Duquesne National Bank

A small facade with a bigger-than-life history, this former bank spent less than two years fulfilling its original purpose. The handsome Industrial National Bank opened here in 1904, closed two years later after a merger, and sat vacant until Duquesne National Bank bought the property in 1910. That bank failed in the Great Depression; another bank relocated here for a time, and then this became the final home of the Pittsburgh Stock Exchange until it was dissolved in 1974.

After a brief interlude as an art gallery, the building spent the last two decades of the 20th century as a gay dance club and drag show cabaret under a series of names, including Zack’s Fourth Avenue. Today it houses the costume shop of the Pittsburgh Playhouse, the performing arts center of Point Park University.

The venue’s main courtyard on Forbes Avenue preserves facade pieces of the old buildings torn down to make way for the playhouse. Here on the Fourth Avenue side, it stands on what was merely a parking lot.

Dorothy Finkelhor

The founder and first president of Point Park University dropped out of high school. Dorothy Finkelhor finished her diploma at age 25, then earned a bachelor’s and M.B.A. As a city schoolteacher during the Great Depression, Finkelhor was laid off along with all other married women teachers whose husbands still had jobs.

So she placed a want ad in the paper, offering to teach shorthand and typing to anyone who watched her two young daughters while she found another job. When she got nearly 100 responses, she decided instead to start her own secretarial school. After more than 10,000 students had matriculated — and Finkelhor had earned her Ph.D. at Pitt along the way — in 1960 the school became Point Park, first as a junior college, then a four-year college by the decade's end, and now a university.

Virgil Bo Swiatek

A bartender at Zack’s Fourth Avenue, Virgil Bo Swiatek performed in drag beauty pageants locally and nationally as LaDonna LaMoore. The club sponsored Swiatek’s travels and costume budgets, and hosted the Miss Gay Pennsylvania USA competition in 1990.

LaDonna won the pageant that year, performing a choreographed lipsync medley of “All That Jazz” and “What I Did For Love” that ended with her simulated execution in the electric chair. Just days before the pageant, city council passed an ordinance outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation.