Donny’s Place should have become Pittsburgh’s first LGBTQ historic landmark. The building houses a cornucopia of historically significant stories inside an unassuming container that itself is historically significant. The effort to designate Donny’s Place a City of Pittsburgh historic site should have been an easy case to make, and it likely would have been in any other city.
But this is Pittsburgh. Here, the nomination died after being shot down by the Historic Review Commission and the Planning Commission. The City Council voted July 22 to deny the designation and ended one of the most contested historic preservation bids in city history.
Pittsburgh once exemplified cutting-edge historic preservation practice. In the 1960s, local preservationists forged what historian John Sprinkle dubbed the “The Pittsburgh Approach.” It was a pragmatic and collaborative method that treated historic properties as renewable resources, not artworks in distressed neighborhoods threatened by urban renewal.
Today, that creativity and sophistication have been lost. Pittsburgh’s preservationists now are a mostly ineffective and unsophisticated group of city planners and volunteer preservation advocates. The Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, founded in 1964 and hailed as Pittsburgh Approach innovators, has evolved into a real estate and tourism business. PHLF avoids cases where property owners object to historic designation.
“As a matter of our own policy, we don’t support third party nominations of buildings, i.e. nomination without the owner’s consent. We don’t believe in it,” a PHLF spokesperson wrote in a 2021 email.
As a local preservation professional, I had a front row seat for two of the city’s most combative historic designation bids (In 1999, and again in 2022) : the Pittsburgh Wool Company and the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House, a former racketeer’s Uptown home designated historic in 2022. As a journalist, I covered the Donny’s Place nomination from its first community meeting through to its defeat on Grant Street this summer.
Before dropping my public history and historic preservation practice in 2022 in the wake of the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House case, I had spent almost 40 years working for government agencies and consulting firms doing historic preservation work. I also taught historic preservation for a national training organization and at Goucher College, one of the nation’s leading historic preservation graduate programs. While living in the Washington, D.C. suburbs I chaired the Montgomery County, Md. Historic Preservation Commission. You might say that, by the time I hung up my preservationist hat and dusted off my journalist hat to cover the Donny’s Place proceedings, I knew my way around historic preservation.
Donny’s Place clearly met multiple criteria for designation as a city historic site. Its graffiti-tagged, threadbare exterior speaks volumes to why owner Donald Thinnes established his bar there and why it remained a Pittsburgh and regional institution for almost 50 years. If I had been on a historic preservation board hearing the case, recommending designation would have been an easy decision.
But, again, this is Pittsburgh, where, by law, the nine-member HRC has just one commissioner with a background in historic preservation. The others are representatives of city agencies and the real estate and architecture industries.
Pittsburgh’s law has conflict of interest built into it. It allows sitting HRC members to nominate properties for designation and then participate in the deliberations and vote on them. Commissioner Matthew Falcone, president of Preservation Pittsburgh and the HRC’s resident preservation expert, has done so more than 30 times, including for the home where he lives and the synagogue where he was congregation president at the time of its nomination and subsequent designation.
Falcone began recusing himself from cases with Preservation Pittsburgh involvement after the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House designation. He recused himself from the Donny’s Place case.
As a Certified Local Government (CLG), Pittsburgh has benefitted from generous historic preservation grants offered by the U.S. Department of the Interior, and the city gets a special seat at the table in federally funded or licensed projects that require compliance with the National Historic Preservation Act. To maintain its CLG status, Pittsburgh’s HRC members must get a minimum amount of annual training to maintain the city’s certification. The HRC gets some training, but it’s not as much as the guidelines require, and the subject matter sometimes diverges from what the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) has recommended as training topics.
In 2022, the SHPO recommended that the HRC develop “a consistent, mandatory training policy for HRC members and staff,” according to Pennsylvania Deputy State Historic Preservation officer, Andrea MacDonald. Specific areas recommended for HRC training included Pittsburgh’s preservation law (Chapter 11), historic property designation, and conducting of public meetings. The HRC, in 2024, according to SHPO records, “expressed interest in future training on history of Point State Park, archaeology, and acceptable sustainable materials.”
MacDonald also told Pittsburgh City Paper that the city has missed its training benchmarks multiple times since 2020. Some of that, she wrote in response to emailed questions, was due to the COVID pandemic.
Pittsburgh City Planning Department assistant director Kevin Kunak confirmed MacDonald’s information about HRC training. “Covid disrupted our educational efforts. We are currently revamping our program to include webinars, in-person training, and conferences,” Kunak replied in response to emailed questions from City Paper.
“Annual training is mandatory for HRC Commissioners. Training is usually ‘preservation adjacent’ and focus[es] on maintaining Commissioner’s professional accreditations,” Kunak said. “City Planning offers free preservation webinars to City staff and Commissioners through its membership in the National Association of Preservation Commissions (NAPC).”
I think that lack of training and expertise likely contributed to why the Donny’s Place nomination failed. City historic preservation planner Sarah Quinn, in her staff reports for the nomination, simply reused text from the landmark nomination. She provided no additional research, context, nor analysis for the HRC and Planning Commission.
