Tucked tightly beneath the concrete arch bridge carrying Ohio River Boulevard over Woods Run is a four-story building with strong ties to LGBTQ history.
Between 1993 and 2012, nightclub entrepreneur extraordinaire Scott Noxon operated it as the Pittsburgh Eagle. Like the bridge that dwarfs it, the brick building towers over Eckert Street and Don’s Diner, the popular eatery located across the road. And like Donny’s Place in Polish Hill and the True Luck Café (Lucky’s) in the Strip District, the Eagle occupied a building with its own deep and fascinating history, begining with an Irish saloonkeeper who bankrupted himself constructing the building, and ending with a key chapter in the city’s history of queer nightlife entertainment.
A Woods Run saloon and a suburban roadhouse
The building at 1740 Eckert St. was one of two brick buildings Robert L. Matthews had constructed between 1902 and 1906. The first was a store designed by architect Frederick Scheibler, the second a saloon and hotel that became the Pittsburgh Eagle. According to a biography of the architect, who later became known for designing many distinctive homes and apartment buildings, the store was his second professional commission.
The Pennsylvania-born son of an Irish immigrant who worked as a shoemaker, Matthews, by the 1890s, had traded working as a railroad brakeman for a career in hospitality. He got his first saloon license in 1895 and he began buying lots along McClure Avenue.
Matthews was 46 in 1904 when he married Catherine Reel, the daughter of a wealthy Allegheny County family whose ancestors include early settler Casper Reel.
The Scheibler-designed Matthews saloon and hotel was a neoclassical architectural gem. Its Eckert Street façade includes two massive pilasters and a cartouche with Matthews’ initials. The brick building featured a Scheibler design hallmark: a steel frame. It was built to last and make a statement about its owner’s wealth.
Like many other Pittsburgh hospitality entrepreneurs, Matthews left a complicated legacy. The saloon and hotel failed in 1907. Despite his in-laws wealth, Matthews had borrowed heavily, presumably to finance the building and create a luxurious drinking establishment.
“They were A #1 bar fixtures,” Matthews told a federal bankruptcy judge in 1908. He had paid $4,000 ($145,000 in 2025) for a mahogany, glass, and marble bar, and sideboard. The 18-room building had 26 chandeliers that cost him $1,275 ($46,000), and the basement power plant to light the building included a gas-powered generator that cost $2,500 ($92,000).
Matthews had sunk more than $10,000 ($363,000) in fixtures and lighting alone. He had $46,000 ($1.6 million) in secured debts and owed individuals $3,847 ($139,803) for outstanding loans and work on the building. His biggest creditor was former congressman and pioneering nature photographer George Shiras 3rd [sic], whom Matthews owed $1,120 ($40,701). When he filed for bankruptcy, Matthews had assets worth just $255 ($9,266): four suits, one overcoat, one ring, one watch and chain, and $255 in cash.
After losing the saloon and his shirt, Matthews and his wife opened a Ross Township roadhouse called The Oaks. Because of the bankruptcy, the property was in Catherine Matthews’ name, and Robert Matthews owned the saloon license. Scheibler designed a new building for Catherine, yet a different one ultimately was constructed.
The Matthews marriage began to disintegrate after they opened the roadhouse, and, in 1913, Catherine filed for divorce. Their split was anything but conventional. Robert Matthews, according to the divorce case record, “drank a great deal and was ill natured, unreasonable … he habitually insulted guests at the hotel; made improper advances towards them and at times exposed his person before them, greatly mortifying his wife.”
As the divorce case moved forward, Pittsburgh newspapers reported that Robert Matthews had sued Catherine’s sister, Stella Reel. As the Pittsburgh Press reported, Matthews “[declared] that his wife’s sister persuaded her to desert him and to apply for a divorce.” Robert Matthews also alleged that his sister-in-law had gotten free room and board at the roadhouse in the months leading up to the divorce and he demanded $10,000 in damages.
Robert lived the remainder of his life in poverty; he died in 1934, a resident of the North Side Little Sisters of the Poor home for the elderly. Catherine Matthews owned and operated The Oaks until 1937; she died in 1952. Curiously, despite their contentious and very public divorce, Catherine and Robert are buried in the same plot in Christ Our Redeemer Cemetery in Ross Township.
Back in Woods Run, a new saloon keeper took over the building and, in 1921, the Ukrainian-Americanization Association bought it and converted it into a clubhouse. By the 1930s, it had become known as Eckert Hall. Tenants included two candy companies.
