02  /  IF YOU LIVE IN PITTSBURGH, READ THIS The Hill District gets its marquee back THE NEW GRANADA THEATER · CENTRE AVENUE, HILL DISTRICT On Wednesday, August 12, at 5 p.m., there will be a ribbon-cutting on Centre Avenue. At sunset, someone will throw a switch and the marquee on the New Granada Theater will light up for the first time in about sixty years. Here is what that building is, because most people who drive past it don't know. It was completed in 1928 at 2007–2013 Centre Avenue as the Pythian Temple, built for the Black Knights of Pythias. The architect was Louis Bellinger, who was Pittsburgh's only Black licensed, practicing architect for more than twenty-five years. He lived in the Hill. He drew three floors: storefronts, banquet rooms, lodge space, and an auditorium that seated 1,500. In the 1930s it became a theater. Harry Hendel bought the building and moved his Granada operation into it, and a 1937 remodel turned it Art Deco. For the next three decades it was where the Hill went to see the best music in the country. Duke Ellington. Count Basie. Ella Fitzgerald. Cab Calloway. Not a stop on the tour. The stop. Then it went dark in the 1970s — by which point the Lower Hill had already been cleared for the Civic Arena, and the neighborhood the theater had been built to serve was a different, smaller place. The city landmarked it in 2004. The Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation followed in 2007. It made the National Register in 2010. Designations are not restorations, and for a long time that's all it had. What's different now is that there is a tenant in the building. Pitt's Hill District Community Engagement Center has moved onto the third floor and brought the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, a jazz studies studio, and STEAM programming with it. Phase I — the marquee, the facade — is finished. That's what gets cut on Wednesday. Phase II is funded. Lieutenant Governor Austin Davis announced a $1 million Main Street Matters grant in late July for the first floor: a café and lounge, a commercial kitchen, and a black box theater. The second-floor event space is being built out with Live Nation, which means the room is being designed to hold real touring productions again. WHY IT MATTERS Pittsburgh is good at plaques. It is much worse at the part where the building actually opens and somebody works in it. This one has a tenant on the third floor, a grant for the first, and a date on the calendar — and the neighborhood that lost the most to urban renewal in this city is the one getting the room back. If you have five spare minutes next Wednesday evening, the marquee lighting is worth standing on the sidewalk for.

THE CATHEDRAL OF LEARNING · OAKLAND

PITT SPLITS THE DIFFERENCE — Tuition is going up in Oakland and disappearing everywhere else.

Starting this fall, the Pitt Regional Campus Tuition Pledge zeroes out tuition at Bradford, Greensburg and Johnstown, plus the Titusville nursing program, for any Pennsylvania household with an adjusted gross income of $75,000 or less. It's a last-dollar program: federal, state and institutional aid apply first, and Pitt covers whatever's left. New students, current students, transfers — all eligible.

Meanwhile, in-state undergrads on the main campus are looking at a 3% increase. Graduate students, 2%. Tuition there has climbed steadily for six years, which the university attributes to inflation and flat state funding. Pitt says there are no plans to extend the free-tuition program to Oakland.

Why it matters: this is a real answer to a real problem, and it's also a choice about who Pitt is for. A kid in Johnstown whose family clears $70,000 now goes to college free. A kid in Bloomfield with the same family income, admitted to Oakland, pays 3% more than last year's class did. Both of those things are now true at the same university. Watch whether the regional campuses fill up.

THE WALL OF SHAME — Local artists have started keeping receipts on businesses using AI to make their signs.

An anonymous Instagram account called the Pgh AI Wall of Shame — profile picture: Sarah Connor from Terminator 2 — collects photos of AI-generated flyers, billboards and storefront signage around the region and posts them. A few thousand followers. Some businesses have quietly taken the designs down.

The account's members told City Paper they can spot it by the tells: maximalist clutter, no sense of negative space, pointless underlining they call "fart lines."

This isn't hypothetical for the people involved. Illustrator Sophia Pappas, who started out doing work for Pittsburgh Quarterly and later drew for the New York Times, says local publishing has replaced contracted artists with models and that part of her career is over. Designer Jess Schweitzer of Happy Lil Canvases charges around $50 for a commission and calls AI ads "cheating." And illustrator Mario Zucca — whose intricate line work predates any of this, and who drew for the NFL Draft and the side of Sheetz trailers — is now getting accused of using AI, which he called disheartening.

Mr. Roboto Project in Garfield has pledged to bar AI-made flyers from the venue entirely. The Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership pledged $10,000 to local art last year after catching heat for an AI-designed Picklesburgh shirt.

Rates came down for the third week running. They're now 0.11 off the 52-week high set two weeks ago. That's the good news, and it is not what the market is reacting to.

