Welcome back to #Mobsburgh (Social Distancing Edition).

For much of the 20th century, Fifth Avenue was one of Pittsburgh’s major ethnic business corridors. It begins downtown and then winds up the city’s hills towards the eastern suburbs. Its first mile forms a boundary separating the city’s Hill District from the Bluff (or Uptown) neighborhood. That stretch included bars, restaurants, and drugstores that were key sites in the city’s bustling numbers gambling rackets. There were popular places, like Darling’s Drug Store at Fifth and Stevenson, where gamblers placed their bets and numbers bankers, controllers, and runners mingled.

And then there was the Aurora Club at 11 Pride Street. Pittsburgh’s numbers bankers gathered there to drink, play cards, and share information about the city’s rackets. It wasn’t as well-known as the Crawford Grill No. 2 in the Upper Hill nor was it as flashy as Squirrel Hill’s Beacon Club. Yet, for several decades the Aurora Club was an important part of Pittsburgh’s entertainment economy and vice ecosystem.

Not to be confused with the “Aurora Reading Club,” an African-American literary society, the club first opened in the 1960s. It was located in a two-story building on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Pride Street.

In earlier years, the site was occupied by a three-story brick building which housed several businesses between the turn of the 20th century and the early 1940s. These included a furniture store owned by Samuel Cooper, a Chinese laundry, and a shoe store called the Fifth Avenue Boot Shop.

The brick building was demolished and replaced in 1942 by a new two-story brick building with a storefront on Fifth Avenue and an entrance to the second floor in the Pride Street facade. A succession of businesses occupied the building’s first floor space: a television and appliance store, followed by a tile business.

In 1950, Realtors with organized crime ties were marketing the new building’s second floor space to potential tenants as show room or office space. Newspaper ads published in the 1950s and early 1960s indicate that the space housed several offices prior to being converted into a nightclub.

By 1963, the “Berryman & West Club” had relocated from an earlier home in the Hill District to 11 Pride Street. The club booked local jazz acts, including noted trombonist Harold Betters (b. 1928). Ads published starting in 1963 also noted that the club sponsored boxing matches in the city.

By 1965, the club was doing business as the Aurora Lodge. It continued booking the same acts — Harold Betters was a favorite — and sponsoring boxing matches in area arenas. Newspapers frequently mentioned the club as one of the hottest Black nightspots in Pittsburgh, right up there with the Crawford Grill and the Hurricane Lounge.

Former Pittsburgh City Councilmember Sala Udin recalls visiting the club in its heyday. “I remember one of my last visits to the club at 5th & Pride was to see Arthur ‘Red’ Prysock (in the Billy Eckstien tradition),” Udin wrote in an email responding to questions about the club. “During that time, I remember visiting the club frequently, as an ‘after hours’ club.”

Throughout the 1960s and into the 1980s, the club continued to be a popular entertainment venue. In 1966, Muhammad Ali’s first wife, Sonji Clay, was a singer at the time and she held a news conference in the club shortly after the couple divorced.

In 1972, Hubert Humphrey campaigned in Pittsburgh. After visiting downtown, the candidate spent the evening in the Aurora Club with Hill District residents. The bar was filled to capacity. People were “seated at tables, and … stacked two deep at the bar,” the Pittsburgh Press reported.

The jazz shows, press conferences, and political activities were the club’s public face. Offstage and off the books, the club was a popular hangout for the city’s numbers racketeers, including Jewish and Italian numbers bankers. “It wasn’t an Italian/Jewish club. It was a black club (to my knowledge),” according to Udin. Unlike more fashionable places like the Ankara and Copa where the numbers men brought their wives and families, the Aurora was strictly business.

“It’s a gambling place,” recalled Will Darling in a 2019 interview. Darling, 98, was a longtime Hill District figure whose uncle owned Darling’s Drug Store in the next block. “It was more of a crude place …Beacon Club was a nice place. You’d get a sandwich or something. Aurora Club was just crap games.”

Mob Real Estate

The club appears to have remained under law enforcement’s radar for its first few years in business. The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board in 1967 temporarily closed the club for selling after hours and for alcohol sales to non-members. In September 1974, the Pittsburgh Press reported that 56 people were arrested in a raid at the club and “five guns and a small amount of drugs” were seized. Eight years later, in 1982, that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that four men had been arrested in a raid that yielded more than $4,000 in numbers slips.

Despite being well-known among Pittsburgh’s gamblers and racketeers in the 1960s, the lack of law enforcement action at the club might have been the result of it being a protected place. The building in which the club rented space had been owned since 1950 by Antonio “Tony” Ripepi (1902 [or 1903]-1996), an organized crime figure whose career began in the 1930s. Ripepi was born in Calabria, Italy, and he arrived in the United States in 1921.

Ripepi worked as a bus driver in 1930 (for his brother Angelo’s company) when he completed his citizenship petition. He had married Ursola Quattroni in 1929; she had been born in 1909 in Allegheny County to parents who came to the United States from the same Calabrian town as her future husband.

