It is June 1924.

The Immigration Act of 1924 has just passed overwhelmingly in Congress and been signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge.

It restricts the number of immigrants to the United States from outside the Western Hemisphere to just 165,000 people.

That's an 80% reduction from just a decade prior.

While the 1921 law had restricted any country's number of immigrants to 3% of their 1910 census population.

This law restricted it further to just 2% of their 1890 population.

As this map from The New York Times shows, that greatly favors immigrants from Germany and the British Isles, the melting pot was declared over the melting pot.

That's an idea we've heard before.

It's as old as time, or at least as old as America is.

The idea that a bunch of different immigrants from different cultural backgrounds could come to America and create something homogenous and unique.

But to show you where the Melting pot was revived in a new way, we need to go back to the summer of 1892 right here in homestead, Pennsylvania.

As the homestead works were starting out in the 1870s.

It employed mostly American born skilled laborers and Irish and German born unskilled laborers.

Almost all the men belonged to the Union.

Tensions began to rise in the spring of 1892, when it became obvious that Henry Clay Frick would no longer negotiate with that union, so the men declared a strike.

When Frick was caught trying to import Pinkerton mercenaries to act as strikebreakers, the men fought back.

In the ensuing daylong battle on July 6th, 1892.

Ten men lost their lives.

The state militia was called in to restore order, which meant siding with the company.

In the fall of that year.

The men called off the strike, while the skilled laborers that had dominated before 1892 believed there was honor in a hard day's work.

Carnegie and Frick believed in profit and efficiency over dignity.

Bodies were reduced to their labor power after the union was crushed.

Frick and Carnegie made it a policy to hire as many languages as possible.

If the men couldn't communicate with one another, they couldn't unionize.

There were too focused on their differences to realize what they had in common.

It is no coincidence, then, that the labor movement did not pick up again until the 1930s, after immigration had been curtailed by the 1924 Immigration Act.

And after a new generation of workers had grown up in a world where everybody speaks English.

In 1892, the only churches in town were Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, United Presbyterian, Episcopal, and German Evangelical.

Neither a Catholic church nor a Slovak church would appear until 1896.

Churches, it turns out, are a great lens through which to view the history of homestead.

Over the decades, more than 40 churches have existed in just this small area, a result of many different groups of people having to live together, possibly biased towards one another, but united in the oppressive working conditions of the mill.

When I say homestead, by the way, I don't just mean the borough of homestead.

It's actually pretty small, and homestead is the centerpiece of this whole area, to be sure.

But there's also the borough of Munhall directly to the east, which is where the mill managers and the executives would have lived, where the houses are a little bigger and more spread out to the east.

Beyond that is the borough of Whitaker.

On the west side of homestead is West Homestead, which was dominated not so much by the mill but by master.

Machine Works, which made equipment for the mill.

And then the city of Pittsburgh actually extends to the south below the river to about up against all of these municipalities.

Can you guess what the neighborhood of Pittsburgh is called down there?

It's called New Homestead, so that's nice and clear.

So basically all of that together makes up what's called the Homestead district.

But it's a lot easier to just call the whole thing homestead.

So that's what I'm going to be doing for the rest of this video.

And the fact is, homestead used to be a lot bigger.

Right now, the homestead district has a resident population of about 17,000.

But in 1920, by some estimates, it was upwards of 45,000.

And it used to be physically bigger too, the lower ward of homestead, extended below the railroad tracks all the way up to the river, and butted right up against the steel mill.

This was unquestionably the dirtiest, most crowded section of town, a place where new immigrants came to live in squalor while they stayed.

But the money to move up to the hill, renters would often take in boarders to make ends meet.

20 houses would share one latrine and one water pump.

The infant mortality rate in the ward was one in three over twice what it was up on the hill.

Native white Protestant churches were always the first to leave the ward.

Black and Slavic congregations often took over their old buildings, and eventually, if they were able to, moved up here to the hill as well.

Second Baptist, for instance, took over United Presbyterian, while Saint Gregory's Russian Orthodox took over another.

Saint Michael the Archangel Slovak Catholic Church had been down in the ward for decades, and in 1908 they acquired this piece of property here in Munhall.

