Hemingway’s Cafe sure got its swan song. The Oakland bar recently had some of its busiest nights ever as students and alumni swung by for their last hurrah before the college hangout closed forever.
Owner John Elavsky announced in January that Hemingway’s would end its decades-long run May 3.
In reality, the last customer left at 1:42 a.m. May 4 (with some gentle coaxing from the bouncer). Elavsky, 68, may have been ready to retire and travel the world, even as he grew emotional during the final night, but his customers weren’t ready to give up Hemingway’s.
It was a lively scene, especially for a Sunday night, but by about 12:45 a.m., the mood had quieted. The finality seemed to have set in. The house lights had just come on when the opening guitar strums of Green Day’s “Good Riddance” rang out from the jukebox.
University of Pittsburgh student Andrew Mueller leaned on a wooden counter and stared longingly. Alex Fritch, a close friend who graduated hours earlier, sat by his side.
The two budding engineers often came to Hemingway’s to blow off steam after class. Now the bar was closing and Fritch was leaving town, an emotional cocktail that left them both teary-eyed.
“It’s a tragedy,” Mueller said. “To see this place go is a part of Oakland dying.”
Hemingway’s was among the last of a vanishing breed: the Oakland college bar.
C.J. Barney’s and Zelda’s Greenhouse used to be on the same block as Hemingway’s. Both closed by the early 2000s, with Dunkin’ and Five Guys now in their places, respectively. The Panther Hollow Inn, a former favorite of Carnegie Mellon University students, is now a Chipotle. The Decade, a live music club on Atwood Street where Bruce Springsteen and U2 once played, gave way to a couple of dive bars, then nothing at all after the building’s roof collapsed in 2021.
“I don’t want Dunkin’. I don’t want Chipotle,” said Stacey Adams, a 1998 Pitt graduate and hiring manager at the university, as she nursed a beer at Hemingway’s a few weeks ago. “I want the old bars.”
Many neighborhoods see bars come and go, but these establishments carry a special significance for students and alumni who spent formative years frequenting them.
Oakland’s bars are where some of them had their first legal (or illegal) drinks and even met their future spouses. Just ask Pat and Bill Freyermuth of McCandless, who came back to Hemingway’s in its waning days to reminisce about their rather fortunate blind date there some 40 years earlier.
Each closure is a reminder of how fleeting the college experience can be. Put together, they tell a story of decline in Oakland’s bar scene that’s more than a nostalgia-fueled illusion. The neighborhood’s nightlife has changed, and there are cultural and economic trends to blame.
The pollster Gallup has tracked a sharp decline over the past few years in young people who drink. The timing aligns with the covid-19 pandemic, which left an entire generation of students less accustomed to going out. Some students are more inclined to spend their nights on the town on the North Shore or South Side.
At the same time, Oakland rents and the overall costs of running a bar are on the rise.
Demand hasn’t totally disappeared for the few Oakland bars still kicking, though. Lines out the door are a common sight. Recent Pitt graduate Jenna Seelbach, 22, summed up the situation as she waited for trivia to start at Gene’s Place, a hole in the wall two blocks from Forbes Avenue.
“Too many damn people, not enough bars,” she said.
Last bars standing
Gene Ney has served drinks in Oakland since 1997, long enough to see Jagerbombs and craft beer go in and out of style. He started as a manager at Denny’s Bar on Louisa Street before buying the building and renaming it after himself in 2005. More than two decades in, Ney has no plans of shutting down. In fact, he’s thinking about expanding into the second floor.
The bartender-scholar, who teaches business courses at Carlow University, has some theories about what happened to Oakland’s nightlife.
The first blow was Pitt providing free bus passes to its students, who can now easily travel between neighborhoods at no cost. The rise of rideshare services like Uber has made it even more convenient for students to quench their thirst elsewhere. But more than anything, the 1999 demolition of Pitt’s on-campus football stadium hurt alcohol sales in Oakland.
In his first couple of years at Denny’s Bar, Ney remembers opening at 7 a.m. on game days and being slammed until kickoff. These days, students pack into yellow school buses bound for Acrisure Stadium, which Pitt’s football team shares with the Steelers, to do their pregame drinking in the North Shore.
In a college neighborhood, business can slow down not just one day a week but for weeks or months at a time during breaks in the academic calendar. Brandon Smith cited a long list of reasons for closing Fuel and Fuddle in 2023 — high rent, inflation, staffing issues and just plain old burnout — but Oakland’s seasonality was a major challenge, too.
“I was trying to run a business where really only seven months a year were profitable and the other five, instead of breaking even like we used to, we were losing money,” said Smith, who ran the joint for about half of its 27-year existence.
The void left on Oakland Avenue by Fuel and Fuddle was quickly filled by a stew restaurant. The couple behind that venture converted the space into a short-lived Latino buffet before moving out altogether. Henry Schwartz, co-managing partner of Oakland Real Estate Co., said in late April he’s reeling in a Thai restaurant with a bar to fill the space.
