The City of Pittsburgh is planning a new Department of Public Works maintenance facility along Prospect Drive in Schenley Park, putting a new municipal building in an area with generations of LGBTQ history.
The City issued a request for proposals July 27 seeking architectural and engineering services for a new maintenance facility near the end of Prospect Drive. The proposed building would be approximately 10,000 to 11,000 square feet and would support Public Works crews responsible for maintaining Schenley Park and other nearby City parks.
For most Pittsburghers, Prospect Drive may look like an unremarkable road ending in a grassy circle surrounded by woods.
For generations of LGBTQ Pittsburghers, it has had another name: the Fruit Loop.
The Fruit Loop has been a cruising ground. It has also been a place to sunbathe, picnic, play volleyball, meet friends, celebrate Pride, distribute condoms, and remember people lost to HIV/AIDS.
And queer Pittsburghers are still gathering in the area today.
More than a cruising spot
Exactly when LGBTQ people began gathering in Schenley Park is difficult to pin down.
There is evidence of gay activity in the park dating as far back as the 1940s and 1950s. In notes to his biography Warhol, author Blake Gopnik cites a 2014 interview with Pittsburgher Bill Wood, who remembered Schenley Park as a site of gay activity during his youth.
By the 1970s and 80s, there are firsthand accounts from the location that would become widely known as the Fruit Loop.
Before smartphones, apps, and widespread LGBTQ acceptance, parks and other semi-public places were part of the informal geography through which queer people found one another.
Sometimes that meant sex. But at the Fruit Loop, finding other gay people didn’t necessarily end there.
In an August 20, 2005 letter to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette titled “We deserve space,” long-time LGBTQ community advocate Randy Forrester pushed back against a newspaper editorial that had focused on sexual activity at Prospect Drive.
Forrester acknowledged the area’s history as a cruising ground but described a different scene on sunny weekends. LGBTQ people sunbathing, picnicking, talking with friends, walking dogs and playing volleyball.
Writer Casey Allen remembered something similar in a 2010 article in Pittsburgh’s Out, now preserved in QBurgh’s Q Archives. Allen called the Fruit Loop a once “revered social gathering spot for gay people in the city,” recalling summer Sundays with pickup volleyball and potluck cookouts.
For some queer Pittsburghers, the same place where you could find a hookup was also somewhere you could spend a Sunday surrounded by other LGBTQ people.
Pride came to Prospect Drive
Schenley Park has a broader LGBTQ history beyond the Fruit Loop.
Pittsburgh’s first Gay Pride march in June 1973 ended at Flagstaff Hill. That summer, Pittsburgh Gay News advertised weekly gay worship services there.
By 1992, organized Pride activities had reached Prospect Drive itself.
Pittsburgh City Council adopted a resolution that year recognizing the city’s LGBTQ Pride celebration. The resolution noted that the June 27 Pride parade would be followed by a “picnic and community festival on Prospect Drive in Schenley Park.”
Writer Brian Broome, who arrived in Pittsburgh that year, later recalled discovering the Fruit Loop and finding a flyer directing people there in connection with Pride activities.
By then, the Fruit Loop wasn’t simply an underground place to cruise. It was also somewhere Pittsburgh’s LGBTQ community gathered openly.
AIDS and the Fruit Loop
Prospect Drive also became part of Pittsburgh’s response to the AIDS epidemic.
In 1998, Pittsburgh’s Out reported that Pittsburgh AIDS Task Force workers and volunteers were conducting outreach there, distributing condoms, lubricant and HIV risk-reduction information.
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The community also used Prospect Drive to remember people who died. An AIDS memorial garden once stood at the Fruit Loop.
Forrester described it in his 2005 letter as a “spontaneous community project of the ’80s,” created during the years when AIDS was devastating Pittsburgh’s gay community.
The garden was still standing when he wrote that letter in August 2005. It isn’t there today.
Shepherd Wellness Community has documented that the City later removed what the organization calls the AIDS Memorial Rose Garden. Shepherd Wellness preserved the garden’s last remaining rose bush, along with name plaques and wooden memorial posts.
The rose now grows at Shepherd Wellness’ Bloomfield location, while other surviving pieces were incorporated into a memorial art installation.
There may also be a living remnant still at Prospect Drive.
Sister Petra Pyper Pictapekhov, a local Sister of Perpetual Indulgence, has speculated that daffodils from the former memorial were moved around the large tree in the center of Prospect Circle after the garden was removed. QBurgh has not independently confirmed that account.
The City has tried this before
This new proposal has an unusual historical echo.
In 2005, Pittsburgh also considered putting a Public Works maintenance facility around Prospect Drive.
Forrester’s letter was written during that controversy. He criticized what he described as the City’s desire to choose “the only gay community spot in our city parks” for a large maintenance facility.
That project was never built. Twenty-one years later, the City is again considering a maintenance facility along Prospect Drive.
The current proposal is already drawing opposition, although not solely because of the area’s queer history.
Friends of Schenley Park has called on the City to locate the facility outside the park.
“Schenley Park is not a land bank,” the group wrote following an August 10 informational meeting with Public Works. “We believe that the park should be preserved as a park, not as a location for municipal maintenance operations and non-recreational facilities.”
The City says the new facility is necessary to provide adequate space for park maintenance crews. The RFP calls for a new building, utilities, accessibility and stormwater work at the site. The project remains in its design phase.
Still a queer gathering place
The LGBTQ connection to Prospect Drive isn’t only history.
Pittsburgh Black Pride continues to hold community events in the Prospect area. Its 31st annual Community BBQ was held at Schenley Park’s Prospect Grove on July 26, one day before the City released the RFP.
The City of Pittsburgh’s LGBTQIA+ Commission was expected to discuss the maintenance facility at its August meeting. That discussion has been postponed until the Commission’s next meeting on September 15.
For now, there is no marker at Prospect Drive explaining any of this history.
Nothing tells someone driving around the circle about the LGBTQ people who found community there, the Sunday volleyball games, Pride gatherings, HIV outreach or the AIDS memorial that once grew there.
That’s one of the difficulties of preserving queer history. It doesn’t always come with a historic building. Sometimes it is a road, a patch of woods, or a grassy clearing that looks ordinary unless you know where to look.
For generations of LGBTQ Pittsburghers, Prospect Drive is a place to find friendship, community, celebration, and remembrance.
Now the City is planning something different there, and we still deserve space.