At first they built a small wooden frame church, but in 1927 they replaced it with this more imposing structure.

This move pleased about half the congregation, who were eager to escape the soot and the grime and the noise from down below.

But half the congregants actually decided to return to the ward, and establish Saint and Slovak Catholic Church.

Now, this kind of splintering among European Catholic immigrants was nationwide.

By 1916, 2230 congregations in the United States used their native tongue for mass, and another 3846 used both their language and English.

Ethnic parishes such as this one in the Pittsburgh area were established for one major reason.

The Slovak population took all the actions of establishing a new parish.

Buying land.

Hiring an architect.

Fundraising for construction.

Hiring a priest who spoke their language.

In this case, they got a guy from Minnesota before they even asked the bishop if they were allowed to, and desiring that level of control was completely understandable.

In those days, the mill foremen would decide what job you got in a mill and therefore what your station in life would be.

The three levels of the male hierarchy were Anglo, Hunky and Negro.

Or as we would say today, white American, Slavic and African American because the mill life was so stratified and so segregated.

The differences between people like culture, dance, music, food, those were all celebrated outside the mill.

There really was no public entertainment in town.

There were skating rinks for a few years, but those closed.

There was nickelodeons.

But for the slobs who didn't speak English, those were useless.

Pittsburgh was just too far away and too expensive to get to.

However, there were about 50 saloons in town, and the library offered a gymnasium and social clubs.

If you were willing to pay a monthly fee.

So for immigrants who spoke a different language than their bosses, who were generally looked down upon by their neighbors and who had few other social opportunities.

The church as a central part of their life seems inevitable.

It provided a link between the Old world and the new, and it provided both social and spiritual comfort.

To quote at length from the sociologist Margaret Byington, who studied the conditions here in homestead in 1908.

Social needs are further met by the churches, which in homestead, as is usual in the town, play a more important role in the community than they do in a large city.

While church affairs and suppers may not be the best ways to raise money.

They offer good times.

Ten cent socials, for instance, provide a jolly evening for the young folks.

Chicken and waffles suppers, advertised often during the winter, proved to be pleasant.

Homelike affairs.

The churches also provide a real, though limited, intellectual stimulus.

One has a large men's club whose meeting speakers talk on subjects of current interest in another church.

A club of young men and women has regular debates on sociological subjects.

The church, in such ways becomes the center for broadening the life of its members by other than purely spiritual interests.

But in 1941, as the Lend-Lease effort ramped up and it became obvious America was headed to war in Europe, the Defense Plant Corporation and U.S.

Steel bought up every parcel in the ward and tore everything down to expand the steel mill for wartime production.

In those, 121 acres lived over 8000 people in more than 1300 homes.

That was nearly half the town 12 churches, five schools, two convents, 28 saloons, and countless small businesses and social halls were wiped off the map forever.

Residents were forced either to find room in the rest of the district, or move into newly built defense housing.

There were four of those projects in the area.

Riverview homes in West Mifflin.

The confusingly named Munhall homesteads in Munhall.

Glen Hazel Heights across the river and Bedford Dwellings in Pittsburgh's Hill District.

In fact, so many black residents were moved from the ward into Bedford Dwellings.

It cemented the Hill District's demography as a black neighborhood.

After the ward was demolished, the biggest indicator of class distinction, whether one lived above or below the tracks vanished.

The war meant the destruction of nearly half the town, but it also meant unparalleled prosperity.

The old homestead was quickly disappearing.

Saint Anthony's Polish Catholic Church lost its school, its rectory, and half of its congregants in a move out of the ward, but it traded longevity for speed by constructing a new, smaller, more suburban style building, which was open by the end of 1942.

With no school and no rectory.

The church was closed in 2009 and now contains four apartments.

Saints Peter and Paul Lithuanian Catholic Church was the smallest Catholic church in the ward, and had the easiest time relocating it.

Just bought the first Evangelical Reformed Church up here on Mifflin Street.

Their parochial school continued to operate until 1968, but the church was closed in 1992 when a bunch of local parishes were merged.

The most important consequence of half the town being demolished is that the last vestiges of ethnic identity outside the church were not shattered, but damaged beyond repair.

