2 weeks Ago By Bill O'Driscoll
A local developer and the estate of a former Polish Hill gay bar owner have sued the two people who nominated the bar for historic status. Laurel Communities and the estate of Donald Thinnes filed the suit Wednesday in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court, hours before the first hearing on the nomination for Donny’s Place began before the city’s Historic Review Commission. The suit against the two nominators, Lizzie Anderson and Matthew Cotter, claims the nomination was intended only to prevent a planned housing development on the site.
Jonathan Kamin, an attorney for both Laurel and Thinnes’ estate, agreed that the late Thinnes was an important person in the local LGBTQ community. But he notes that Thinnes signed an agreement with Laurel to redevelop the bar site in 2019, even before Donny’s Place closed. He said the nominators had “impure motives.
” “To have his memory used as a sword against him is really very, very disappointing to all of us,” he said. The planned development had been held up for years by matters including city approvals and a lawsuit by the Polish Hill Civic Association. The current proposal calls for 19 market-rate townhouses on about 3 acres, including the Donny’s Place site.
Buildings going through the historic-nomination process are protected from demolition. Kamin said that while the development site is larger than Donny’s Place, the parcel containing the former bar is crucial to the project. The lawsuit seeks damages from the defendants including court costs, punitive damages and more.
The suit claims Thinnes’ estate, which still owns the multiple parcels targeted for redevelopment, stands to lose more than $1 million if the prospective sale does not go through. Laurel has spent more than $250,000 on approvals and plans for the development, according to the lawsuit. In her presentation to the Historic Review Commission — which she made online while the commission met in person — Anderson said Donny’s served as a vital hub for the LGBTQ community for nearly a half-century after Thinnes opened it in 1973 as the Norreh Social Club.
She noted that starting in the mid-1980s, it was also an early recruitment site for the Pitt Men’s Study, a still-functioning University of Pittsburgh initiative to study the spread and treatment of HIV/AIDS. And Anderson noted that LGBTQ bars have dwindled in number in recent decades, making the preservation of a place like Donny’s all the more important. If approved, Donny’s Place would be the first historic landmark in Pittsburgh to honor LGBTQ culture in the region.
In his in-person remarks before the commission on Wednesday, Kamin said the Donny’s Place building is in such poor condition that it is not worthy of historic designation. “There is nothing historic or significant about this property,” he said. Reached by phone after the meeting, Anderson told WESA the call was the first she had heard of the lawsuit.
Also, she said neither she nor Cotter had heard from Laurel Communities or the Thinnes estate about the nomination, which was first filed in October. She added that the nominators did not intend to prevent development on the rest of the land. Historic Review Commission chair Lucia M.
Aguirre said it had received some 90 letters in support of the historic designation, and only two opposed. Commissioners agreed that the building itself — a plain, century-old brick structure — isn't notable. But the commission voted 4-0 that the historic nomination is viable, meaning that it meets at least one of 10 possible criteria for historic designation and warrants further discussion.
“It’s really about the culture and that society, not about how fabulous the building is,” Commissioner Karen Loysen said. “But what happened there is the more important thing.” Commissioner Matthew Falcone, who is the board president of Preservation Pittsburgh, a nonprofit group that supported the nomination, recused himself from the vote.
Commissioner Richard Snipe abstained. The matter is slated to return to the HRC at its meeting on March 5, which will include a public hearing on the nomination. If the commission approves, the nomination will then go to the Pittsburgh Planning Commission and ultimately to City Council.
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