For five years, the ground floor of the old YMCA building at 120 S. Whitfield sat mostly dark. The Ace Hotel closed during the pandemic, its restaurant Whitfield went with it, and when Kasa took over the property in 2021 and renamed it The Maverick, the bar space stayed quiet. Blue Sky Kitchen & Bar, one block north on N. Whitfield, closed too. If you lived here in 2022 and wanted a cocktail near home, you drove to Shadyside or walked to Kelly's.
That block does not read the same way anymore. Four cocktail-forward rooms have opened inside a two-block radius of the Maverick since spring 2025, and a fifth is a short walk down Penn. For a resident of East Liberty, Larimer, or the north edge of Shadyside, the neighborhood's evening center of gravity has moved. It no longer runs along Penn Avenue past Target and Whole Foods. It runs perpendicular, on a short stretch of S. Whitfield and Centre.
The corner, drawn tight
The cluster fits inside a rectangle roughly bounded by Centre Avenue on the south, Penn on the north, S. Highland on the west, and S. Whitfield on the east. Four of the five new anchors are within a three-minute walk of the Maverick's front door. The fifth, Margaux, sits at Penn and S. Highland, one block off.
What has opened, in order
Title 9 — 5997 Centre Ave. Pittsburgh's first women's sports watch bar, from a concept that began with March Madness pop-ups on March 21, 23, 28-31 and April 4-6 before the room officially opened. Eight televisions, a rooftop bar, a full menu named for athletes.
Hey Babe — 120 S. Whitfield, ground floor of the Maverick. Opened mid-2025 by Danielle Cain and Rob Hirst, who designed the space in collaboration with Wildman Chalmers Design. Hirst was the opening bartender at Kaya in 1996 and has since mixed things up at Soba, Mad Mex, Sienna Mercato, Round Corner Cantina, Kingfly Spirits and Eleven Contemporary Kitchen.
Hound Haus — 6314 Broad St., the old Zeke's Coffee address, opened June 7, 2025 by Tom and Danielle Lafe. A 10,000-square-foot coffee shop, bar and coworking space, also with a dog park. The back patio opens onto a fully-fenced, 10,000-square-foot dog park that is heated and open in cooler months.
Palm Palm — 5996 Centre Ave. Opened July 6 with a menu of fun, affordably priced coastal cuisine and beverages, from Ritual House owners Herky and Lisa Pollock with partners Edwin and Amanda Smith. Pollock's own framing: "We call this Ritual House's light and airy little sister."
Margaux — 5947 Penn Ave., at Penn and Highland. A hybrid European café-bar offering specialty coffee, shareable plates, rotating cocktails, and a handpicked wine and beer list. Coffee by day, cocktail bar by night.
Two others sit inside the same rectangle and shape the daytime version of the same block. BéLa Kitchen, chef Minh Luong's second restaurant after more than a decade at Tan Lac Vien, opened on Whitfield to spotlight lesser-known regional dishes and home-style cooking from Vietnam, alongside a full bar program. Dancing Crab Thai opened its third location on the same corridor, run by chef-owner Lek Srijariya, originally from Thailand's Sukhothai province, who moved to the U.S. as a nurse in L.A. before settling in Pittsburgh, started a tiny Thai grocery in the Strip, launched a food truck, and turned her signature curries and noodle dishes into some of the most reliably delicious Thai food in the city. Duo's Taqueria, the Duolingo-affiliated room, rounds out the food side with birria and more than 130 agave spirits all from Mexican-owned distillers.
Why this block, and not Penn Avenue
The Penn Avenue corridor was the story for fifteen years. Target opened on July 24, 2011 as an anchor in a dynamic East Liberty commercial corridor, alongside Home Depot and Whole Foods. That spine is still the daytime map. It is where residents park, buy groceries, and pick up the school-supply run.
The evening map is different now, and it is not built on big boxes. It is built on rooms that were dormant. The Maverick's ground floor sat empty for five years. Zeke's Coffee closed and became a dog park. 5996 Centre Ave. was previously an unremarkable retail address. What made the switch possible is not new construction. It is operators looking at rooms that already existed and reading them differently.
The distinction matters because the block reads like a coordinated development but was not one. No single landlord assembled it. Cain and Hirst were big fans of Whitfield, the restaurant chef Beth Zozoula operated from the building when it was known as Ace Hotel, and both entities closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hound Haus's owners moved to Pittsburgh's East End near Tom's childhood neighborhood in Highland Park in 2021. Palm Palm came out of a Downtown restaurant group looking for a second concept. The cluster is the sum of independent decisions that happened to land inside the same three minutes of walking.
A Saturday evening, read as a loop
For a resident who has not walked the block since 2023, here is the shortest version of what it now supports:
- Coffee at Margaux around 4 p.m., which shifts into a sophisticated cocktail bar where you can experience the artistry of the bartenders as the light drops.
- A drink at Hey Babe during Golden Hour, Monday through Friday from 4 to 6 p.m., with drink discounts and 15% off all food.
- Dinner at Palm Palm or BéLa Kitchen, both within a two-minute walk.
- Late seat at Title 9 if a women's game is on, or a nightcap on the Hound Haus patio if a dog is involved.
That loop is roughly 500 feet of sidewalk. Five years ago it would have required a car.
What the cluster is not
The point is not that East Liberty had nothing before. Casbah, Muddy Waters, Garbarino's, Kelly's Bar & Lounge, Senyai, Paris 66, Fish Nor Fowl, and Mola have anchored dinner in this neighborhood for years, and most of them sit outside the two-block rectangle described above. Casbah is still a neighborhood restaurant and wine bar located in Pittsburgh's East End with a year-round garden patio. Muddy Waters still separates oysters by coast so you can compare New England and West Coast in one sitting. Those rooms did not move.
What changed is that the perimeter of the East Liberty evening got denser at one corner. If your walk used to fan out toward Ellsworth in Shadyside or toward Bryant Street in Highland Park, it now has a plausible middle destination. The block is not competing with the older rooms so much as filling the interval between them.
What to read into it
Two things, if you live here.
First, this is the first sustained recovery of the Ace Hotel bar footprint since 2020. Cain and Hirst have given the space new life by renovating the bar, replacing the flooring and light fixtures, adding high-top tables and installing booths and banquet seating. The room that used to define East End nightlife under a different name is once again what people mean when they say "meet me on Whitfield." That was not obvious in 2023. It is now.
Second, the Maverick corner is behaving like a small business district rather than a hotel amenity. The concentration matters because East Liberty's older nightlife nodes were spread across a much longer walking distance, and Penn Circle traffic patterns discouraged casual pedestrian browsing between them. A resident can now leave a Highland Park rowhouse, cross Penn at S. Highland, and be inside a room with a decent cocktail list in under ten minutes of walking. That is a different neighborhood than the one that existed when the Ace closed.
For anyone tracking the arc of the block over the next year, the two open questions are what fills the former Blue Sky footprint on N. Whitfield, and whether Broad Street's evening traffic follows Hound Haus's lead or stays a daytime address. Both are worth watching if you live within the perimeter.
If you are already inside this radius and thinking about the value of what your walking distance now includes, Black Key Partners works block-by-block across East Liberty and the surrounding East End neighborhoods. Request a Concierge Consultation and we will walk you through what the current corner supports, and what your home is worth to a buyer who wants to live inside it.