Schwartz, whose company owns about 20 storefronts in Central Oakland, declined to say what Oakland Real Estate Co. charges its tenants.
Leasing top-tier retail space in the Pittsburgh area costs an average of $27 per square foot, according to a March report from global real estate giant Colliers. Typical rents in the most desirable neighborhoods, including Oakland, are above $30 per square foot, local real estate agents say. Prime locations in these parts of town can fetch up to $60 per square foot.
“If I did not own this building, I would not be here,” Ney said.
Oakland’s evolution
One way college bars can make a few extra bucks is by expanding their clientele to underage drinkers. Ney recalled that every Oakland bar used to serve students under 21. Plenty of alumni can attest to these loose carding policies.
“We used to get into bars with our Pitt ID,” Adams said.
Some bygone bars simply seem surreal in hindsight.
“It was bizarre,” Heather Damron, a 1996 Pitt graduate and Mt. Lebanon resident, said about C.J. Barney’s. “You had 100 kids packed into a basement. It was 10-cent draft beers, and then it went to a quarter.”
Zelda’s was “kind of special in a really disgusting sort of way,” said Matthew Bell, a 1989 Pitt graduate who lives in New Jersey.
Anecdotes like these speak to how Oakland has cleaned up over the years. Reported crimes also have steadily ticked down, according to annual reports from Pittsburgh police. A community watch group fizzled out in the early 2020s, in part because it had less to do.
Playing chicken
There are other signs the neighborhood is evolving.
Developer Walnut Capital tore down a row of aging fourplexes on McKee Place last year to make way for luxury apartments. The Original Hot Dog Shop, an Oakland legend known simply as The O, was cleaved into a couple of trendy eateries after its 2020 closure. Even Forbes Tobacco recently got a fresh coat of paint and a sleek name: City Smoke Shop.
Then there’s the chicken. A three-block span in the heart of Oakland is home to five restaurants specializing in fried chicken. It’s a poultry-lover’s paradise. But to some living in Oakland, this concentration of chicken embodies the homogenization of the Forbes-Fifth corridor and the neighborhood’s shift toward polish over personality.
“I don’t know if everyone universally laments the loss of Hemingway’s or The O,” said Andrea Boykowycz, executive director of the Oakland Planning and Development Corp. “But in general, nobody wants to see Pittsburgh icons replaced with another chicken place.”
Oakland’s population swells in the daytime with commuting students, healthcare workers and Pitt employees, raising demand for fast food and fast casual joints over bars, according to David Glickman, president of Keystone Real Estate Advisors.
Glickman is marketing the Meyran Avenue property that once housed the Panther Pit, which authorities shut down in late 2024. The real estate listing contains several selling points for a potential bar owner, including “limited competition.”
“There’s still a place for drinking establishments, and I think we’ll see more,” he said. “It’s definitely a void.”
The right mixture
Attempting to meet the neighborhood’s need for evening entertainment, Shawn Fertitta helped launch SAD BAR, a nonalcoholic pop-up bar on Forbes Avenue that ran from mid-January to early March. The venue featured sunlamps to beat seasonal depression, mocktails and events such as open mic nights. It attracted a steady crowd, but mostly from other parts of Pittsburgh.
“I’m not really sure why we didn’t get as many students as we thought we would,” said Fertitta, executive director of the Oakland Business Improvement District.
What has seemed to resonate with students is late-night eats. An increasing number of establishments are finding success staying open until midnight or later, according to Schwartz. He envisions Oakland becoming more of an “18-hour-a-day community.”
Boykowycz sees a need for more places that allow people to leave their silos. With Hemingway’s gone, Oakland has gone backward in this way.
“The chief joy of Hemingway’s is it’s a place where students and staff and folks who work in Oakland, folks who live in Oakland, feel equally at home,” Boykowycz said. “Those are the kinds of mixtures we’re looking for that we’re missing.”
Last call
A few minutes before 1 a.m. on the last night at Hemingway’s, Elavsky turned down the music and walked behind the bar counter. He was in his usual uniform: a hoodie, sweatpants and reading glasses resting on his head.
“Hemingway’s,” he shouted, quieting the chatter in the room. “Last call.”
Applause erupted. The bartenders got to work pouring drafts and mixing the bar’s beloved “shot pitchers,” typically some concoction of liquor, soda and brightly colored syrup topped with gummy worms.
College nights at Hemingway’s are an experience Mueller, the Pitt engineering student, and his alumni parents have in common. Besides that, the Oakland of the 1990s they describe to him seems like a foreign land — a time before the neighborhood lost its “soul,” as he put it.
Mueller will keep a piece of Hemingway’s with him. He stopped by May 5 as the bar’s pitchers, plates and other items were being sold and bought a couple of stools for his apartment — the exact ones he and Fritch sat on two days earlier.
It was a feel-good moment, but Mueller sees a bleak future ahead for Oakland, one without anything worth growing attached to.
“It’s just another college town,” Mueller said. “It’s not our college town.”