diocese of Pittsburgh threatened to close the church in 1992 as part of a merger of churches in the Steel Valley, parishioners raised nearly $400,000 to rehabilitate and save the aging edifice.

"The art and architecture of the churches could never be duplicated," said Bill Stevens of Munhall, who with his wife, Jo, rallied hundreds of volunteers to save St. Mary Magdalene.

St. Nicholas Orthodox Church, at 903 Ann St., with its lovely trio of stainless steel domes and crosses, is another story of determination. Construction of the church began in 1936 in the middle of the Great Depression, when money was short and the congregation couldn't always afford to pay the bills. It took the congregation until 1958 to complete the richly appointed church.

Still going strong

Although some of the churches are open just once a week, most are working congregations. Some vacant churches in the district have been bought by different ethnic or religious groups.

The old Rodef Shalom synagogue in Homestead, dedicated in 1902, now is home to Community of the Crucified One. The bustling church, founded in Homestead, has expanded nationally and internationally.

St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cathedral, erected in 1903 at Tenth Avenue and Dickson Street, is the first cathedral in America for Carpatho-Rusyns and the most important historic building in America for the ethnic group, said John Righetti of Ohio Township, president of the Pittsburgh-based Carpatho-Rusyn Society.

This year, the society's national organization bought the building, and it plans to turn it into a National Carpatho-Rusyn Cultural Center, with a lecture and concert hall.

The cathedral had been vacant since 1993, when its congregation, Eastern Catholics who are in union with the pope, decided to build a new church on Greentree and West Run roads in Munhall, a few miles away.

Righetti said St. John's, which became the cathedral for the Ruthenian (Rusyn) Exarchate in America in 1929, was a mother church for three traditions that eventually evolved out of it: Greek Catholic, under the pope; Russian Orthodox, headquartered in Washington, D.C.; and Carpatho-Russian Orthodox, headquartered in Johnstown, Cambria County.

"And it was our first cathedral -- it is to us Rusyns what Jamestown, Va., is to the English," Righetti said.

St. Gregory Russian Greek Orthodox Church on East Fifteenth Street, which is part of the Russian Orthodox Church, is getting ready to celebrate its 90th anniversary.

St. Nicholas Orthodox Church on Ann Street is a congregation that belongs to the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese of the U.S.A. in Johnstown.

Other important churches in the district include St. Matthew's Episcopal Church, a gray stone building with red doors and a bell tower at 336 E. Tenth Ave., Homestead. It was founded by English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish immigrants in the 1880s at a time when the congregation struggled to afford a resident clergyman.

Homestead United Presbyterian Church at 908 Ann St., with roots dating to 1874, is a congregation that voted to stay in Homestead, even when the mills closed and the economy failed.

African-American churches also thrived here, including Clark Memorial Baptist Church at 1301 Glenn St. Its congregation began 1889, when its members met at a private home. This church, built in 1923, reflected the traditions of the Deep South as it tried to meet the religious needs of African Americans who came to the industrial north to find a better life.

Second Baptist Church at 107 W. Twelfth Ave., is celebrating its 100th anniversary.

The Park Place African Methodist Episcopal Church at 215 E. Tenth Ave., was organized in 1883 and was first called the Frances Virginia Gladden A.M.E. Church to honor the woman who donated the property for the church.

The present-day St. Maximilian Kolbe Roman Catholic parish is a 1992 consolidation of six parishes established by ethnic groups who came to Homestead and Munhall to find work. St. Margaret, a Hungarian parish, and Ss. Peter and Paul, a Lithuanian parish, have been closed. Four worship sites remain: St. Anthony, a Polish church; St. Mary Magdalene, which has Irish roots; and St. Michael and St. Anne, two Slovak parishes that split in 1909 because of a disagreement over where St. Michael should be located.

Now the two Slovak churches' congregations are united. And St. Joseph the Worker extends his arms from the bell tower of St. Michael the Archangel, reminding the world of the time when so much steel was produced in the Steel Valley that it was a perfect place for a "National Memorial to the Working Man."