According to the Pennsylvania Crime Commission’s 1990 report on organized crime in the state, Ripepi was a “capo” in the Southwestern Pennsylvania branch of La Cosa Nostra. Federal and state law enforcement files from the 1960s and 1970s show that he ran numbers operations in Allegheny, Fayette, and Washington counties.

Ripepi’s first known brush with the law came in June 1938 when he was arrested in Gallatin while carrying more than 1,000 numbers slips. By the 1940s, Ripepi was in the jukebox business. The coin vending enterprise was a flimsy cover for distributing slot machines throughout the region. Ripepi’s longtime partnership with John LaRocca (1901-1984), a Sicilian native who law enforcement believed ran the Mafia in Southwestern Pennsylvania for several decades, began with numbers and slot machines. The building at 1501 Fifth Avenue was one block away from Ripepi’s Keystone Music Company, the front for his slot machine enterprise.

But the association wasn’t just business. It was family. Ripepi’s daughter was married to John Bazzano Jr. (1927-2008), another gambling figure whose father owned the Rome Coffee Shop in the Hill District. On July 29, 1932, three brothers from the Volpe crime family were shot to death in the shop. That brazen execution kicked off a violent turf war among area racketeers. Bazzano senior was believed to have ordered the Volpe killings and he was brutally murdered in New York City the following month. Law enforcement documents and newspaper accounts describe John Bazzano Jr. as one of John LaRocca’s most powerful underbosses.

Nuisance Bar

The Aurora Club continued to book jazz acts through the 1980s. Starting in 1984, Pittsburgh newspapers reported on a string of violent crimes associated with the bar. In August 1984, a man was shot and killed outside the bar. Three years later, in November 1987, another man was killed at the bar.

Over the next decade, multiple violent crimes were reported; many were linked to narcotics use and sales. Yet, the bar continued to operate mostly free from police enforcement.

In December 1998 a 22-year-old Wilkinsburg man was shot and killed after an argument at the club. The murder was the final straw for then-City Councilmember Sala Udin, who lived nearby. “If the Aurora Club is not closed by this weekend, they will have to move me out of the way, because I will block the door with my body,” Udin said in a statement printed in the Post-Gazette. “I am calling on the mayor, the chief of police, the district attorney, and the state police to close down the club immediately and permanently.”

Udin’s 1998 campaign to close the bar capped years of efforts. According to a December 23, 1998 Post-Gazette article,

City Councilman Sala Udin has led protests against Aurora Club operations. The task force has received dozens of complaints on its hot line about the after-hours bar on Pride Street, including calls about fighting, aggravated assaults and public urination, said Cmdr. William Joyce, who heads the vice and narcotics squad.

A few days after Udin’s statement following the murder, a judge heard the complaint that the council member filed filed and ordered the bar temporarily closed. Hearings and negotiations in January 1999 resulted in the club being permanently closed.

A Tainted Legacy

The Aurora Club has been effectively erased in histories of Pittsburgh’s Black nightlife that focus on the more glamorous places like the Crawford Grill. Yet, the Aurora Club was just as important to Pittsburgh’s African American residents as its better-known contemporaries. In an article published in 1985 in the Post-Gazette’s “Black on Black” column, model and Pittsburgh Parking Authority employee Lorraine D. Turner castigated other Black residents for the their detachment from what she believed to be authentic Black culture:

To folks who are concerned about being offended or of having their illusions shattered, I say: You don’t want to be caught screaming, “Oh my god, what do they want!” like in 1965, do you? You should want to be informed. I bet that you don’t read the Courier, the city’s black newspaper. I would also bet that you don’t frequent the “Name of the Game” the “Phase II” the “Aurora Club” or Erin and Wylie avenues. Even further, I would bet that the Negroes you come in contact with don’t frequent those places either. I therefore conclude that you are ignorant of black culture and black thought. Ignorance breeds superstition and fear so you ought to want to know. It won’t be often that a down brown will open up and tell you what’s up on the real side ….

Just two years earlier, the Press published a feature on the Hill District’s musical legacy. The Aurora Club was among the joints mentioned:

On Fulton or near it, mixed in with the Loendi Club, Crawford Grill, Musicians Club, Hurricane Lounge and Aurora Club were spots like the Bamboola Club, the J&J Bar, the Java Jungle, Five and Dime Bar, Hilltop Club, and the Torch Club ….

The violence associated with the Aurora Club’s last years appears to have stigmatized its legacy in Pittsburgh Black culture and history. Even Mark Whitaker’s 2018 book, Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance erased the Aurora Club from the historical record.  In the third decade of the twentieth century, the building once owned by one of the region’s most notorious mobsters and which housed one of Black Pittsburgh’s signature cultural institutions is abandoned and forgotten, along with the people who once made it, for good or bad, a lively Mobsburgh destination.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

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