In 1991, if you’d used the word “barista” in conversation, you would have drawn blank stares. The reaction might have been even worse had you suggested someone spend $2 — a whole $2! — on a coffee drink made with steamed milk. And then sip it from a thrift-store mug, in a café filled with antic wall murals and mismatched secondhand furniture. In Pittsburgh? On the freshly postindustrial South Side?
Yet that was the business model of the Beehive Coffeehouse & Dessertery, which opened that year in a former East Carson Street pharmacy and quickly became an iconic gathering place for students, artists, misfits and yes, neighbors too.
The Beehive, which also birthed an Oakland location, closed in 2019. In a new book, local author and Beehive devotee David Rullo tells its story.
The Hive Arrives
“Gen X Pittsburgh: The Beehive and the ’90s Scene” (The History Press) draws on 70 interviews with sources ranging from the ’Hive’s co-founders and employees to some of the countless patrons who over three decades made it a second home. (Full disclosure: This reporter is among them, and briefly quoted in the book.)
But Rullo, now a senior writer for the Jewish Chronicle of Pittsburgh, knows better than most how important the Beehive was for some people. He writes he’s among those whose life the coffeehouse at 14th and East Carson changed, and not just because of the lattes and baked goods.
Rullo discovered it shortly after it opened, during his freshman year at Point Park University. As a suburban kid in those pre-internet days, the North Versailles native found in the Beehive something he didn’t know existed: a community for people like him, “some weird kid wearing like a three-quarter-length leather coat” who read Jack Kerouac and sought out imported Charlie Parker cassettes.
To him, the Beehive was “where all of the local artists, all of the filmmakers” were, he said. “All of the writers, everyone was there. And so it really showed me that there was this world outside of the suburbs and what had been led to be expected in those places.”
“Gen X Pittsburgh” — the title emphasizing the demographic cohort over the coffeehouse was his publisher’s idea — offers an in-depth account about how a couple of Pittsburgh-bred entrepreneurs, Scott Kramer and Steve Zumoff, launched the Beehive on a main street better known at the time for old millworkers’ bars and neighborhood-serving retail.
They imported the idea of a funky coffeehouse — still a new one in North America — from out of town. And when it came time to decorate, they put up a sign that read “Artists Wanted” and talked to whomever came through the door. (The famous back-wall mural was by Kevin Schlosser; the shop’s lady-with-a-beehivee-hairdo logo was by Rick Bach and Michael Lotenero.)
Rullo also emphasizes the community that formed among the Beehive’s janitors and “coffee-slingers,” as they were then called. The rotating cast of workers included a number of folks who went on to greater fame, including jazz singer Phat Man Dee. Some of the coffee-slingers were stars in their own right, Rullo writes.
Art Institute graduate Valerie Gatchell-Christofel longed to work at the Beehive because it just seemed so cool. “Just watching all those neat people walk in, I was like, ‘I have to get a job there,’” she told Rullo.
“I lived there until I graduated,” said Josh Spench, another Art Institute student and coffee-slinger in the ’90s.
The coffeehouse didn’t just birth its own little scene, complete with live music — it was a hangout for members of signal ’90s-Pittsburgh band Rusted Root — and caffeinated discussions deep into the night. It also helped usher in a new South Side, a place of art galleries and new-school retail like Slacker, Groovy and Culture Shop.
“The South Side felt … like the first neighborhood that began to get an identity post-industrial collapse,” said Rullo.
True, a number of culturally simpatico establishments predated the Beehive on East Carson, including the Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh Guitars, City Books and St. Elmo’s Books. But in 1991, for the group of young folks who’d soon be known as Generation X, the Beehive was a key catalyst, Rullo contends.
The Gen X Vibe
He adds, however, that it all just kind of happened for this age group that came to be typecast for irony, self-reliance, low expectations and flannel.
“If you were to try and design a place for Gen X, which at that point hadn't been named, right, you couldn't have done it,” he said. “Scott and Steve were of the age a few years older than the people that were there. So they sort of were tuned to what this generation was interested in. And it was, you know, like if you went up into your grandmother or your aunt's attic and found a whole bunch of chairs that didn't match, you know, and tables and chinaware that didn't match and they had bookshelves with strange book titles, you know, stuff that people would just leave there. So there was like French impressionistic poetry and sitting alongside maybe a Betty Crocker cookbook.”
“A lot of people went there that were part of Gen X without knowing it, and each contributed something to make it so special to the people that were there,” he added.
The Beehive was such a hit that, in 1992, Kramer and Zumoff opened a satellite location, in the old King’s Court movie theater, in Oakland. That venue included a bar and combination movie theater and concert hall that also played a big role in Gen X Pittsburgh culture. It also featured an array of old-school pinball machines, whose Pittsburgh revival Zumoff sparked.
But the Oakland location mostly lost money, and the owners shuttered it a decade later.
While the original Hive survived years longer — and even expanded to adjacent storefronts — times were changing.
Buzzing Into the Sunset
Rullo said its golden era ended around 1997. For one, other coffeehouses clearly inspired by the Beehive started popping up around town. (This was long before Starbucks had a foothold in Pittsburgh — let alone a South Side location on the corner opposite the Beehive.)
The South Side also got less affordable for the artist types and other, often tenuously employed folks who made the scene.
And while the Beehive was among the city’s early internet cafes, Rullo said, “cell phones changed the game completely.” A culture in which people go to coffeehouses to peruse spreadsheets on their laptops is not conducive to the sort of environment the Beehive so powerfully nurtured.
“Once you could go into a place and put on headphones and sit staring at a screen, it completely changes the need for that community,” Rullo said. “And I think it does away with some of the spaces that were so dependent on it.”
A few hundred Beehive partisans turned out to the book’s launch party, held Nov. 1 at Kramer and Zumoff’s Tiki Lounge, located about 10 blocks up East Carson.
Rullo said sales have been strong.
He calls it a “book of memories.”
“I made great efforts to try and honor everyone's memories, knowing that I was going to get some things wrong,” he said. “But I hope that people can look back and remember their youth.”
He also sought to honor Kramer and Zumoff, who went on to own such businesses as the Lava Lounge and the Double Wide Grill.
The Beehive, he said, “really was a vision product. And I don't think they get enough credit for that right now.”