Remember, this is 15 years after immigration basically ground to a halt.

Almost all the fraternal houses were demolished and not rebuilt.

Most parochial schools were wiped out, and the geographic proximity of congregants to their churches was gone.

Ethnic identity in the area became predominantly a personal or familial identity, or perhaps a once a year activity as part of Kennywoods ethnic heritage Days.

But before we get more into specific churches, I want to give you a sense, at least with the very broad brush on where all these churches and denominations fit on the family tree of Christendom.

So in general, there's three major groups of Christianity.

In the beginning there was one church, but in 1054 there was the Great Schism.

And in general, people in the East became what we call Orthodox, while people in the West became what we call Catholic.

Within Orthodoxy, there is a lot of different groups, mostly divided along national origin lines.

And within Catholicism there's two major branches.

There is Roman Catholic, which you're probably familiar with, and then there's Greek Catholic or Byzantine Catholic as it's sometimes called in North America.

But again, we don't really have to get into the specifics here.

Now.

Then the Roman Catholic Church faced the Protestant Reformation in 1517, on which all these different Protestant groups kind of split off.

Right?

You have Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, to name just a few of very many.

And all these groups are Christian, right?

They all believe in the Holy Trinity and the same thing.

So the only things that really differ between them are what are their traditions.

What are their rights, what other liturgies like, and what do they allow in their worship.

And what kind of authority do they place and where.

For instance, some groups weigh the authority of the Bible much heavier than they weigh the authority of the church, and vice versa.

Some groups use a little bit of magic and iconography in their groups in their worship.

Some other groups say that that's not okay at all.

So I just kind of want you to keep all that in the back of your mind while we move through this, and I think you'll get a sense of all the different influences that homestead has in its churches, because there's a lot of different types of Christianity moving around in this town.

As political jurisdictions in Europe were constantly changing, group identity was something that was fluid.

But in America, you have to be defined as something, and that something had better be unchanging.

So many immigrants created identities that might not have actually been that strong in the old country.

As historian Jeffrey Driscoll notes, architecture can serve as a medium for the conscious public expression of this identity.

Early on, ethnic congregations either took over old American churches or built their churches in an American style to signal to the powers that be that they were ready to be assimilated into the new country.

But as the years went on, architecture tended to harken back to the Old World in a postwar conformist society.

Ethnic heritage was a point of pride.

Examples of this include Saint Gregory's Russian Orthodox Church, which was first established down below the tracks in 1912.

The congregation just bought an old Protestant church and reconfigured it to suit their needs.

They added an altar, an iconostatis, and a signature onion dome and three bar cross.

That church, of course, like everything else around it, was demolished in 1941.

Thankfully, the congregation was able to secure some land way up here on 15th Avenue on top of the hill.

They couldn't get a Russian architect, but they could get the services of Doctor Andrew Avinoff to have enough to consult.

He had designed the Russian room of the Cathedral of Learning.

Construction dragged on, and services were held in the basement until the church was finished in 1951.

It is built largely the same as Orthodox churches in the old country.

One enters into the narthex, a sort of foyer area, and steps to the left and right.

Take one either up to a loft or down to the basement.

The square shaped nave is straight ahead, and in the center of the ceiling is a dome with clear story windows.

At the far end of the nave is the iconic stairs.

A screen in front of the altar, which is decorated with depictions of important saints and other figures.

These appear in the same order in every Russian Orthodox Church.

There are, of course, important distinctions architecturally.

I imagine the basement is one, though I don't know that for sure.

The most obvious difference is the stained glass windows.

Those are an American addition to Orthodox architecture.

The seraphim painted on the dome have three pairs of wings, as opposed to two pairs of wings as they were painted in Catholic churches, at least according to the priest.

What I find most fascinating about Saint Gregory's is the time and dedication, interpretive, construction, authentic and beautiful.

The Orthodox Old World Church for a congregation that was at that point, at least a generation removed from immigrating.

But as historian Michael Rosenow points out, immigrant churches erected literal and figurative walls against alienation.

They provided a central location for family events such as births, marriages and deaths From the earliest days of settlement until the end of the 19th century, Presbyterians dominated western Pennsylvania.

