Tag Archives: Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission

Pittsburgh’s Historic Review Commission misses the history

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Earlier this week I attended a Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission hearing to cover the proposed designation of a landmark gay bar, Donny’s Place, as a city historic site. One of the regulatory agenda items ahead of the designation case involved a property owner’s proposal to rework the facade of a building in the Mexican War Streets Historic District.

Proposed facade alterations for the former Caruso beer distributorship building shown to the Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission February 5, 2025.

Located on the corner of Taylor Avenue and Wolfrum Way, the one-story commercial building has a long history. In the 1919, Angelo Lascher opened an auto repair shop there. Its facade with multiple garage doors reflected the business done inside. Lascher sold the property in 1966 to Sam Caruso, who owned a nearby beer distributor.

Caruso’s beer distributorship photographed in 2021 before it closed. Photo by David Rotenstein.
1925 real estate atlas showing the location of Angelo Lascher’s garage.
Angelo Lascher’s auto repair business regularly appeared in auto parts manufacturers’ ads published in Pittsburgh newspapers. This ad was published July 17, 1930, in the Pittsburgh Press.
Sam Caruso placed this help wanted ad in the Pittsburgh Press on June 15, 1969.

After moving into the former Lascher auto repair shop, Caruso followed a familiar and historically significant pattern in Pennsylvania by converting a garage into a beer distributorship. There are several notable Pittsburgh examples, including the former Tito brothers bootlegging site that became the first place where Rolling Rock beer was sold in the 1930s.

Former Tito brothers bootlegging garage turned beer distributorship. The Pittsburgh City Council designated the building as a historic site, along with the neighboring house where Joe Tito lived. In 2023, the Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission voted to allow the garage’s demolition. Photo by David Rotenstein.

Sam Caruso’s heirs closed the beer distributorship in 2021 and the current owner bought the property in 2024. John Francona, who represented the LLC that bought the property, told the HRC:

It’s kind of been an eyesore since I moved in the neighborhood 26 years ago, but it was a beer distributor so everyone liked it. I’m not exactly sure what it was built as. It could have been built as garages, but it’s a lot of garages for a single-family house. So, it may have been retail. I’m not sure when it became the beer distributor but it’s been there for a long time.

Pittsburgh historic preservation planner Sarah Quinn didn’t have much to offer in the way of the building’s history or the potential impacts posed by the proposed facade work. “The scope of work is restoration of [a] commercial façade along North Taylor Avenue,” Quinn told commissioners. “Staff comments are the proposal is very appropriate and will bring [the] storefront into accordance with the guidelines. Recommended motion is approval.”

The HRC unanimously approved the project.

It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in history or architectural history to uncover the former beer distributorship’s history and architectural significance. All it would have required is a little bit of curiosity and research.

©2025 D.S. Rotenstein

Public Participation Without the Public and Without Participation

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Yesterday’s Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission discussion of the National Register of Historic Places nomination of the William A. “Woogie” and Ada Harris House was billed as an opportunity for public comment.

Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission Feb. 1, 2023, agenda. Note the reason for including the “Woogie Harris House”: “for public comment.”

With no public notice (beyond listing on the HRC agenda posted on the city’s website) and no notification by the city’s historic preservation community, community groups, and other stakeholders, the 10-minute discussion was a master class in public participation minus the public and minus participation.

The Inside Man

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I wonder if Preservation Pittsburgh has evaluated its potential legal exposures created by having the organization’s president Matthew Falcone serving as a Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission member? As Preservation Pittsburgh’s leader, he nominates properties to become City of Pittsburgh historic landmarks. As a commissioner, he debates the merits of those nominations and votes on recommending designation to the Pittsburgh City Council. In 2020, Falcone even nominated, debated, and voted on the designation of his own home.

Preservation Pittsburgh website landing page.

Curiously, Pittsburgh’s historic preservation law makes all of this possible. It created a massive legislative loophole that enables this conflict of interest:

Submission of a nomination by a member of the Historic Review Commission, the City Planning Commission, or the City Council shall not preclude that member from full participation in the review of the nomination nor from voting on the recommendation or designation. (Pittsburgh Municipal Code §1101.03(a)(1)(b).

There’s no doubt that the HRC plays an outsize role in whether properties get landmarked or not. Being the board’s resident historic preservation expert doesn’t help, either. Along with the Planning Commission, the HRC acts in an advisory capacity under Pittsburgh’s historic preservation law. In its final say, the City Council puts great weight on what the two boards recommend.

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Historic preservation is about people

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Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission member Karen Loysen must not have gotten the memo: historic preservation is no longer just about pretty old buildings built by rich (white) men. Over the past 20 years, the field has sought to become more inclusive and people-centered. Loysen, a Pittsburgh architect, seems to be out of touch with current best practices in historic preservation.

Loysen’s unsophisticated and narrow perspective on historic preservation was on display in her statements about Pittsburgh’s Tito-Mecca-Zizza House as it worked its way through the HRC hearing cycle on its way to historic site designation. Though Loysen and her HRC colleagues declined to recommend landmarking the site, on June 7, 2022, the Pittsburgh City Council voted 6-2 to make the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House Pittsburgh’s newest historic site.

Children in the Tito-mecca-Zizza House side yard.

The landmark nomination that I prepared in 2021, in collaboration with Tito, Mecca, and Zizza family members, included many historical family photos. These pictures show the Victorian home over the span of several decades, lovingly used by the families. The photos also provide invaluable snapshots in time that show how some elements of the historic home have remained unchanged and how other elements were altered or replaced in the late 20th century. They are an invaluable asset any historian or architectural historian would be eager to have to make the case for a property’s historical significance.

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DAM it all to Hell: Pittsburgh Historic Preservation’s Rube Goldberg Machine

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In 2018, the City of Pittsburgh passed a law recognizing community organizations and implementing a process to improve stakeholder participation in development activities. The new law added to an already complicated bureaucracy for such municipal boards and commissions as the Zoning Board of Adjustment, Planning Commission, and the Historic Review Commission. These quasi-judicial boards hold public hearings where members of the public and City officials “are allowed to give testimony concerning issues under consideration.” The new Registered Community Organization Law requires all people living in a neighborhood with a registered community organization (RCO) to hold a public meeting called a development activities meeting or DAM before they can have a case heard before one of the city’s quasi-judicial boards.

Gina and Steve Super got sucked into the new DAM system soon after it launched. In1996, they bought a historic building on Pittsburgh’s Southside. For almost 50 years prior to their purchase, the two-and-a-half-story brick building at 2106 East Carson Street had housed Gerson Brothers, a tailoring and dry cleaning business. After buying the building, Gina Super opened The Laundry Basket in the storefront space.

2016 East Carson Street (Lucy’s Handmade Clothing Shop). Photo December 2021.

About two years ago, the Supers decided to make some changes. They closed the laundry business and converted the space into a retail store. At the same time, the Supers painted the building’s exterior. “All we wanted to do was freshen up the paint on the front and we replaced it with the same exact colors,” Gina Super told me in a January 2022 interview. “It wasn’t like we were changing or altering the front of the building. We repainted the identical colors.”

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