The Aurora Club, another piece of Pittsburgh jazz history, may soon be demolished

“The End,” Angela James replied after receiving a photo of a condemned sign posted on the boarded-up window of an Uptown building. Between 1962 and 1999, the building at 1501 Fifth Ave. was home to the Aurora Club, a popular jazz club and Hill District institution. Now, it’s one of several Fifth Avenue buildings that the city has condemned this year that could be facing demolition.

Once operated by George Barron, the man whom James long considered her father, the Aurora Club and the building where it operated were important parts of Pittsburgh entertainment and organized crime history. The building’s disgraceful final chapter masks a history that includes gigs by some of the city’s finest musicians and ties to Pittsburgh’s top Mafia figures.

Mob real estate

In 1947, Meyer Talenfeld, a racketeering bail bondsman and real estate broker, bought the newly constructed building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Pride Street. Talenfeld was a cousin of future Pittsburgh Mayor Sophie Masloff. His rap sheet includes prosecutions for receiving stolen goods, assault and battery and bribery.

Talenfeld exploited his family’s real estate business to build a large portfolio of Hill District properties to use as security for bail bonds that he wrote for many of the neighborhood’s Jewish numbers racketeers. By the 1960s, civil rights activists had named Talenfeld one of the city’s most egregious slumlords.

Talenfeld didn’t hold onto the property at 1501 Fifth Ave. for long. He sold it in 1950 to Tony Ripepi, a Mon Valley slot machine and jukebox entrepreneur whom state and federal law enforcement officials later named the third-most-powerful figure in Pittsburgh’s Mafia family.

Ripepi owned the building until 1996, the year he died. In 1962, he rented the second-floor space to George “Crip” Barron. Barron was a Hill District native who got his nickname in childhood: Some people who remember him said his limp came from polio, others said it was from an improperly healed fracture.

A club is born

Barron went into the numbers gambling business in the 1940s. He first appeared in local newspapers in 1949 after being caught with numbers slips. In the early 1960s, Barron and his partner, Joe Stotts, bought the charter of a defunct social club: the Berryman and West Club. Stotts, who died last year, also was a numbers man with a long record and an entry in the 1990 Pennsylvania Crime Commission report.

For a couple of years in the late 1930s, the Berryman and West Club had been a Hill District fixture in its rented space on Wylie Avenue above the Crawford Grill No. 1. There, the club hosted pianists Errol Garner and Alyce Brooks.

Though short-lived, the Berryman and West Club made a lasting impression. Barron capitalized on that name recognition when he opened his Fifth Avenue club two decades later. In its later incarnation, the club booked acts like The Debonaires, a local Black radio staple fronted by crooner John Wilson, who played weekly gigs Sunday evenings.

After two years of booking such acts as the Billy Kymes Combo and Jimmy Reed, in 1965 Barron changed the name to the Aurora Lodge Club, using another old social club charter. Barron dropped “Lodge” from the name within a few years and it was simply called the Aurora Club.

The Aurora Club continued to book big-name local and national acts. Trombonist Harold Betters played there, along with his brother, singer Jerry Betters. So did drummer Roger Humphries. By the 1980s, the Aurora Club had joined the Hurricane Club and the Crawford Grill No. 2 as one of the city’s top jazz spots. It was, as Lorraine Turner wrote in the 1985 Post-Gazette column “Black on Black,” a slice of authentic Pittsburgh Black life.

More than music

The Aurora Club was much more than a place to catch good jazz. From its earliest years as the Berryman and West Club, it sponsored boxing matches at venues throughout the city. In 1972, presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey held a campaign event there. A decade later, LaWanda Page, who played Aunt Esther on the popular TV show “Sanford and Son,” headlined a comedy act in the club.

James recalls spending time in the club — during daylight hours — with Barron at the club’s holiday parties that Barron threw for Hill District kids.

“The bar would have candy lined all the way down the bar and he had games and he had bobbing for apples and you got a bag and it had little trinkets in it,” James remembers of the Halloween parties. “At Christmas, he had gifts for children.”

Barron continued to rack up arrests into the 1970s for numbers gambling offenses. The club became a popular haunt among local racketeers.

