The Open House Chicago sites were only open until 5 pm on either Saturday or Sunday or both, and it was almost 4 when we headed to Ukrainian Village by El from the South Side and then a westbound bus. A little tiring, but I wanted to see the interiors of Sts. Volodymyr & Olha Ukrainian Catholic Church and St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral before the event finished. It was worth the effort.

Sts. Volodymyr & Olha is a massive brick presence just south of Chicago Ave.

Yaroslav Korsunsky, an architect from Minneapolis designed the church in the 1970s, reportedly in a Byzantine-Ukrainian style the early second millennium AD. I’m no expert on that, but I will say that the interior is stunning.

A few blocks north is St. Nicholas. It too is a striking church.

Note the 480-light chandelier.

And the fine stained glass.

Afterward, we didn’t feel like walking the additional blocks to see Holy Trinity Orthodox Cathedral, which we visited last summer when it happened to be open. It’s also resplendent, and has the distinction of displaying an icon that includes not only the founder of the parish, but the architect of the building, Louis Sullivan.

It was a first for me: a church with a lime-green interior wall, all the way around, and a large cross created by colorful lights, as a fixture on the ceiling. To find this church, you take the Green Line south to the 43rd St. station, and then walk west on 43rd. At Wabash Ave., turn left – to the south — and there you are, at 4315 S. Wabash: The First Church of Deliverance.

I’ve seen it described as a rare example of Art Moderne in a house of worship. I’ll go along with that. One Walter T. Bailey designed the structure toward the end of this career, which involved a practice in Chicago and Memphis, doing (among other designs) a number of Knights of Pythias buildings, including this one I’d never heard of near Nashville.

Lee Bailey, writing for WBEZ, says: “The church was built in 1939 and designed by Walter T. Bailey, the first African American to hold an architecture license in Illinois. Those terra cotta-clad twin towers were added in 1946, designed by Kocher Buss & DeKlerk. The building’s modernity wasn’t by chance. In the 1930s and 1940s, First Church was an exceedingly modern congregation.

“The Rev. Clarence H. Cobbs was only 21 when he founded the predominantly black First Church congregation in 1929. The church began its radio broadcast in 1934, giving Cobbs and his 200-member choir a national reach and influence. The congregation’s choir revolutionized the sound of gospel music in 1939 when its organist and composer Kenneth Morris convinced Cobbs to install the newly created Hammond electric organ at the church. The church’s gospel festivals in old Comiskey Park in the 1940s drew thousands.

“In 1953, the congregation became the first black church in the U.S. (quite possibly the world) to broadcast its services on television. WLS-TV carried those services live — a significant development, in retrospect — for 12 straight weeks. Songs that later became gospel standards made their debut at the church under Hobbs, including the staple ‘How I Got Over.’ ”

The interior is auditorium-style, and green is the first thing that strikes you. Then the details, especially the luminous ceiling cross.

Up closer to the front.

Nearby, at 4359 S. Michigan Ave., is the Centennial Missionary Baptist Church. Once upon a time, it was the Eighth Church of Christ, Scientist. Actually, not that long ago.

It too is an auditorium church, but more semicircular. In that way it reminded me of the Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist, which is downtown.

A nice woman named Doris gave us a tour, including not only the main part of the church, but some back rooms. Open House Chicago notes that “Designed in 1911 by architect Leon E. Stanhope, the Centennial Missionary Baptist Church was originally home to the Eighth Church of Christ, Scientist. Designed in the neoclassical style, with a striking red domed roof, it was one of the longest-running African American Christian Science congregations.

“The building only recently became home to Centennial Missionary Baptist Church – which itself boasts a distinguished history. Their first house of worship was a building owned by Lorraine Hansberry, and numerous gospel music greats performed over the years.”

The third church we visited in Bronzeville, Mount Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church, 4600-4622 S. King Dr., began as the Chicago Sinai Temple in the early 1910s, designed by the prolific Alfred Alschuler. I didn’t take any exteriors, but Design Slinger has some good images.

