Hazelwood will have a brewery once again
Not many people know that the city neighborhood of Hazelwood has a brewery. It’s a four-story brick building built in 1905 where people used to make and sell Hazelwood Famous Beer and, later, after Prohibition, Derby Brewing Co.’s Moerlein lager and pilsner. It closed in 1938, and the structure has since housed other businesses including a demolition company that did not demolish it.
By next year, beer is to again be brewed on-site as well as consumed at the building at 5007-5111 Lytle St.
The Progress Fund plans to reopen it as a brewery. Make that three breweries, each with its own separate brewing spaces on the first floor, viewable through glass windows on the street. They’ll share a big beer garden on the other side, by the main entrance. Each brewery will serve its own beers and share a third-floor bar area and seating area, as well as a rooftop deck, with views of the
main drag of Second Avenue — just across the railroad tracks — as well as the Monongahela River, the adjacent 178-acre Hazelwood Green site, Oakland and the Downtown skyline.
“Is this not cool?” said Progress Fund President and CEO David Kahley as he stood up there while giving a tour of the raw space last month.
The project was presented during the city Zoning Board of Adjustment’s virtual meeting Thursday because it seeks special exceptions for commercial parking in a residential district (three employee spaces) and off-site parking (five spaces) on a shared alley. If those exceptions are granted (the board has 60 days), Mr. Kahley says it would just need the city to sign off on the building permit for construction to proceed.
The Progress Fund has purchased lots on either side of the former brewery as well as what was once an icehouse behind it, as part of what it envisions as a craft drinks destination and an anchor to Hazelwood’s future.
No government money has been spent to acquire the property, notes Mr. Kahley. The Progress Fund did get a $1 million grant this year from the Richard King Mellon Foundation and, in 2018, $4.5 million of $14 million in R.K. Mellon economic development grants for the neighborhood. The Progress Fund used its share “to assemble real estate holdings, rehabilitate historic property, and construct new industrial space in Hazelwood,” according to R.K. Mellon.
This is an unusual project for The Progress Fund, which normally doesn’t function as a developer, but Mr. Kahley says the plan is to help Hazelwood the way it has helped trail towns such as West Newton. Possible tenants include Straub Brewery, which brews in St. Marys, Elk County.
“What an exciting project,” says Straub President and CEO Bill Brock.
His family-owned brewery worked with The Progress Fund on its new Visitors Center & Tap Room and it would like to be part of Hazelwood.
“Everything about it feels good,” including that it would give the brewery a physical presence in its biggest market.
“It would be a good place to meet a lot of those customers,” he says.
Other possible brewers are Travis Tuttle, one of the co-founders of Butler Brew Works in Butler County. He’s says his “hat is in the ring” to be part of this “great project,” which he would do as a spinoff from Bonafide Beer Co., a small brewery and taproom that he is in the process of launching on 21st Street in the Strip District this year with PA Libations’ Christian Simmons.
“It’s go-to easy-drinking beers,” says Mr. Tuttle, who may work with yet another brewery to contract-brew the first batches. He notes that if Bonafide is to also brew in Hazelwood, “we’re going to put a lot of emphasis on hiring people from there and nearby areas.”
Another possible tenant is Mike Potter, the owner of Black Brew Culture and cofounder of the Fresh Fest Black beer festival, for whom this would be his first brewing venture. He did not comment.
While they’ll all have their own first-floor brewhouses, equipped with seven-barrel systems, and their own second-floor storage rooms, they’ll share the rest of the building, which will have a big elevator for customers to access on the beer garden side.
That, says Mr. Kahley, was partially a nod to the people who live on the other side of Lytle Street, which eventually will be opened into Hazelwood Green, the former LTV Coke Works that’s being developed into a tech hub with housing and other amenities.
“We wanted to have a big impact on Hazelwood, and we wanted to go big,” he says of the project.
If the initial phase is successful, it could grow with the addition of a distillery in the former icehouse structure, which for many years operated as a lumber company.
Between the two will be a parking lot and an expansive outdoor space, which in these COVID-19-crimped times, looks even more attractive than it normally would. Food trucks will park there. While the brewery building itself won’t have a restaurant — “It’s all about the beer tastings,” Mr. Kahley stresses — it may have a third-floor space where sandwiches and other prepared foods could be served.
“I think there’s tremendous potential,” says Joe Hackett, landscape architect and principal with LaQuatra Bonci Associates, who is helping to lead the restoration. He’s looking forward to reusing brick, foundation stones from a long-gone addition and Belgian block recovered from behind the brewery, which will be restored, but kept, as he puts it with a grin, “sweaty and old.”
Mr. Kahley notes that one top corner of the building was clipped off by a 1990s tornado when it housed a hydraulics company. “It’s a survivor,” he says. And still bomb-shelter solid, as they learned when they stripped off some of the old cork that once insulated the interior walls. The lead designer is Will Hopkins of Tai + Lee Architects.
While The Progress Fund has most of the $4.9 million construction funding in hand, Mr. Kahley will be working over the next six months to secure about $500,000 for touches such as the landscaped beer garden and rooftop deck.
Sam Reiman, director and trustee at the Richard King Mellon Foundation, lauds The Progress Fund for preserving the Hazelwood history of the place, perhaps including it in a brand of beer made there, and for thinking about keeping prices affordable to a wide range of residents as well as tourists.
“There’s a lot of thought going into this in terms of how you fully integrate this into the community.”
Pittsburgh and the surrounding area already have scores of breweries, but Mr. Kahley believes there’s plenty of room for more — “Have you been to Napa?” he says, referencing that winery-filled region. The idea for Hazelwood, he says, is to help “create some life here.”
The place could open as early as next spring “in a perfect world,” but everything is subject to the COVID-19 crisis. The plan is to start working on the exterior and continue working on the interior this winter.
Mr. Reiman acknowledges that the pandemic will have an effect, but elements of this project such as multiple tenants sharing the costs of one space, “That was relevant before COVID, and now it’s even more relevant.”
City Councilman Corey O’Connor, who was instrumental in helping The Progress Fund acquire two adjacent lots that previously generated complaints, says he’s looking forward to the brewery becoming a destination that connects all the new things happening in Hazelwood with the old things that built it.
“You’re going back to the roots of what the neighborhood was.”