Members of the Pittsburgh community are trying to get the building that once housed a significant LGBTQ+ bar declared a historic landmark.

According to their October nomination form, locals Lizzie Anderson and Matt Cotter say that the bar and nightclub most recently known as Donny’s Place “was an anchor of gay life in Pittsburgh for almost fifty years.”

Related

Affordable housing complex for LGBTQ+ seniors to open in Pittsburgh
“We’re in the ‘helping seniors improve their lives’ business.”

“Donny’s holds such an incredible history, mostly for the queer and trans community, but also for Polish Hill on the whole,” Anderson told local NPR station WESA.

Stay connected to your community

Connect with the issues and events that impact your community at home and beyond by subscribing to our newsletter.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today

The two-story building in the city’s Polish Hill neighborhood first opened as an after-hours LGBTQ+ club in 1973 after Vietnam veteran Donald Thinnes acquired the liquor license of the Polish social club that previously operated there. Thinnes, who died early this year, ran the bar under various names until closing it in 2022. The building has stood vacant since then.

Over the years, the bar was home to leather events and one of the city’s notable lesbian bars. As a founding member of the Pittsburgh Tavern Guild — an organization established in the 1970s to help LGBTQ+ bar owners protect their establishments from anti-LGBTQ+ legal restrictions, the local mafia, and the state Liquor Control Board — Thinnes made Donny’s Place a hub for recruiting participants in the Pitt Men’s Study, a massive HIV/AIDS study, and for disseminating information about the epidemic in the 1980s.

The bar was “central to the relational and infrastructure building of a lot of the enduring gay institutions in the city,” local journalist and historian Dade Lemanski told WESA. “It never was just a gay bar,” he added. “It really functioned as a community center.”

In their application, Anderson and Cotter note that Pittsburgh has no designated historic structures commemorating LGBTQ+ history. “Sites of gay life are threatened and disappearing due to encroaching development,” they write. “In this moment, we have the opportunity and necessity to act in preserving Donny’s Place, a building that signifies almost fifty years of Pittsburgh gay history.”

“Encroaching development” is indeed a hurdle they will have to overcome.

The building has been threatened with demolition since 2019, when developer Laurel Communities announced a plan to build 30 market-rate townhouses on Thinnes’s three-acre property, WESA reports. Polish Hill locals have objected to the project over concerns about gentrification. The Polish Hill Civic Association initially opposed the project, filing a lawsuit against Laurel Communities and the city’s Zoning Board, it now says it’s open to it if it includes affordable housing.

But as a Change.org petition supporting the preservation of the Donny’s Place site notes, Anderson and Cotter’s historic nomination puts a halt to the building’s possible demolition for now.

Anderson echoed the petition’s call for the site to include affordable housing for queer and trans elders, telling WESA that “the first goal is to save the building because we know all the beauty and history that has happened there.”

On December 16, supporters argued in favor of the historic designation at a development activities meeting.

“The proposal is about creating space for life,” Lemanski said during the public Zoom meeting, according to the Pittsburgh Business Times.

Anderson acknowledged that supporters don’t know where Thinnes’s estate, which currently owns the property, stands on the historic nomination, which was filed without their involvement. The estate, she said, is under contract to sell the property.

The nomination process is likely to stretch into spring 2025.

Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.