The exterior is stately, while the interior is gorgeous.

Design Slinger says: “In 1910 architect Alfred Alschuler drew up plans for a Chicago Sinai building complex that would include an auditorium for worship and a large community center which would house offices, classrooms, meeting spaces, a gym and a pool…. as members moved further south, a large corner lot was purchased at 46th and Grand Boulevard to serve as a new home base.

“Since the congregation was part of the Reform tradition, Alschuler followed a design scheme that was popular at the time with other congregations in not proclaiming that the building was a house of worship, by choosing a historical classic architectural style. The restrained sophistication of Greco/Roman refinement would convey to the passerby that this was a substantial edifice, it could be a bank or a library, but not wear its religious affiliation on its sleeve.”

By the 1940s, the Jewish population in the area couldn’t sustain a synagogue, and the structures became part of the high school run by Franciscans. In 1961, Mt. Pisgah Missionary Baptist congregation acquired the property.

By the time we got to the last church on the tour, we were feeling the overload. At least I was. It’s the kind of feeling that drives you back to your room for an evening of television – a bad movie in another language is just the thing — after spending the day looking at grand churches or magnificent museums or arresting ruins or even just intense, one-thing-after-another cities, or some combo of all these.

Well, one more. We can handle that. The last one for bus #4 was the curiously named First Baptist Congregational Church at 60 N. Ashland Ave. Its Gothic Revival outside hinted that it was going to be another big, spectacular church inside. That’s a good thing, of course. But the effect wears off a little after four others.

It was spectacular inside. But not in the way I expected. It perked me right up and made me want to look around. It wasn’t like any of the other churches. For one thing, First Baptist Congregational is an auditorium church, trimmed in dark woods, a very inviting design.

The view toward the front, facing the powerful organ, among other things.

Toward the back.

It’s also the oldest of the churches we saw that day, built as the Union Park Congregational in 1869, long enough ago that the congregation who built it had been abolitionist before the war, and active in resisting the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. After the war, the congregation counted Mary Todd Lincoln as a member for a time.

They hired one Gurdon P. Randall to design their church. He was active in Chicago both before and after the war, but apparently a number of his structures were lost in the Chicago Fire. Union Park Congregational survived, since the fire didn’t reach this far west. Through a number of shifts in congregation whose details I’ll skip, the modern congregation is affiliated with both the United Church of Christ and the National Baptist Convention.

It isn’t lavish in an in-your-face way, but the detail is remarkable.

Got pretty stained glass, too.

About three years ago, a snowstorm sent one of the smaller spires crashing through the roof and the false roof over the nave (if that’s the right term for an auditorium church). That was bad enough, but apparently the wind then carried soot that had accumulated between the two roofs over the years inside the church, covering everything. The restoration was only recently completed.

At St. Paul’s Catholic Church at 2234 S. Hoyne in Chicago, Paul is there to greet you.

Or at least a mosaic St. Paul does, looking absolutely certain of his mission to the Gentiles. He’s above the front entrance, and while the church has many brilliant mosaics – and who doesn’t like a brilliant mosaic? – note the bricks around the Paul mosaic. The entire church is an enormous, artful mass of those bricks. As this view from the rear makes clear.

“St. Paul’s Church was established by a small German community in 1876, with its cornerstone laid in 1897,” the CAF says. “Designed by Henry J. Schlacks, the church was built entirely by its own parishioners — many of whom were professional bricklayers. Singled out in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not as ‘the church built without nails,’ the structure underwent a long-term restoration project completed in 2013. The gothic-style building is visible from all sides of Pilsen due to its exceptionally tall spires and dark brick.”

