This is the most inventive of Cram's three churches in Pittsburgh, with a powerful and idiosyncratic Spanish-inspired design for a congregation originally of German and Irish extraction and now African American. The surrounding blocks of identical frame houses are dwarfed by the church's tall and spiky spire. The numerous pinnacles on the sides and the crocketed spires on the facade make the vibrancy of this Iberian fantasy—a restatement of the Cathedral of Burgos in Spain—all the more powerful. Inside, Catalan Gothic provided Cram's precedent for a forest of slender columns and ribbed vaults that creates the most dramatic nave in Pittsburgh.
Holy Rosary Church
1928, Ralph Adams Cram for Cram and Ferguson. 7160 Kelly St., Homewood