The upper class was and still is, Presbyterian.

Andrew Carnegie and the Mellons were members, at least nominally.

And if you wanted to get into their circles, you'd better be one to.

This church was built as the First Presbyterian in 1904, replacing an earlier church that was just up the hill.

The organ for that first church was donated by Andrew Carnegie himself, but unfortunately it did not survive the move.

In 1958, the two major branches of the Presbyterian Church here in the United States, United Presbyterian and Presbyterian USA, merged.

And so the two Presbyterian Church is here in town also merged.

So now this is the United Presbyterian Church.

Are you tired of hearing me say that word yet?

When it was built in 1904, it was actually considered to be up on the hill, because, remember, the town extended down to the river.

Mill managers who wanted promotion.

I better be members here.

If you wanted to be anybody in the Steel Valley, you had to be a Presbyterian.

Architecturally speaking, Protestant churches in America mimicked Catholic churches in Europe until the late 1800s.

Then these more square massing began to appear.

And that's a result of auditorium style seating, which can fit more people in the sanctuary and have more people closer to the pulpit.

Long center aisles aren't really necessary in Protestant churches, because professionals aren't as much a part of the worship tradition like they are in Catholic churches.

This new massing is called the Akron Plan, and it creates a very visually distinct American type of church, usually with a tall corner tower and then sometimes a secondary tower on the other side of the sanctuary.

Romanesque is the usual style for these buildings, because it seems more in line with public buildings than the traditional Gothic of churches, and it lends more credence for these churches to be involved in public life.

In the 1950s, as steelworkers got wealthier thanks to good union negotiations.

The process of suburbanization began.

Since everybody now had a car and there were only so many parking spaces in town.

The idea of businesses and offices and institutions moving to the suburbs gained popularity, and churches were no exception.

Centralized is a Hungarian Byzantine Catholic church.

The congregation first found an old Protestant church in downtown in 1907, but in 1961 the pressures of suburbanization got to be too much, and so the congregation purchased 13 acres out here on homestead Duquesne Road.

This church was dedicated in 1966.

If you look on the front, you see two cornerstones, one in English, one in Hungarian.

In the basement they have traditional Hungarian decorations and even paintings of the steel mill.

More notable, perhaps, is the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist.

The old cathedral was built in 1903, designed by Hungarian architect, emulating a Ukrainian Catholic church in Austria-Hungary.

One of the most distinctive pieces of architecture I've ever seen.

Its towers are a homestead landmark, but after the mill shut down in the 1980s, the suburbs of Manhattan looked better than ever.

So in 1993, the congregation built a new cathedral out here in Munhall.

The sanctuary is shaped like a square, and the dome above represents heaven.

There's this clear storey window up there that shines light down on all the murals inside.

This is similar if you'll recall, to Saint Gregory's Russian Orthodox.

The outside of Saint John's and of Saint Elias are rather unadorned, but that's kind of the point.

The real action is what goes on inside the cathedral.

It's modeled after the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, and it had better be impressive.

It's the mother church of all Byzantine Catholics here in the United States.

I'm doing the voice over here because apparently this intersection is the windiest spot on the face of the earth.

This is Saint Mary Magdalene Stritch.

You can't forget about the Irish Catholics.

This is a Renaissance Italian style church designed in 1895 by Pittsburgh's very own Frederick Sauer.

It closed in 2009, but it reopened in 2019 as the Dragon's Den, a nonprofit afterschool program sort of thing which encourages children to overcome challenges by using an indoor climbing wall and zip line course.

Thankfully, most of the architectural elements were kept intact, such as the heavy timbering and the carved stone columns.

That, along with the dragon theme, gives this whole thing a very medieval feel.

Now, you might think with all this talk of Catholicism and Orthodoxy and European immigration, that homestead is an all white town, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

There's always been a black population here.

During the Great Migration, many Black Americans came up from the South to fill roles at the steel mill.

The three major black churches in town are Park Place A.M.E., which built this subtle little church in 1920.

Clark Memorial Baptist, organized in 1889.

And Second Baptist, which found its way out of the ward in 1941.

Because black steel workers were at the bottom of the ladder, they often found themselves self segregating into their own tightly knit groups, less integrated than even the Slavs in the Americans.

