Fire heavily damages popular N. Side barbecue restaurant
Several people and a dog were evacuated Tuesday evening after a fire tore through a popular barbecue restaurant in the North Side’s Mexican War Streets area.
Wilson’s Bar B-Q, a landmark business on the North Side for nearly 60 years, was engulfed in flames about 6 p.m. It was not immediately known what caused the blaze or whether there were any injuries.
The bare bones shop at the corner of North Taylor Avenue and Buena Vista Street has for decades been a destination for smoked meat seekers. Aromas from Wilson’s routinely wafted in every direction for at least a block, from meats smoked on the grate of a 4by-8-foot yellow brick pit.
In a July 2010 interview with the
Post-Gazette, then 82-year old business founder George Wilson, a native of Louisiana, said that he learned by watching his greatgrandfather.
“He was an ex-slave and when I looked up at him, he looked like a tree. He was a good cook. He and my grandfather would get on a bus and get off at a good place and get an old tub and some chicken wire and set up shop,” he said.
Mr. Wilson, who passed away in 2018, had trained as a butcher in Little Rock, Ark., where he went to high school, and came to the Pittsburgh region with his family when his father got a job in the shipbuilding industry here.
He told the Post-Gazette that he’d worked for 22 years as “a meat fabricator” for the Armour Packing Co. beneath the 31st Street Bridge. “That means I knew how to grade meat,” he said. “When I got wind that Armour might be laying off, I decided to start my own business.”
Wilson’s Bar B-Q first opened in May 1960 at Pennsylvania and Allegheny avenues in Manchester, when he decided to go, as he puts it, “legit.” For the previous 10 years, he was a backyard entrepreneur.
In about 1970, Mr. Wilson moved the business several blocks to North Taylor. The setting was purely utilitarian: bare walls, linoleum floor tiles and discolored menus. The only customer amenities were a big electric fan on the counter, three resin tables and six chairs.
Ribs with a crusty bark encasing tender, fall-off-the-bone meat were the headliner, but Wilson’s also sold chicken, peppered collard greens, macaroni and cheese, potato salad and coleslaw, all simply placed on a white plastic plate and covered with aluminum foil.