A table littered with matchbooks, bar rags, and golf pencils equip you with the social accessories to explore the main gallery. After signing into the record book, you pass through the heavy black out curtain, and enter the foyer, dimly lit by alternating projectors. In concert with the explosion of disco, glittered and glamoured socialites performed, danced, and otherwise let loose at Lucky’s Transportation Club (T.C.), House of Tilden, and Travelers Social Club. and the bars emptied, the social clubs began to swell. Wall Map of Pittsburgh with Visitor Notes from Lucky After DarkĪs the clock struck 2 a.m. Beginning with the career of Lucky himself, and spreading to a landscape of gay and lesbian commercial leisure that covered the city from end to end. Lucky After Dark offers a visual expedition through the prominent gay social clubs between 19. John Britt Membership Cards: Lent to the Pittsburgh Queer History Project for Lucky After Dark. Social clubs have been a staple institution in Pittsburgh, from the settlements of immigrant workers to their use as Prohibition Blind-Pigs, and they have consistently offered some semi-public space for the lives of Pittsburghers. Beginning as an examination of after-hours bars licensed as social clubs, the project’s founder and co-director, Harrison Apple, began collecting materials which traced a rich history of criminality and liminality, ultimately focusing on the sexually fluid night clubs open from dusk until dawn.
The Pittsburgh Queer History Project was formed along the fault lines of Pittsburgh’s social world. 1898 – 1931.īut what of the people who stayed behind? Even in such a well-crafted image of the Steel City, there are bound to be cracks. “Pittsburgh with the Lid Off, Pittsburgh, Pa.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. As the region’s economy sank, Pittsburgh’s population sought employment and promise elsewhere.
The Pittsburgh that was once a powerful industrial metropolis, was transforming through the slow collapse of the American steel industry, further eroding the city’s public image. This rebranding of Pittsburgh was necessary to scrape away the literal grime which had attached itself the city’s reputation . A two-page spread in the 1967 publication “The New Pennsylvania,” featured Pittsburgh with an image of blasting furnaces and the names of over 60 fraternal orders that had built clubhouses across the city. Mixing a history of welfare and reciprocity with the can-do sentiment of the American Steelworker, “the New Pennsylvania” was drawing a picture of the keystone state as an attractive home for the New American Family, supported by a tradition of steel and stone, and oriented to the promise of a lucrative future. Pittsburgh has been called many things since it’s naming in 1758, from “hell with the lid off” to the “steel city.” But its lesser known moniker is “the city of joiners” – indicative of residents’ abnormal enthusiasm for social clubs. Lucky played a large part in shaping the gay social world of post-World War II Pittsburgh. In a period when homosexuality’s relationship to the state was precarious and violent, Lucky and his peers opened covert spaces using the charters of working-men’s fraternal clubs. For the month of June 2014, the Future Tenant Gallery at 819 Penn Avenue, was transformed into a darkened members-only nightclub, illuminated by the turn of slide projectors featuring 640 original images from gay night clubs owned by Robert “Lucky” Johns: “The Pope of Gay Pittsburgh.” 1970s House of Tilden Slides from the Robert “Lucky” Johns Collection of the PQHP Archives. The PQHP archives hold over 12,000 items ranging from photographs to clothing, video, and realia. Lucky After Dark, the Pittsburgh Queer History Project’s inaugural exhibit, featured a cross-section of ephemera from our growing archives.