Content area
Full text
When I asked Matthew Falcone to partner with me on a regular series of tours, for which he would dig into the history of a place and share it with all of us, I gave him one directive: Surprise us.
We started our series in April, in the North Side's Deutschtown, where he revealed historical details about the Jewish history there. From the responses I got from readers, he surprised most of you as much as he did me.
It's a bold man who picks perhaps the best known of Pittsburgh's neighborhoods for our second Digging History mystery tour - the Strip District.
When we set a date, he emailed the rendezvous: "Let's meet at Lucky's."
Lucky's is the popular name of the Real Luck Cafe, a bar at 1519 Penn Ave. with a shamrock emblem hanging from its facade. But its decorative window hoods and cornices, stained-glass windows above the doors and storefront windows, including a transom with a little vent that swings open, are clues that it was built to be something a little more highbrow than a bar.
A plaque on the building makes this playful claim: "On this site in 1897, nothing happened."
When you dig history as much as Mr. Falcone does, such a claim is a challenge.
"I found an article from 1897 about a bogus priest who was working the Strip District. He dressed like a priest and asked people to lend him valuables, jewelry, watches, for a parish fair at a church in Turtle Creek. He was really a grifter."
Gabriel Weisser owned Weisser's Jewelers - Lucky's first use, starting in the...