Ann Canning The Children's Window at the Smithfield United Church was destroyed in the fire on Jan. 1.

By Patricia Lowry
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

From the street, the only sign that trouble had paid a visit to Smithfield United Church of Christ is the violent gash in the glass panel of one of the four bronze entrance doors and the plywood behind it. Disturbing to be sure, but it's hard to look at that shattered glass with anything other than gratitude for the passer-by who smelled smoke, the off-duty cop who called 911 and the firefighters who pulled the church back from the brink of devastation.

On New Year's Day, "The smoke inside the sanctuary was so thick you couldn't see two feet in front of you," the Rev. Doug Patterson told his congregation on Sunday morning, when his parishioners joined members of the African United Fellowship in the sanctuary. Until the New Year's Day fire, the fellowship held Sunday afternoon services in the church's social hall, the big, open, first-floor room to which the fire was contained.

The mood of the two congregations was emotional and positively celebratory, peaking with the singing and drum playing of some of the African church members. Their bold, rhythmic, joyful sound exploded in the sanctuary and had black and white folks alike standing and raising their swaying hands to the sky.

"We ask that the emotion that we most feel is that we be reinvigorated in your spirit," Patterson prayed on behalf of both congregations.

He told them that federal investigators, who must look into every church fire, have narrowed this one down to a probable cause but he wasn't at liberty to say it.

"It is not arson, and it certainly wasn't anybody's fault," Patterson said. "The good news is we're adequately insured."

The restoration, already well along, continues this week, as scaffolding goes up inside the sanctuary so crews can clean and repaint the walls, decorated with low-relief plaster traceries of rosettes and panels.

Henry Hornbostel, the church's architect, designed it. Mario Celli, another Pittsburgh architect, disparaged it. Didn't seem to care much for the whole building, in fact. Writing in Charette, the Pittsburgh Architectural Club journal, as the church neared completion in 1926, Celli quoted Ruskin in blasting the traceries for their "dull, successive, eternity of reticulation," and he taunted Hornbostel about the spire as well, asking, "is it white gold or duralumin?"

Celli and other architects sometimes critiqued each other's work in Charette in the 1920s, and I've read enough of it to know he was an astute critic. But he also was a purist, and Hornbostel's "Gothic" Smithfield church is both modern -- stone veneer on a steel frame -- and eclectic.

"A Tudor arch at the entrance and plaster fan vaults inside suggest England," Walter Kidney writes in "Pittsburgh's Landmark Architecture," "but the square tower ... looks Italian, while the intricate traceries of the decorative panels and the openwork spire have a 15th-century German feeling."

How very American, and how fitting for a church that practices tolerance and inclusiveness. The Smithfield spire, in steel and Pittsburgh aluminum, is a lacy filigree whose openness might be seen as a symbol for this open-minded congregation that also welcomes a charter school and homeless shelter.

It's fitting, too, that this urban church, hard by the sidewalk, plays an essential role in one of Downtown's quintessentially Pittsburgh views, as seen from William Penn Place. Rows of early, modest brick rowhouses face each other across a courtyard; its entrance is an arched gateway that frames a view of Smithfield's rose window. The church's spire rises above it, near the aluminum-clad former Alcoa Building. If there's another view that so felicitously and compactly showcases the city's evolution and its innovative industry and architecture, I can't think of it.

Smithfield, the city's oldest congregation, proudly wears its history in its windows. The sanctuary's dozen stained glass windows depict Gospel events; beneath them are 12 smaller windows devoted to church and city history, highlighting the first pastor's trip across the mountains in 1782, the Penns' gift of land to the church in 1787, the courthouse and markethouse, the congregation's four previous buildings, Lincoln's visit to Pittsburgh in 1861 and much more. Their survival makes another loss -- the great Children's Window brought from the old church -- a little easier to bear.

"You and I will carry that window in our minds forever," congregation president Nan Foltz told the group, mindful that it could have been so much worse.

All things considered, stopping a tragedy in its tracks wasn't a bad way to start the year.