Pittsburgh's lesser-known cemeteries have some of the city's best views

Like any older city, Pittsburgh is dotted with cemeteries. Public ones feature a wide variety of burials and landscaping that reflect the city’s history, with newer graves located alongside half-dissolved marble headstones. Smaller, private burial grounds also serve as time capsules of different waves of immigrants.

Cemeteries also complement Pittsburgh’s parks and green spaces. Many locals include their nearest burial ground on walking, running, or cycling routes. Others pass through on their way to the resting place of a loved one or local celebrity.

Exploring Pittsburgh’s cemeteries will give anyone paying attention a clearer sense of who we were and are as a city. In some cases, the walk comes with a hard-to-beat skyline view or unique neighborhood vantage point. Whether you’re a peppy jogger or morbid goth, Pittsburgh City Paper went in search of the city’s most beautiful — and most overlooked — cemeteries. While Allegheny and Homewood cemeteries are well known for their tranquility, the following burial grounds roll into one the unique atmosphere, lush foliage, and scenic overlooks Pittsburgh has become known for.

South Side cemeteries (Carrick)

There are three scenic cemeteries among Pittsburgh’s Hilltop neighborhoods — South Side Cemetery, the main public cemetery, is clustered by St. John Vianney Cemetery (itself an amalgamation of two older Catholic cemeteries) and St. Adalbert Cemetery. All three are nestled among rolling hillsides along Brownsville Rd. with views from different angles of the surrounding homes and businesses.

Over 40,000 people have been laid to rest in the South Side Cemetery alone, which contains graves dating well back into the 1800s as well as several designated areas for pet burials. St. Adalbert, meanwhile, is the resting place of many Polish immigrants and their descendants. Taken together with St. Michael's down the road, these plots form a sort of Necropolis that reveals the waves of immigration and economic success that propelled Pittsburgh during the heyday of steel.

St. John Lutheran Cemetery (Spring Hill)

From their graves on an unassuming Spring Hill slope, the late Lutherans buried in Saint John’s — many of them German immigrants as evidenced by headstones in the original Deutsch — have one of the best views in the city.

Two looping roads connect several sections of ornate graves from the late 19th century on. Whether you’re trudging up from Solar St. or down from Buente, you’ll need to hike up toward the water tower near the summit of Spring Hill. From there, you’ll have a phenomenal look at Pittsburgh’s skyline flanked by obelisks and the working-class rowhomes of this cute residential neighborhood.

Locals favor the cemetery for its optimal view of seasonal fireworks down near the Point. It’s easy from here to imagine why so many immigrants from the verdant hills of southwestern Germany found their way to Pittsburgh — from the tightly-clustered homes to the breweries, brineries, and slaughterhouses then operating in the valley, these early Pittsburghers must have felt right at home along the Allegheny.

Calvary Catholic Cemetery (Greenfield)

The largest of Pittsburgh’s diocesan cemeteries, Calvary Cemetery sits at the top of a hill between Greenfield, Hazelwood, and Squirrel Hill. The cemetery is the resting place of several famous Pittsburghers, including actor Frank Gorshin and several Bishops of Pittsburgh, and has expansive views toward both Downtown and the lush green valley between the South Side and Homestead.

Like others on this list, Calvary shows what an important lodestar religion has historically been for the populations of Pittsburgh. As a wholly Catholic cemetery, Calvary is far from unique in Pittsburgh — other faiths, including the region’s many Jewish congregations, have their own, separate cemeteries, as well. But the sheer number of the interred, and the stature and beauty of the cemetery’s more prominent burial sites, show how powerful a force Catholicism has been in the region over the past 150 years.

Historic St. Peter’s Cemetery (Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar)

This careworn but historic cemetery is located in one of the quietest corners of the East End (unless, that is, police are using the nearby firing range). St. Peter’s has burials dating from the early 1800s on a hilltop above the St. Peter’s Evangelical & Reformed Church. The surrounding neighborhood is mostly residential but contains additional historic sites, including the fascinating Mayan Revival Lemington Elementary School building (now home to Catalyst Academy).

The view from St. Peter’s offers a unique angle of East Liberty, Oakland, and Downtown, capturing the full sweep of the city’s East End. Like St. John’s, this cemetery’s oldest grave markers are in German, but the later interred include Pittsburghers of English, Irish, Polish, and Italian descent, mirroring the way successive waves of European immigrants shaped the East End’s neighborhoods and left an indelible impact on local culture.

Voegtly Cemetery (Troy Hill)

The smallest cemetery on this list, Voegtly Cemetery is a product both of Pittsburgh’s immigrant history and the disruption caused by ongoing waves of development — this cemetery is the resting place of many original Pittsburghers who were rediscovered during construction work on the North Side.

While its earliest burials were Swiss and German immigrants, Voegtly is now the home of the Western Pennsylvania Firefighters Memorial and features views over the treetops of Lawrenceville, the Strip District, and Downtown. Not far away are Troy Hills art houses, eateries, and local holy site St. Anthony’s Chapel. Each cemetery in Pittsburgh offers a different cross-section of local history, but in few places can you juxtapose old and new Pittsburgh so immediately as in Voegtly Cemetery.th