That surprised Donny’s Place nominator Lizzie Anderson and Carnegie Mellon University historian Harrison Apple. The HRC cited a lack of information on Pittsburgh gay bars as a major reason for not recommending designation for Donny’s Place. My coverage of key sites in Pittsburgh queer culture for local newsrooms draws heavily on research by local and nationally renowned experts in LGBTQ history and historic preservation. I have written about Lucky’s, the Pittsburgh Eagle, Travelers Social Club, and other notable queer bars that once made Pittsburgh “Gay America’s best kept secret.” Apple’s work always was close at hand.
“I think that there is extant evidence that that bar made a dramatic impact on the history of LGBT life in Pittsburgh and, by definition, made an indelible mark on the city of Pittsburgh,” Apple said after the City Council recommended denying the designation.
Quinn similarly handled the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House nomination. Instead of going beyond the pages I wrote, Quinn simply cut and pasted large blocks from the 120-page nomination into her staff reports. Quinn also managed to erase women’s and Black history from her presentation of the case to the HRC and Planning Commission, despite being cornerstones in the nomination that I wrote.
Donny’s Place regulars from the 1970s and earlier (as well as patrons from the bars’ former days as the Norreh Social Club) recognized the building from its heyday as a familiar neighborhood bar and, later, queer gathering spot. Some of them said as much even as they testified in hearings while opposing the nomination. But as with the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House case, HRC members confused the concept of integrity — a building’s capacity to convey why it’s historically significant — with the building’s condition.
All the HRC could see in Donny’s Place was a dilapidated, fire-damaged eyesore.
Preservation Pittsburgh, which helped the nominators complete the application, and which testified in hearings to support it, likewise failed to provide any expertise. One reason some HRC members gave for not supporting the nomination was that it represented a slice of Pittsburgh history that was too recent, and that owner Thinnes was not historically significant. Had Preservation Pittsburgh (and the nominators) gone deeper into the property’s history and its connection to neighboring 1228 Herron Ave. (also owned by Thinnes and physically connected to the bar at 1226 Herron Ave.), they would have found connections to wider Pittsburgh history through prior owner John Fiorucci, an influential former boxer, bar owner, city alderman, and police magistrate.
“Donny’s Place address listed on the historic nomination application was 1226 Herron Avenue — this address was based on all the research, archival materials, and computer searches that list 1226 Herron as the address for Donny’s in the public and popular sense,” Preservation Pittsburgh’s Melissa McSwigan wrote in response to emailed questions from CP.
Some historians have written about “the dead hand of the past” in historic preservation practice. The concept suggests contemporary public policy decisions are gripped by a figurative dead hand that holds things like historic properties unchanged in perpetuity. Writing about the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2001, a group of legal scholars wrote, “The Commission on the one hand is the dead hand that prevents development and economic viability.”
The dead hand in Pittsburgh functions similarly, but with a few twists.
After the HRC voted in 2023 to approve demolishing the Uptown garage (and later beer distributorship), where bootlegger Joe Tito stored his fleet of liquor transporting trucks, and where Rolling Rock beer was first sold, I reached out to city preservation planners asking for information on how to de-designate the landmark.
“There is no guidance in our ordinance,” Quinn replied. The law has just one mention of de-designation, in a section covering time limits imposed on resubmitting proposed designations. “The Historic Review Commission shall not consider a proposed amendment or rescission of designation within one (1) year of its previous designation,” the law reads.
When a fire gutted Tito’s former house, I asked Kunak how to begin the rescission process. After consulting with the city’s Law Department, Kunak replied that a new application for designation was required: “Our recommendation is the rescission process should generally follow the historic nomination process.” That process includes DAM and HRC, Planning Commission, and City Council hearings.
Pittsburgh’s roster of designated historic sites is a lot like the Hotel California: you can check out, but you can never leave.
Pittsburgh’s preservation dead hand and its questionably trained regulatory regime impact the city in ways many residents may not realize. They make consequential decisions affecting more than old buildings.
“Individuals who participate in local preservation programs, both as volunteers and staff, are often tasked with making important decisions about projects and properties in their communities,” read SHPO CLG guidelines approved in 2018. “Given the significance of these responsibilities and the impacts they can have on property owners and the community, it is important for decision-makers to be knowledgeable about best practices and current issues in preservation, design, and community development.”
Though well-intentioned, Pittsburgh’s preservation law may be doing more harm than good to the city. Its stewards may be stunting development by embracing what Landmarks Illinois president Bonnie McDonald dubbed the “culture of preciousness.” It’s a focus on subjective standards that prioritize pretty old buildings instead of the people and events with which they were associated.
“The culture of preciousness values integrity over significance,” McDonald wrote. “If we are truly about saving places and their stories, significance must be considered independent of integrity.”
Instead of returning to the Pittsburgh Approach and embracing new preservation best practices, Pittsburgh’s HRC has the city’s history firmly in the grip of a dead hand. As the Donny’s Place, Tito-Mecca-Zizza House, and Pittsburgh Wool Company cases show, the city’s heritage is being lost, along with opportunities to craft solutions that protect Pittsburgh’s invaluable history and encourage development that benefits the city. Pittsburgh has two options as I see them: repeal its preservation law or substantially amend it to bring it into the 21st century.
This article appears in Aug 6-12, 2025.
