Lots of Pittsburghers have lived in, worked in, and frequently visited the Strip District over the years. To celebrate our magazine’s 20 years, it seemed fitting to reach out to well-known personalities for appreciative comments about their Strip experiences. We present here—in no particular order—their many responses, a mixture of succinct, heartfelt comments and essays full of personal/family memories, all expressing their genuine love for our favorite neighborhood.
Andy Masich
(Senator John Heinz History Center)
Once a desolate brownfield, the Strip District has emerged as a vibrant neighborhood with a storied past and great food, where residents and businesspeople value tradition while coming together to solve modern challenges and enjoy a uniquely Pittsburgh experience. The Heinz History Center has been proud to be a part of this transformation. I can think of no better place to be home to “America’s #1 History Museum.”
Stan Prestogeorge
(Prestogeorge Coffee & Tea)
So much of our success is rooted in the history, growth, and evolution of the Strip District. There truly is no place like the Strip, and as we enter our third generation, I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have been part of its story and hopeful to remain part of its future. As the neighborhood continues to evolve around us, we’ll be here doing what we do best: roasting great coffee, serving our customers, and growing alongside the community, all while staying true to the values and traditions that have always defined Prestogeorge Coffee & Tea in the Strip!
Andrew Stockey (WTAE)
The best evening in town? A morning in Pittsburgh’s Strip District! The shopping. The sights. The sounds. The coffee! It’s a great place to experience everything that Pittsburgh is about on a Saturday morning—and maybe the best way to meet your neighbors and friends who call our community home.
Jimmy Sunseri
(Jimmy and Nino Sunseri’s / Bella Notte)
My grandfather and his brothers started a pasta-manufacturing plant in Sharpsburg around 1894. By 1898, they had moved to the Strip and created the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company. That was our family business until my brother and I established Jimmy & Nino Sunseri’s and Bella Notte in the 1980s.
In the good old days in the Strip District, everything was owned by families. It was the city’s “hub” for wholesale produce/foods. All the mom-and-pop stores in the city’s neighborhoods shopped here. The terminal was nothing but wholesale produce with railroad cars unloading food there, front and back. The Strip was a city in itself with its own set of rules—everyone worked crazy hours. The atmosphere today is not the same; then it was totally blue-collar workers, and everyone had a business.
I retired back in 2016 for health reasons. But I have still maintained a Strip presence at our business—sometimes sitting in a Hollywood-style director’s chair while chewing on an unlit cigar. Today, all roads in Pittsburgh still lead to the Strip District. It is what it is, but it is by no means what it was.
Celina Pompeani Mathison
(KDKA Pittsburgh Today Live, formerly)
My family and I love spending time in the Strip District. There is everything you could possibly want. The Strip has some of the best restaurants, coffee houses, shops, and walking trails. It’s my favorite part of the city!
Raymond Turkas Jr.
(Strip District Meats)
My father would be amazed if he could see the Strip today. He would have never imagined the Strip would extend past 21st Street! In fact, back when we started in 1952, it wasn’t even called the Strip; it was called the produce yards. I can recall being a young boy and walking into Primanti’s down the street, and the actual Primanti brothers were behind the counter—both of them!
Mayor Corey O’Connor
(City of Pittsburgh)
The Strip District is a great example of what makes Pittsburgh such a special place: a rich history, locally owned businesses, hardworking people, and a willingness to embrace what’s next without losing sight of where we came from. For two decades, The Strip! magazine has helped tell that story—capturing its changes, celebrating its people, and preserving the stories that make the Strip District and Lawrenceville such special places.
I’ve always appreciated that no matter how much the Strip changes, it never loses its character. I can still remember watching the trains at Wholey’s before picking up a pepperoni roll at Mancini’s with my father or grabbing pancakes at Pamela’s or Kelly O’s—and now I get to do the same with my kids. As we work to make Pittsburgh every family’s first choice, the Strip reminds us that our strongest neighborhoods are the ones that honor their history while continuing to evolve.
Dan McCaffery
(McCaffery Interests)
We have had the pleasure of participating in the tremendous transformation of the Strip District over the past 20 years—from the redevelopment of The Cork Factory and Lot 24 to 1600 Smallman and our forthcoming multifamily project on Smallman Street, and notably including The Terminal, which even in its worst state had been a necessary anchor to continued development in the Strip District. It’s been an incredible experience watching the neighborhood become an attractive destination for all.
