Gone on Holiday
The Holiday Bar in Oakland celebrates year-round. Christmas, Halloween and Fourth of July decorations simultaneously line the walls and mirrors in the city's oldest surviving gay bar operating under the same name.
But now a subdued feeling of mourning has entered the bar, which will host its very last last call on April 29, after 40 years in business. The new owner, Carnegie Mellon University, will demolish the building in June.
Recently, co-owner Chuck Tierney sat down in the bar with Trib p.m. and stared at the Mardi Gras masks across the table, one mouth foolishly grinning, the other pulled down in a deep frown.
"I think this explains it," he said. "Happy and sad."
Tierney, 59, and Chuck Honse, 56, will be retiring after owning the bar for 30 years. Weary from the long days and nights running the establishment, Tierney and Honse wanted to sell the bar to someone else who would run it. And then Carnegie Mellon University approached them with an offer the two said they couldn't refuse -- and declined to disclose.
"Eventually, the building had to go. The University was always going to claim it," Honse said. "It just came a little faster than I thought."
Many people might not even realize it once the bar is gone. It sits modestly along Forbes Avenue, next to the National City Bank across from North Craig Street. There are no neon lights, and the front windows are covered in cross-hatched brick. Only a simple sign reading "Holiday Bar" above the front entrance lets people know it's there.
"This bar came from an era when gay bars hid in plain sight," Honse said. "If you didn't know where it was, you didn't see it."
But despite the obscured appearance, the Holiday Bar is a part of Pittsburgh history, a history that rarely gets told.
Before there was a World AIDS Day, the Holiday Bar united the gay community, dispelling myths and recruiting volunteers for the nation's first major AIDS research study.
"Back then, nobody knew how it was contracted," Tierney said. Customers were avoiding draft beers or only drinking from plastic cups.
In 1983, University of Pittsburgh infectious diseases and microbiology researcher Charles Rinaldo received a grant from the National Institutes of Health. His project: to form a local research site for the national Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study, which also had sites in Los Angeles, Baltimore and Chicago. To keep funding, researchers needed at least 1,000 gay men volunteers for what became known as the Pitt Men's Study.
Honse and Tierney signed up and rallied with other local gay bar owners to recruit as many of their customers as possible. The two set up a station in the basement where, in exchange for free beer, customers could fill out questionnaires and a phlebotomist would take blood samples.
"In many, many cities, (gay) bar owners and community leaders stayed away from the issue," said Anthony Silvestre, a co-investigator of the Pitt Men's Study. "It was very unusual for a community to get behind HIV education in 1983. It may be unique in the country." The Pitt Men's Study ended up recruiting more than 3,000 men and continues to do follow-up research with some of the original volunteers.
Today, the Holiday Bar has become the backdrop for personal histories, the setting for life-altering events and picture-perfect memories.
"Me and my husband got married here," said Jon McIntire, "eternally 25," of Shadyside. "We got married on karaoke night.
"It's a travesty that this bar is closing," he said. "It's an awesome bar. You can always talk to people. You don't have to listen to Cher blaring over the loud speakers."
It's this laid-back atmosphere -- TVs tuned to sports games, low-key music and a 75-cent draft Thursday -- that attracted many of Holiday Bar's customers.
"If you compare it to the other gay bars, I think this bar is a little more down to earth," said bartender Cian Brown, 38, of Polish Hill. "Everybody is so friendly."
The Holiday Bar was the first gay bar Kevin Flannigan, 40, of Oakland, ever set foot in back in 1993.
"I was first coming out," Flannigan said. He had heard it was a sports-friendly bar, and he came to watch the Notre Dame game. Fourteen years later, most of Flannigan's gay friends are people he met at the Holiday Bar.
"It's sad. It's like when you sell your family home," he said of the bar's closing. "There are a lot of memories here."
The Andy Warhol Rumor
For decades, rumors circulated about an unsigned mural of Andy Warhol decorating a wall at the Holiday Bar. Many people suggested it was a self-portrait of the artist and former Carnegie Mellon University student.
Around this time last year, during alumni week at CMU, co-owner Chuck Tierney was at the bar in the middle of the day and he'd left the door open.
"This man comes in and says, 'Not only was I surprised to see the building here, I'm surprised to see my painting still here," Tierney said. The man turned out to be David Byrd, a CMU alumnus, who said in 1965 the original owner of the bar offered him free beer and food for all his friends for a day if he painted the mural.
After deciding to sell the bar, owners Tierney and Chuck Honse removed the whole wall and gave it to the owner of Pittsburgh Eagle. a gay bar on Eckert Street on the North Side, for safekeeping.
Fundraiser Mondays
What: Every Monday in April, the Holiday Bar will feature bartenders from other gay bars, whose tips will be donated to a charity of their choice. An additional 25 percent of the night's register total will go to the charity.
Who: Bartenders from Images will be raising money for the Persad Center, a counseling center for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.
When: 8 p.m.-2 a.m. tonight
Where: 4620 Forbes Ave., Oakland
Details: 412-682-8598