Schlacks, of course, is the fellow who did St. Adalbert (see yesterday). But St. Paul was an astonishingly early work in his career, since he was only 28 at the time. “Schlacks himself took on the role of general contractor and hired men of the parish…” the CAF says. “He wrote, ‘We could find no builder in Chicago acquainted with the proposed method of construction, or who could give even an approximate estimate of the cost from my plans….’ ”

True to the tradition of its building, parishioners did most of the recent renovation, as this article in Crain’s Chicago Business (of all places) notes. And a fine job of it they did.

It’s all brick, even the white areas on the ceiling, which were plastered over at some point. The mosaics, we were told, were completed in the early 1930s – ordered in pieces from Germany, I believe. Especially striking are Jesus and the Apostles, though they look a little like they’re at a board meeting of some kind (the nonprofit Salvation Co).

By the time we got to St. Paul’s, we were eating our sack lunches in the bus. The tour took us downstairs for more refreshments. The lower level, now an event and meeting space, was a major part of the recent renovation, and striking in its own way.

When I saw it, I thought, Rathskeller. Perfect place to hoist a brew and sing drinking songs in bad German. In the case of the tour, however, the only drinks on offer were water, soda and coffee.

During the Churches by Bus tour on Saturday, I became acquainted with a few new saints. That’s one of the things about saints, there are always more. The second church for bus #4 was St. Procopius Catholic Church at 1641 S. Allport St. in the Pilsen neighborhood.

Procopius? The Secret History Procopius? He was a saint?

No. Different fellow, separated by 500 years or so and some geography. From the web site of St. Patrick’s Church in Washington, DC: “Born in Bohemia; died March 25, 1053; canonized by Pope Innocent III in 1204; feast day formerly July 4. Procopius studied in Prague, where he was also ordained. He became a canon, was a hermit for a time, and then was founding abbot of the Basilian abbey of Sazaba in Prague.

“Procopius is one of the patrons of Czechoslovakia (Benedictines, Delaney). In art, Saint Procopius lets the devil plough for him. He may be portrayed (1) as an abbot with a book and discipline, devil at his feet; (2) with a stag (or hind) near him; (3) with SS Adelbert, Ludmilla, and Vitus (patrons of Prague); or (4) as a hermit with a skull and a girdle of leaves (Roeder).”

Pilsen, as the name strongly suggests, used to be a Bohemian neighborhood, in the ethnic sense of that term, not the hipster sense. In 1875, St. Procopius was established as the third parish for the Bohemians of Chicago, and the parish built this handsome church in the early 1880s. According to some sources, Paul Huber was the architect. Other sources say it Julius Huber. The father and son sometimes worked together, so maybe they both did, to create the Romanesque Revival structure.

Back then, the Benedictines administered the church. There was even a monastery on site that later moved to suburban Lilse and became the Abbey of St. Procopius. Now the Jesuits operate the church.

In our time, Pilsen is a large Mexican-American neighborhood, with some bohemians in that other sense – those who can’t afford Bucktown or Wicker Park any more – filtering into the neighborhood. Or so I’ve read. My visits to the neighborhood have been scant few in recent years.

Here’s Procopius, center stage. No stag or skull or leaves or even a devil, but artistic interpretations vary.

Not far away are Mary and the infant Jesus, flanked by Joachim and Anne, with Mary as a girl. I don’t ever remember seeing this particular array before, but I don’t spend a lot of time studying religious art.

In a back corner of the church stands a statue of Miguel Agustin Pro, S.J.

The Jesuits are honoring one of their own, martyred by the anti-clerical government of Mexican President Plutarco Elias Calles in 1927. Before being executed by firing squad, Pro put his arms up and cried out, “Viva Cristo Rey!” Newspapers published a picture of him in that position, and so he stands in a church far to the north.

The church is also a shrine of the Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos. A sign in Spanish and English on the outside of the building, near the entrance, says so. (The nearby cornerstone says: “AD SANCTUM PROCOPIUM C Missio Haec Fundata Est A.D. 1875 Hic Lapis Angularis Positus Est 23 Julii 1882.”) If you can’t make it to the shrine of that name in central Mexico, coming here counts, and apparently people do in droves.