I’m at the bar in the Bloomfield Bridge Tavern, forking my way through the Polish Platter (the “red” one, with meat) and talking with Steve Frankowski about the end of a family bar that is set to close this fall just shy of 32 years old.
His father, Stan, who wore his heart on his sleeve and his political and Catholic allegiances on the walls inside and out, died in 2005. Steve, 57, the eldest son, has been running the place since, but he says when the insurance runs out Oct. 22, so will he.
It was just him and the cook Thursday working a Penguins night in Pittsburgh because an employee called off (because it’s a Penguins night in Pittsburgh). Some of the regulars had crossed the Allegheny River for an early evening brew, but as the sun set, millennials began sidling up to the bar for a crash course in Polish cuisine.
“We have the second best Polish food you’ll ever have,” Mr. Frankowski tells a new customer.
(He’d never presume to say his food could top that of someone’s mother, grandmother, aunt or uncle.)
Having a beer before heading down to PPG Paints Arena for the game is Mark Lewandowski, whose aggressively unpretentious rock band, the Spuds, played the tavern more times than anyone would care to count in the 1980s and ’90s. Mr. Lewandowski is a recently retired special education/inclusion teacher at Mars High School and he lives an easy walk down the hill from this Liberty Avenue landmark.
The Bloomfield Bridge Tavern locked entrance comes with words of wisdom for those who enter. (Darrell Sapp/Post-Gazette)
“The Frankowski hospitality has never changed,” he says when I ask what differences he’s seen in the place.
Stan Frankowski was a union leader and bologna packer at the Armour Meat Co. in Thornburg until it shut down in 1983. He rallied union members to buy and manage it but the buyout plan fell through. The father of four then took a few classes on entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University and, in his 50th year, wound up a bar owner with his children’s encouragement.
Steve was 25 then. His father said, “Just give me five years,” but anyone who’s ever seen “The Godfather” knows how tough it is to leave a family business.
“They sucked me in,” Steve says pulling his arms back like Michael Corleone, but smiling.
I brought out an old newspaper story from January 1991 that he remembered well. It was about a patron from Plum who expressed support for “President Reagan’’ on KDKA-TV following President George H.W. Bush’s State of the Union address — and that’s not even the punchline. The Greater Pittsburgh Fugitive Task Force swarmed into the tavern after after seeing this particular fugitive’s barroom critique on TV, and a week later the man pleaded guilty to 25 criminal counts “because I did them all.”
Weird stuff was the rule in this bastion of Polish pride on the edge of the neighborhood known as Pittsburgh’s Little Italy. It celebrated Dyngus Day on each Monday after Easter, passing out water pistols so men could douse fair maidens in a modern spin on an ancient folk tradition. Except that from the get-go, women arrived armed with store-bought Super Soakers and men had to go home drenched in lessons in equal rights.
The BBT, as so many called it, always hosted all kinds of music. Sure, polka bands came through, but so did the Spuds, indie metal, punk, avant-garde jazz, Squonk Opera, you name it. It had Drum & Bass Night every Wednesday for 14 years ending in 2014. The Frankowskis heard sounds they never would have and the bands learned the difference between haluski and kluski.
A ping-pong table is on the stage now and “the city’s upset because they can’t get any tax revenue from it,” Mr. Frankowski said.
The BBT is an All-American story that’s ending in an All-American way: The cost of insurance is driving the Frankowskis out of business. Four or five years ago, on a Drum & Bass Night, a patron slipped on the floor and ultimately walked away with a $35,000 settlement.
No one ever fell on all those slippery Dyngus Days, but irony has never helped when figuring insurance premiums. That payout came too close to one for after a power surge that fried his cash register a year or so ago, and there also was a mishap on a deejay night that’s still in court.
The insurance rates will be going to a height Mr. Frankowski doesn’t care to scale, and so the bar and everything in it is for sale. He shares all that information with more shrugs than bitterness.
“Three Polish hand grenades’’ he says when someone orders three plates of stuffed cabbage, and then he taps that into the register just before the puck drops on one of the last hockey nights this family tavern will ever see.
Brian O’Neill: boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947 or Twitter @brotheroneill
First Published: June 11, 2017, 4:00 a.m.