In fact, the only reason Second Baptist was able to stay afloat is because Clark Memorial let them worship in their space while they raised construction for their new church.

As white flight began in earnest in the late 1950s, homestead became a majority black borough.

After the mill closed in the 1980s and home prices began to fall, poor blacks from surrounding communities moved in and speeded up that process.

One of the greatest impacts that these new immigrants, in a sense, have had on the community is the establishment of new churches that followed their beliefs and their traditions.

See, about 45% of African Americans are Baptist.

Baptists are a Protestant denomination and to a greater degree than basically every other Protestant.

They believe that the Bible has ultimate authority for the church itself.

Doesn't have to be much.

They're never as complex or adorned as Catholic churches are, as long as it's got four walls and a cross doesn't even have to have windows, you're good to go.

So most of the new churches in homestead are storefront churches, that is, churches that move into old storefronts.

And they've got their pick of the litter, random abandoned old buildings, abandoned houses, old churches of other denominations really doesn't matter as long as God is being worshiped.

That's what's important.

After the horrors of 1892, Andrew Carnegie felt pretty bad, at least publicly.

So in 1898, here in Munhall, the Carnegie Library opened on top of the same hill where the National Guard was camped out in 1892 to restore order.

Some people welcomed it as a sign of cultural and educational attainment.

Others saw it as a half apology.

But what you can't deny is that it is a grand building, perhaps grander than any one church in homestead.

And if the library is Carnegie's answer to the plight of the steel worker, the steel workers felt they needed their own.

And the place for that was Saint Michael the Archangel Slovak Catholic Church.

This church went up in 1927, and in 1926, excuse me, 1966, the congregation reached out to the Vatican and asked, who's the patron saint of steel workers?

Well, they didn't know.

But after some debate, it was determined that Saint Joseph could be because he was a carpenter.

Therefore he was a worker.

Therefore he was a steel worker.

So a scale model was cast here in Pittsburgh, shipped to Rome, where the statue's full size was cast, blessed by the Pope, shipped back here to homestead, and placed atop that tower.

But as you might notice, the statue is not on top of the tower anymore.

The church was closed in 1989.

Sold in 2009, and before it was sold, the diocese decided that the resale value would be higher if it didn't have a giant statue of a saintly steel worker on the top.

But the parish wanted to keep it.

And so the statue ended up here in the parking lot of Saint Maximilian Kolbe Catholic Church.

This is the replacement church for Saint Anne's, which was down below the track because the priest was able to keep all the major elements the church, the rectory, the school, the social hall.

It allowed homestead to remain the center of Slovak Catholic community for decades to come.

Now, I didn't know the statue was here until I accidentally came for a fish fry a few weeks ago.

And lo and behold, here he was.

And I didn't know any of the symbology either, but I talked to a guy who told it to me, and so I'm going to tell it to you.

As you can see at the top, he's got a halo to signify that he is in fact, the Saint in his right hand.

He's holding a hammer to pound out the steel in his left hand, a steel girder is standing on a billow of clouds coming up from the blast furnaces, and behind him are the flames.

Molten iron or steel pours over the world to show that homestead steel products have been shipped all over the globe.

Below him is a pillar of smoke.

And this is the cool part.

When he was up on top of the tower of Saint Michael's, they had floodlights from beneath to make it appear at night that he was floating, keeping watch over homestead.

So this is Saint Joseph, the steel worker.

It is April 2025.

It's been 133 years since the labor movement collapsed at the Battle of Homestead, and it's been just over a century since the melting pot.

One sense of the word came to an end.

The constant hum of the homestead works hasn't been heard for for decades.

That mill which gave this town life demanded the occasional human sacrifice.

Brutal working conditions ripped away autonomy and dignity from generations of immigrants and Americans alike.

In the health or shelter of the lower ward, those groups were free to find and create identities for themselves.

But with the war gone, with the steel mill gone to in acres of asphalt and strip malls in its place, the churches they built rise above the skyline more prominently than ever before.

Saint Joseph the Worker may no longer be able to guard the steel workers from the top of his feet.

The faith in this town is as strong as the steel ever was.