Humanity still rates highly at Brewer’s Hotel
Lawrenceville site is a haven for outliers
Thirty years ago, in the dim light of the Brewer’s Hotel, former city policeman Andy Usner reflected on the backlash he was getting — from city officials, other bar owners, even friends — for housing AIDS patients upstairs.
It wasn’t seemly, they said. Aren’t you afraid? Are illicit things happening in there?
His bar business wasn’t doing well, and many tenants weren’t paying their $35 per week. The coroner made regular visits to the Lawrenceville hotel, and as rooms emptied, Mr. Usner took in more ailing people. His answer was always, “Where else can they go?
“When people want to buy the place, they guarantee they will throw everybody out,” he told The Pittsburgh Press in 1989. He said he had “three people with AIDS here, an oldtimer, two [veterans], both
retired. You don’t throw people like this out. You just don’t do stuff like that.”
Mr. Usner died in 2010. The tenants by then were no longer AIDS patients, but his humanity lived on in the bar’s reputation. It was one of the city’s oldest LGBT-friendly bars, usually crowded, when Carol Usner, now Carol Held, became the new owner.
She overcame culture shock and picked up her dad’s mantle. But the building started exacting a toll in deferred maintenance, and business began to decline, with an ironic twist: Safe havens were no longer as necessary. Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender patrons could feel comfortable in many bars and restaurants.
The competition was providing a wide variety of cocktails and upscale ambience. The Brewer’s lacks both.
Its sign is as old-fashioned as the concept of sleeping rooms above bars. The facade is rough. The building sits alone, across Liberty Avenue from the former Iron City Brewery. Even a streetwise woman might think twice about checking it out.
Behind the door, though, the welcome is warm. The stamped tin ceiling is a beautiful black brindle. Corrugated aluminum covers the walls part-way, and string lights hang over decorations of witches and ghouls.
Two bar seats were empty during a recent Thursday happy hour.
“If this were five years ago, it would be packed,” Ms. Held said.
When it was built, around 1906, the Brewer’s Hotel and bar attracted workers from the neighborhood breweries. Some lived there. Keith Held, Carol’s husband, said he thinks the hotel and brewery shared a tunnel; a sealed opening in the basement suggests that.
A regular who goes only by Paddy became a patron in 1977 and lived upstairs “for years and years,” he said. “We restored the ceiling. I used to mop the halls. There used to be a diner in back. I tended bar, and I was a cook. And back in the day, I loved to get on the dance floor.”
There is no longer food service, except when Ms. Held brings holiday dinners to share with tenants and a bartender makes tacos on Tuesdays.
Paddy rejects the designation “gay bar,” he said. “This is a street bar, friendly to everyone.”
Over a bottle of Straub’s one evening, he said he playfully called Andy Usner “Daddy.” “He was a foster father to me,” Paddy said.
Low rents, full house
The Helds say they have put more into the business than they can afford to keep doing. She is three years behind on property taxes and recently set up a payment plan to chip away at that debt. A contractor, Mr. Held has donated all the repairs in the bar, but a structural engineer’s report is needed to approve his repair of flooring damaged by a leaky ice machine.
The structural engineer’s report will “make this problem go away,” District Judge Tony Ceoffe told Ms. Held in his courtroom one day recently. He was sympathetic. He told her he had to have a structural engineer approve work done in his own home. She told him she can’t afford to hire a structural engineer.
Then she went to her car and cried.
Her troubles began, she said, when a former employee, whom she had fired in a clash of personalities, began reporting the business, prompting visits from the Allegheny County Health Department, the Pennsylvania State Police Bureau of Liquor Enforcement and city inspectors.
Since 2013, the PBLE has cited the Brewer’s for allowing smoking without posting a sign, for failing to notify the board of a change in managers, for gaming devices — like those in many bars, but vintage — and for missing a deadline on Responsible Alcohol Management Program training.
The 14 rooms are always full, and rents keep the place afloat, barely, she said.
Thanks to Hank, a tenant of 19 years, rents are paid on time. He screens everybody before handing over a key. He keeps the upstairs halls and bathrooms clean, monitors behavior like a drill sergeant, paints walls, installs lights, makes repairs.
“You have to work to be here,” said Hank, who didn’t want to give his last name. “No drugs or alcohol upstairs, and if you don’t pay rent, you can’t live here.”
A tradesman and former trucker, Hank has two rooms, both tiny, one with a microwave and dorm-size refrigerator.
The rate is $75 a week, $100 a week for a double room, “which is completely unheard of” in the city, he said.
Sitting in the bar one recent evening, Ms. Held acknowledged she could charge more, “but people may have trouble paying more,” she said, echoing her father: “Where would they go?”
The Helds have put the property on the market, but they hold out hope for support from a community that found support at the Brewer’s over the years.
“The kindness of some of the people here overwhelms me sometimes,” she said, citing the example of Alan Stevens, who performs in drag as Cookie Monroe (Monroe as in Marilyn).
Cookie and her Brewer’s Bombshells — Miss V and Veruca La Piranha — could have taken their show elsewhere when Ms. Held cancelled Thursday performances for poor attendance, “but Cookie said they were willing to accept less” for Friday’s shows, Ms. Held said.
“It’s about the bar,” Ms. Monroe said, explaining the sacrifice. “If it wasn’t for Carol, I wouldn’t have the career I’ve had in such a short time. Anytime we’re in drag somewhere, we tell people about this bar, trying to bring new performers, to find an audience again. Last Friday was so reinvigorating. It gave us hope.”
Trying to figure things out
That was the night of the Steel City Softball League’s banquet. The league inducted Andy Usner posthumously into its hall of fame and presented Ms. Held with a plaque. The after-party packed the bar — softball players, drag performers, regular patrons and an unexpected bachelorette party. The crowd evoked the old days. Everyone raised a glass “to Andy,” who, back in the ‘80s, had rallied his friends to umpire when the national association rejected the league for being gayfriendly.
“He umpired every weekend for them,” Ms. Held said.
The bachelorettes didn’t know Andy Usner from Uncle Sam, but they toasted and cheered his legacy.
A man at the party told Ms. Held how he had arrived at the Brewer’s as a tenant. He had come home from the Navy and decided to tell his folks he was gay.
“His dad told him, ‘No faggot will live in my house,’” Ms. Held related.
He had five dollars in his pocket and a friend’s recommendation of the Brewer’s Hotel.
“He told my dad he didn’t have any money, and he said my dad told him, ‘Catch up with me when you get on your feet,’ and handed him a room key.”
Carol Held didn’t know what she was getting into when she assumed ownership of the Brewer’s Hotel, but it got into her. She is on the brink of having no choice but to sell, but her heart says no.
“Everyone is thinking, thinking, how to get business back,” she said.
“She doesn’t sleep,” Mr. Held said.
“I lie awake, thinking,” she said. “My mind is rolling, trying to figure things out.”