Making of a Mapping Project

By Al Preston

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            I’m very proud of the first walking tours created by the Holiday Pride! They were created with the help of Julian and Jessie, two former classmates and current colleagues of mine. You can take a listen to how they viewed working on this project in the future, but in this blog post we’re going to talk about the more nitty-gritty, slightly boring details.

            See, we’re not stopping at the free-to-download brochure on the map page which is perhaps obvious if you go to the map page. We’re going to have far more maps!

            So, I’ll start breaking down our process with our research. I have to give a big thanks to the Heinz History Center for letting us bother them so much as we searched for as much information about the city’s gay bars as we could. They allowed us to look through their collections from Donnie Thinnis, gay newspapers, and the city directories.

            Much of our research (you can find it on the map page) comes from them and from the internet. While there hadn’t been a complete list of the bars before, they didn’t go unnoticed by the city. There was so much love and care put into the bars when they were open and when they closed. Pittsburghers are also lovers of history, and many folks have tried to record the history of some of the bar buildings in some way or another.

            Researching something that hasn’t been collectively studied before is not only difficult, but also quite new to me. In my schooling, I really only researched and wrote about subjects that had large amounts of prior research. However, I find researching the lesser known far topics more interesting and fun.

            I love bringing together all of this information to help general audiences know more just as much as I love digging all the information up. Working on this mapping project has been so much fun.

            Just to give some statistics, we’ve been researching these bars for about five months. We started with a list of about thirty bar names and only a bit of knowledge of some of them. As we researched and looking up Pittsburgh Gay bars, we started to get to about fifty bar names.

            Then we went to the Heinz the first time. After about four hours of dedicated searching, we discovered somewhere in the realm of 65 bars. Not all running at the same time, of course. At the most, thirty bars were running congruently and were scattered across the city.

            New York, San Francisco, and many other cities have one section of the city dedicated to mostly queer folks. The reason for those cities to have a ‘gay place’ as it were, is the same reason that there were red light districts in the same cities.

            Many cities across the US chose to section off crimes of ‘passion’ or crimes with ‘no victim’ like prostitution into one place so that it would be easier to control, and wrangle. Pittsburgh, on the other hand, chose to create an opposite effect.

            A city ordinance prevented sex shops, rub parlors, dirty bookstores, or certain kinds of bars from being able to pop up close to each other. For example, and for simplicity’s sake, here’s a city block:

This building is a dirty bookstore.

And this one is a sex shop.

According to this ordinance, any of these buildings in-between…

            Are too close to those two stores for another sex related shop to open. Due to this, the owners of these kinds of places had to take residence in buildings that weren’t too close to another sex related store.

            Now, like I said, some bars were also beholden to this rule, but not all of them so a few could gather together and they did. Downtown had a number of bars all on the same street. However, because Pittsburgh was resisting the creation of a red-light district, queer folks were also as scattered. Some opened around the sex shops and rub parlors, others popped up in their own spots. Additionally, some buildings became ‘legacy’ bars. In the city, liquor licenses are hard to get and do not move with a particular store. They stay attached to the building itself. Therefore, if you wanted to open a gay bar, it was easier to buy a former bar from a retiring owner than try and start a brand new location.

            Was that a more successful way of handling red light shops and gay bars? It’s hard to say. It certainly fractured communities, and the city was able to target and close individual shops more easily. As seen with the creation of the Cultural District where many bars, sex shops, and rub parlors once were.

            On the flip side, gay bars were prolific and lasted a long time. The owners were all queer themselves and the bars helped each other as much as they could.

            It was wonderful to discover everything we could about the bars. There is some information we’re still missing, and I hope we’ll be able to discover more as we talk to more of the city’s elders or acquire more archival material.

            Coming very soon is an interactive map, and a longer audio tour so keep a close eye on the map exhibit page!