In 1942, the building changed hands again and became a Polish social club: the Kazimierza Pulaskiego Sick Benefit Association (later renamed the Kazimier Pulaski Society). As a private social club, the Pulaski society followed a familiar trajectory because of its liquor license: beneficial community social events coupled with multiple law enforcement raids, mostly for sales to non-members.
The Eagle is hatched
Scott Noxon repeated an old pattern when he bought 1740 Eckert St. in 1993. The city’s queer spaces tended to be located in older, converted buildings. Ethnic social clubs were popular choices. In many cases, writes Pittsburgh Queer History Project founder Harrison Apple, the buildings and fixtures came with liquor licenses for sale.
Adapting older buildings was a pattern among historically marginalized people in the city, including immigrant and Black residents. “None of the establishments was found located in any recently built building,” wrote University of Pittsburgh graduate student William Y. Bell Jr. in a 1938 master’s thesis about the city’s Black recreational businesses.
The Pittsburgh Eagle was Noxon’s first bar in an older building with a colorful history. Noxon used a popular name for the Woods Run nightclub — there were other Eagle gay bars throughout the country, in New York, Washington, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, according to a 2017 NBC News report.
A little more than a decade after opening the Eagle, Noxon bought Pegasus at 818 Liberty Ave. in 2005. In 2009, Noxon told Pittsburgh City Paper that, in 1984, he came out at Pegasus, and that he had fond memories of the place.
Pegasus was a space that, since the 1940s, had been home to nightclubs owned and frequented by Jewish racketeers. The basement nightclub’s best-known tenant was Lenny Litman’s Copa, which was open between 1948 and 1959.
Lenny Litman was one of three brothers who ran a variety of illegal enterprises. The middle brother and most public facing, for many years Lenny penned entertainment and society columns for local newspapers. His older brother Raymond “Archie” was a boxing promoter and beer distributor. Younger brother Eugene also was in the beer business and real estate.
“Lenny was the front,” explains one close family associate who asked to remain anonymous because he was discussing criminal activities. “He was the front for Archie and Eugene.” As for Eugene, the associate described him as Pittsburgh’s Jewish Godfather.
Pegasus became a hub of Pittsburgh queer life, hosting fundraisers and benefits for a variety of LGBTQ+ causes. In 1998, the Post-Gazette dubbed Pegasus “Pittsburgh’s most visible gay bar.” Like its predecessor, the Copa — which, according to Apple, in 1954 hosted pioneering trans performer Christine Jorgensen’s nightclub debut — Pegasus had become a safe place for marginalized and socially stigmatized people.
It was a fun and safe place for Pittsburgh’s gay men. Yet, times were changing by the time Noxon bought Pegasus. Gay men had more socializing and nightlife options because of cultural shifts, and the costs of running a downtown club had gotten too expensive.
Clipped wings
Under Noxon’s ownership, Pegasus and The Eagle overlapped for four years before Noxon decided to leave Liberty Avenue and fold Pegasus into The Eagle building. Each bar had its own demographic and patron preferences. Young gay men were the core group at Pegasus, and the Eagle catered to a more mature crowd, Noxon told the Post-Gazette in 2015, three years after he closed the Woods Run bar in 2012.
Noxon sold the property in 2017. City Paper reached out to him about its history. He shared a few details about the architecture, but he declined to answer any questions. “I am not saying much to any of the press about anything with buildings,” Noxon texted. “The Donnies bar [Donny’s Place] thing is just sad.”
The exchange with Noxon occurred a few days after the Historic Review Commission declined to vote on whether it should recommend the former Donny’s Place building in Polish Hill as a City of Pittsburgh historic landmark.
HRC members claimed they didn’t have enough information about how Donny’s Place fit into the history of Pittsburgh’s LGBTQ culture and history. However, the information about Donny’s Place and others, like The Eagle, is documented. Apple wrote about the bars and their buildings, including The Eagle, Donny’s Place, Pegasus, and many other bars in their 2021 University of Arizona Ph.D. dissertation, “A Social Member in Good Standing: Pittsburgh’s Gay After-Hours Social Clubs, 1960-1990.”
“In terms of LGBTQ history in Pittsburgh, it is one of the longer-running historically central institutions,” Apple says of Donny’s Place. “To have a physical remnant left of itself, it’s one of very, very few places of similar ilk like Pegasus and the Eagle.”
This article appears in May 28 – Jun 3, 2025.
