What happened
The Old Stone Tavern is a squat fieldstone building at the corner of Greentree Road and Woodville Avenue in Pittsburgh's West End, painted red by somebody in the last century, and it has stood there since at least 1782, which makes it the oldest commercial building in the city. It served a frontier road as a trading post and a place to pay a toll. The ledger the preservation group found, covering 1793 to 1797, names the drinkers: from it they identified 109 veterans of the Revolutionary War, sixteen of the War of 1812 and ninety-one men who took part in the Whiskey Rebellion, the rising against the federal excise on spirits that this counter would have been paying. An 1869 newspaper report has President Grant and his wife stopping in. It kept trading through the nineteenth century, ran as a speakeasy under Prohibition and served its last drink in 2008. Demolition was scheduled the following year; the campaign that stopped it also put the building on the city's list of historic structures, and in 2022 the landmarks foundation gave it a plaque.
What is there now
Standing, private and closed. The Porter family bought the building in November 2021 and undertook to preserve and restore it. The friends' trust that saved it is still working — its September 2026 meeting was advertised in the West End, and it is putting up a Lewis and Clark trail sign outside, the overland route out of Pittsburgh having passed the door in 1803 — but there are no tours, no timetable and no bar. The stonework is reported sound and the plaster is not.
Sources
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