“It was a gambling place,” former Fifth Avenue drugstore owner and alleged FBI informant Wilbert Darling said in an interview before he died in 2022. It wasn’t like Squirrel Hill’s Beacon Club, which was a high-end mob hangout. “Beacon Club was a nice place. You’d get a sandwich or something. Aurora Club was just crap games.”

Just up Pride Street, Barron and Tony Zucco, another numbers man, ironically ran the bingo games at St. Benedict the Moor Catholic Church. “Nobody escaped my father’s generosity,” Barron’s step-daughter Trudy Thomas said in 2001, after Barron died.

Gangsters in the basement

Though Barron owned the club, mob boss Tony Ripepi still owned the building. While entertainment history was being made upstairs, the first-floor restaurant space and the basement were full-time gambling joints run by Sal, Adolph (Junior) and Eugene Williams.

The 1990 Pennsylvania Crime Commission reported that the Williams brothers dominated numbers action in the Hill District. Originally aligned with the flashy gambling kingpin Tony Grosso, the Williams brothers later aligned themselves with Ripepi’s crime family run by John LaRocca and then Michael Genovese. The Williams family capitalized on its reputation in the 2014 reality TV show, “The Godfather of Pittsburgh.”

“Sugar’s Deli, 1501 Fifth Ave.,” the Pennsylvania Crime Commission wrote, “has been used by the Williamses to collect bets.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Pittsburgh Police Department maintained a series of “lottery location cards.” The building at 1501 Fifth Ave. had two cards — one for the basement where money was counted and another for the first-floor restaurant.

“There were cashiers down there like you went to a bank,” said one Uptown resident during a 2021 neighborhood walking tour. “It was actually cashiers sitting there at a counter.”

A changing Hill District

The Aurora Club closed in 1999, after years of complaints by neighbors. By that point, the live music had ended and the club had become a noisy after-hours joint. Though it had become a popular hangout for Steelers like Frenchy Fuqua, the Aurora Club also attracted drug dealers and violence.

Sala Udin, who lived near the club and who served on the Pittsburgh City Council, lobbied to have the club declared a nuisance bar after a Wilkinsburg man was killed after leaving the club in 1998. A former Aurora Club patron, Udin became its most powerful foe. District Attorney Stephen Zappala signed onto Udin’s complaint, and Common Pleas Judge Robert Gallo ordered the club to be closed. In 2000, Ripepi’s estate sold the property to its current owner.

A forgotten legacy

The Aurora Club outlived the Hill District’s jazz heyday. Unlike its more famous counterparts, the club has become little more than a brief mention in Pittsburgh jazz history books. One published in 2021, “A History of Pittsburgh Jazz: Swinging in the Steel City” by Richard Gazarik and Karen Anthony Cole erroneously wrote that the club had been demolished during urban renewal.

The building, once a hub where racketeers, musicians and ordinary people rubbed shoulders, gambled and danced, is on borrowed time. It’s one of several Fifth Avenue bars with colorful histories recently condemned or slated for demolition. Others include the former Red’s Bar in the 1600 block and the former Kenny’s Place and the Aces-Deuces Lounge in the 1400 block.

The groundbreaking for the redevelopment of the 1600 block into new affordable housing took place in October. The city considers the Aurora Club building to be structurally intact and not an immediate danger to nearby buildings and people, according to Engage Pgh. The Department of Licensing and Inspections did not respond to requests for additional information about the Aurora Club building.

Angela James is one person who hasn’t forgotten the Aurora Club. She thinks it needs to be remembered.

“The Aurora Club supported the Black community that supported it. In its day, it was a well-known and thriving nightclub,” James says. “Its demolition will erase it from Pittsburgh’s structural history, but not from the memory of those who knew it.”

September 16, 2024

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The Aurora Club, another piece of Pittsburgh jazz history, may soon be demolished

The Aurora Club, another piece of Pittsburgh jazz history, may soon be demolished

Mob real estate

A club is born

More than music

Gangsters in the basement

A changing Hill District

A forgotten legacy

‘The city was one giant brothel’: Pittsburgh’s shocking history of ...

David S. Rotenstein

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