CP Photo: Mars Johnson
Evergreen Cafe owner Phil Bacharach's license plate. Pittsburgh City Paper readers named him "Best Jagoff" in the 2023 Best of Pittsburgh issue.
Jennifer Makovics moved from Michigan to Pittsburgh about 12 years ago. When out-of-town friends and family have visited her throughout the years, they’ve found it mystifying that someone could legally park their car in the right lane of Penn Ave. in front of the Evergreen Cafe, home of Pittsburgh’s polarizing parking menace Phil Bacharach. Makovics agrees.
“Anyone that’s not from here isn’t expecting a parked car to be in the middle of this heavy traffic road,” Makovics, a Regent Square resident, says. “And so it just felt dangerous to me, and I know, talking to people who weren’t from here, they’d feel very anxious about it.”
CP Photo: Mars Johnson
Jennifer Makovics poses for a portrait in Frick Park, near where the Evergreen Cafe is located.
Now, as Bacharach has been unsuccessfully petitioning the City for more information about the decision and a return to the previous parking sign, Makovics and others have simultaneously been pushing them to actually enforce the parking sign.
“My petition was, ‘why is this parking allowed?’ And I think now it’s changed from a policy to an enforcement,” Makovics says.
Bacharach, however, still won’t back down.
“They can put another sign out there and enforce it,” Bacharach says. “That’s not the one I want out there.”
Of the decision to implement the parking sign, City of Pittsburgh Press Secretary Olga George said by email, “The City makes decisions about street parking everyday [SIC] based on a variety of factors including curbside usage, safety and statutory code. This decision is no different than any of the other decisions the city makes on a daily basis. In this case, [the Department of Mobility and Infrastructure] worked with [the] owner of the Evergreen to permit a loading zone to occur during off-peak hours to facilitate business loading activities.”
Past and present comments from Bacharach in City Paper interviews imply he has been stretching the limits of what’s allowed.
Still, “I’ve seen the car less, definitely, lately,” Makovics says. “And I’ve been asking neighbors, too, ‘have you been seeing it not as often?’ So the car is there less. That I feel pretty confident saying.”
When she or neighbors of hers see the car parked there, they call the city’s 311 Response Center or 911 to report the potential violation, she says. Calls have been made as recently as mid-March, according to Makovics.
CP Photo: Mars Johnson
Phil Bacharach in the Evergreen Cafe, and the loading zone sign outside of it
District-9 Councilman Khari Mosley helped facilitate conversations between Bacharach and the City’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure (DOMI).
“My hope is to try to tamp down what’s becoming an increasingly divisive issue,” Mosley says. “And I know the folks who have been opposed to it have been very loud, but there is a sizable [amount of] folks in the community that also have been in support of Phil. I just didn’t want things to spiral out of control.”
Mosley says he finds the high-speed traffic of Penn Ave. as a whole to be concerning. While he referenced an incident last year in which a motorist struck and killed a man leaving the Evergreen Cafe, it’s a larger issue that goes well beyond the bar. Because the state owns the road, the community would have to contend with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) for more holistic changes.
“The more that the community is divided and at odds with one another, that’s going to prevent us from forming a coalition so that we can petition PennDOT to do some more comprehensive traffic calming with DOMI to make that corridor safer,” Mosley says.
For now, though, the battle over the lane outside of the Evergreen Cafe continues to rage.
City Paper visited Bacharach Wednesday afternoon, finding him tending in the small cafe to a few groups of people drinking and eating. I told Bacharach it was nice to meet him in person and to see the place, and he told me, “it’s just a bar.”
He wants the old sign back, and filed a Right to Know Request with the city in hopes to obtain correspondence and some sort of formal report about the loading zone decision. After about a month, he received PDFs of email correspondence with city officials that he didn’t find very illuminating, he says. He has been considering taking the issue to the state.
“I’d like to get my parking back during the mornings to 2:30 in the afternoon,” Bacharach says. “I don’t care about at night. I just want it at crunch times, when I have customers who can’t find a place to park.”
For what it’s worth, when City Paper visited Bacharach, his car was not parked in the loading zone.