Here's the seven-day residential hotsheet for the county:

NEARLY AS MANY PRICE CUTS AS NEW LISTINGS · BARELY HALF AS MANY BUYERS

Read those three bars top to bottom and you have the market. Close to 900 homes came on in seven days. Almost the same number of sellers — 851 — cut their price in that same week. And barely half as many, 486, actually found a buyer.

That is the correlation that matters: new supply arriving at roughly the same rate prices are being cut, and only about half of it clearing. Another 377 went under contract and 763 closed. (I am not going to explain contingent versus under contract here. Depending on the situation they can mean roughly the same thing, and the distinction is not what matters this week.)

And 254 listings expired while 148 were withdrawn. That's 402 sellers who stopped trying in the same week.

THE 805 SPEAKEASY · EAST LIBERTY · PHOTO: DAVID S. ROTENSTEIN / PITTSBURGH CITY PAPER

A nonprofit in East Liberty has opened a speakeasy in a basement. The name is The 805, and it's named after a date — August 5, 1930 — which happens to have been the day before yesterday, ninety-six years on.

Here's what happened that day.

Pittsburgh in 1930 played the numbers. Not a few people — everybody. You bet nickels and dimes on a three-digit number with a runner at the barbershop, and the daily number was calculated from the New York bank clearinghouse returns printed in the afternoon paper, which is precisely why the game couldn't be rigged the way the older policy racket had been.

On August 5, in the middle of a brutal heat wave, the number came up 805. And an enormous number of Pittsburghers had it.

The afternoon Press ran the headline "'Numbers Players' Hit for $500,000." By the next day the paper had more than a million dollars in play and reported that racketeers across the city had simply vanished rather than pay. One of them, Jakie Lerner, ran so thoroughly that Pittsburgh got a rhyme out of it, collected decades later by Pitt historian Rob Ruck from an old racketeer named Sam Solomon:

"805 was a burner,
where the hell is Jakie Lerner?"

Two men didn't run. Woogie Harris — who got the news on a beach in Atlantic City — and Gus Greenlee went into their safes and paid everybody. That single decision made them legends, made them the most trusted bankers in the racket, and financed a great deal of what the Hill District was for the next twenty years. Greenlee later owned the Pittsburgh Crawfords and put his name on Greenlee Field.

Here's the part that closes the loop. Greenlee Field was designed by Louis Bellinger — the same architect who drew the Pythian Temple that became the New Granada. One man drew the theater at the top of this issue and the ballpark that numbers money paid for, and both of them stood in the Hill.

The 805 is in the basement of a former furniture store, down a metal spiral staircase, run by Catapult Greater Pittsburgh. The upper floors are a gallery and event space now.

The weekend gets better as it goes. Friday and Saturday both carry showers — not washouts, but enough to matter if you're standing in a field. Sunday is the dry one. Plan accordingly, and if you're going to Barrel & Flow on Saturday, bring something with a hood.

309 EVERGREEN TERRACE · FOREST EDGE · CRANBERRY TOWNSHIP

I shot a full walkthrough of this house and posted it, and only about two-thirds of it fit. Not because I rambled. Because the house kept going.

That's the honest review. It is extremely unique and it's built incredible on every level — and I mean that literally, there are three of them and none of them is a compromise. Part two is coming.

It sits at the end of a cul-de-sac in Forest Edge on a wooded lot, an Infinity Custom Homes "Austin" model built in 2020. The main level is one open volume with high ceilings, hardwood, and walls of floor-to-ceiling glass pointed at the trees. The kitchen has an oversized waterfall island, a Sub-Zero, a Wolf range, and a walk-in pantry shelved to the ceiling. The mudroom has a dog wash station. There's a gym and an office on the first floor, and a second office downstairs.

Upstairs, every single bedroom has its own attached bath. That's the detail I'd put money on people not believing. The primary has a fireplace, treetop views, and a closet built like a boutique display floor.

The lower level is where it stops being a basement and starts being a second house: game room with a full kitchen and a fireplace, another bedroom and full bath, and a walk-out to the lower patio. Four fireplaces in total, including one in the covered outdoor living area next to a full outdoor kitchen — which is the part that turns October into a usable month.

Minutes from I-79 and the Turnpike, Seneca Valley schools.

Listed by Bryan Reilly, eXp Realty.

The house that wouldn't fit in one video. I posted the walkthrough of 309 Evergreen Terrace this week and ran straight into Instagram's ceiling — only about two-thirds of the tour made it. The place is just under 10,000 square feet. Part two is coming.

Three more tours dropping in the next week. Behind-the-scenes walkthroughs of a $900,000 house, a $1.1 million house, and a $3.35 million house. Same format, no script, no listing-agent voice. Keep an eye on the feed.

• Penguins Sold to Hoffmann Family — No. 18, June 25. The Lower Hill money that put Live Nation in the Granada's second floor.

• Pittsburgh Posted the Biggest Home Price Jump in the Country — May 21. Eleven weeks ago the story was +8.4%. This week it's 851 price cuts.