“PEOPLE KEEP TELLING ME Pittsburgh is the new Brooklyn,” says Brent Young. “It pisses me off.” A native Pittsburgher, Young, 33, made his name as co-founder of buzzed-about Brooklyn butchery the Meat Hook; now he’s back in his hometown opening Whitfield, the restaurant in the new Ace Hotel Pittsburgh. “I love my city, and I just want to see awesome things happen here,” Young says.  The recently opened hotel inhabits a restored century-old YMCA building. On a recent afternoon, sunlight streams through a stained-glass installation by local artist Glenn Greene into the lobby, flanked by Whitfield on one side and a bar on the other. Past the wrought-iron and marble staircase leading up to the 63 guest rooms, double doors open onto a soaring three-story gymnasium, used as an event space, circled by two levels of balcony. Up on the hotel’s second floor, in a ballroom tiled in a checkerboard of red and black, lofty windows frame majestic views of the city.  No, we are not in Brooklyn. Pittsburgh—its architecture and singular history—is this hotel’s subject and muse. That might sound grandiose to someone unfamiliar with the Ace brand. The first Ace Hotel opened in Seattle in 1999, when friends Alex Calderwood, Wade Weigel and Doug Herrick turned a former flophouse in the Belltown neighborhood into a go-to place for creative types. They kept the rates low and filled the rooms with art by people they knew, such as street artist Shepard Fairey. Each of the hotels that followed—in Portland, Oregon; Palm Springs, California; New York; London; Panama City, Panama; and Los Angeles—was as much a social experiment as a place to stay, with cozy public spaces where locals and guests alike could meet for coffee, camp out and plug into the life of the surrounding neighborhood.  Ace was Calderwood’s childhood nickname; he was the face of the hotels and their guiding sensibility. Since his death at age 47 in November 2013, the constellation of projects he launched, which also includes the Rudy’s Barbershop chain and the experiential marketing agency Neverstop, has continued to hew close to his vision. “Alex loved history, loved digging deep into the buildings and the neighborhoods,” says Ace Hotel partner and chief brand officer Kelly Sawdon. “We really embed ourselves and spend a lot of time on the ground listening to the local culture and trying to understand what makes each of these cities unique.”  The East Liberty neighborhood, where Ace Hotel Pittsburgh now stands, was a booming retail center in the first half of the last century, a “second downtown” with its own theaters and department stores. The YMCA building that houses the Ace and the Gothic East Liberty Presbyterian Church directly across the street are artifacts of that era. Ruinous urban planning during the 1960s knocked the wind out of the neighborhood, but by the late ’90s the local community had come up with a unified revitalization plan. Many point to the arrival of a Google office in 2010 as a milestone; nearby Carnegie Mellon University has fostered the talent behind many of the smaller tech start-ups in the area, and that DIY spirit extends to a growing crop of local galleries, microbreweries and other creative incubators.  “What’s most exciting about Ace is that they’re so committed to programming their space and opening it up in partnership with the local community,” says Nate Cunningham of Y Hotel, LP, who, in conjunction with colleague Claire Hosteny, acts as the hotel’s managing partner. What that means for hotel guests is a robust schedule of art, music and other events that present a tightly curated sampling of the local scene. Of course, this being Pittsburgh, Steelers and Pirates games will play regularly too, on an 18-foot screen in the former gym.  One of the hotel’s primary cultural partners, the Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA), has provided an exhibition of photographs of the neighborhood taken by Charles “Teenie” Harris, who documented Pittsburgh’s African-American community from the 1930s to the ’70s. Installed in the hotel’s main stairwell, the show opened with an evening led by CMOA archive specialist Charlene Foggie-Barnett, featuring oral histories from some of the photos’ subjects and a soundtrack by local sound designer Herman Pearl (aka DJ Soy Sos). “You get a real sense of Pittsburgh through the eye of [Harris’s] lens,” says Foggie-Barnett.  A real sense of Pittsburgh—of any city where an Ace Hotel sets up shop—is what this team aims to distill and deliver. The Pittsburgh hotel is the first designed entirely by in-house creative services firm Atelier Ace, turning to local artisans to supply everything from textiles to furniture to metalwork. “We try to say recycled, not reclaimed,” says Zak Kruszynski of the wood his workshop, Bones and All, pulled from barns around the region and used to make luggage racks, coffee tables, benches and other furniture. “I’m inspired by the historical character of the material, the holes and marks left by previous uses. But I want to use it in a modern way.” A Frank Lloyd Wright pattern on the curtains in the restaurant and an abstracted Amish-quilt motif on the Pendleton blankets covering the beds provide further echoes of the region, its architecture and its craft traditions.  In planning the menu for Whitfield with his executive chef, Bethany Zozula, and head pastry chef, Casey Shively, both of whom hail from the area, Brent Young has continually come back to the question of what defines Western Pennsylvania cuisine. He confirms that, yes, there will be pierogies—a prerequisite in this heavily Eastern European city. And in Jubilee Hilltop Ranch, east of Pittsburgh, he’s found a source of grass-fed beef he’s excited about. He has landed on the notion of a tavern, providing “the best of both worlds”—burgers as well as big, indulgent steaks—as the right fit for this town. “You have to be inclusive,” he says. “That’s true hospitality.”
The Ace Hotel brand is known for tapping into the local culture of each of its locations. Its latest outpost in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood is at the cutting edge of the city’s revival.