Tom Balestrieri
(The Buncher Company, formerly)
My connection and romance with the produce yards and the Strip District go back to soon after the end of World War II. My family lived with my widowed grandfather, the owner of the Balestriere (with an “e” then) Produce Company. Our home was adjacent to the business, and I began working alongside my cousins and uncles as soon as I could carry a bushel basket of fruits or vegetables. I worked for the business from grade school through college—until 1963, when I was blessed to be hired by The Buncher Company at their Rail-River-Truck Terminal in Leetsdale. Once there, I moved up the ladder, and I had the opportunity to slip slowly away from the family business.
In the years that I worked with the Strip business, my uncles would take their fleet of four trucks to the produce yards. There were vendors throughout the produce terminal sprinkled along Smallman Street, Penn Avenue, and the streets in between. Primanti’s was there (manned by the Primanti brothers), as was Vince & Henry’s Restaurant, the forerunner of DeLuca’s. These companies and several others like them have continued on through the years, and may have changed hands, but they remain largely the same as they were six or seven decades ago. The same for Penn Mac, with its barrels of olives and three-stores-wide of Italian products; it is said that if you can’t find your Italian staples there, they are no longer being produced. As for Buncher, its goal was to add value to the Strip without changing the fabric of the community.
Most new businesses that have moved into the Strip over the last few decades fit right in with the old, or are there to serve the wants and needs of the residential community. The Strip! magazine is a toddler amongst these titans, but there will always be good news to report about the Strip for generations to come.
Aleita Hermanowski
(Hermanowski Wholesale)
I’m grateful I had the opportunity to be a part of the Strip District community for most of my life. Everyone was truly like family and looked out for each other. My dad, Joe, owned his tobacco and candy business for nearly 40 years. He put his heart and soul into it every day. Our store was also a place where people often came to hang out and catch up. This vibrant era of human connection, steady commerce, and deep community roots will always be a cherished part of who we are.
Paul Carrozzi
(Roland’s Seafood Grill)
My earliest memory of the Strip is watching my dad serve the produce workers in our diner in the early 1960s when I was around 10 years old. He’d slide the plate right down the counter, like on TV. Customers would get up and make fresh pots of coffee and ring someone out if my dad or mom was busy.
Roland’s and the Strip itself have certainly changed over my 60 years of ownership, but the sense of regulars—and regulars who became family—is still at the heart of the Strip. My brother, Rich, would dress as Santa, host the nuns who sold cookies, and frequently yell (good-naturedly) at the delivery drivers, who still brought him food their wives and mothers made for him. We weathered bad crime reports, snowmageddon, leaking roofs, a pandemic, the nightclub era, and now even tourist bus groups, along with the many changing challenges and successes that small businesses face. Somehow, the same resilience, loyalty, and authenticity found in those produce workers still exists today on Penn Avenue—in our local store and restaurant owners. We may not be sliding plates anymore but I assure you that we, along with other places on Penn, will welcome you in as family.
Chris Beers
(Grandpa Joe’s Candy Shop)
I moved to Pittsburgh in 2006 to become the general manager of the Spaghetti Warehouse, now Cinderlands, and I immediately fell in love with the Strip District. I knew then that if I ever opened my dream candy store, it had to be there, building on the incredible legacy of Fort Pitt Candy and Mon Aimee Chocolat. What started as a single 900-square-foot storefront has grown into four connected storefronts, and the Strip District has been instrumental in helping Grandpa Joe’s Candy Shop become a Pittsburgh brand. As The Strip! magazine celebrates its 20th anniversary, I’m grateful to be part of the neighborhood’s continued growth and proud that the Strip helped inspire a business that has now expanded to 23 locations across six states.
Jim Cunningham
(WQED / Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra Broadcasts)
Those big red garage-style doors of the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company loom in my memory from many visits to the cheese counter to buy Parmigiano Reggiano with friend and former academic advisor at Thiel College, Dr. Richard Schroeder. We would start with breakfast at DeLuca’s. One late afternoon, when DeLuca’s was nearly empty, I met artist Robert Qualters there and talked about the poster he’d done for the WQED Auction and another for David Stock’s Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, still hanging in the WQED-FM studios.
I liked to shop at the now-gone Feinberg’s (where I once bought a large mechanical rubber rat as a gift). The violist in the family, Jimmy IV, received his first Steelers jersey from Yinzers. A favorite Strip District stop is always Enrico Biscotti, where Larry Lagatutta told me he was a regular WQED-FM 89.3 listener, before handing over a bag of warm walnut biscotti. As a member of the selection committee for Nancy Polinsky Johnson’s Pittsburgh Walk of Fame in front of The Terminal in the Strip, I voted for George Benson, and this year Henry Mancini. Next year I’ll nominate again famed conductors Lorin Maazel and Andre Previn. Captured in Rick Sebak’s classic WQED documentary, The Strip Show, the Strip is ever changing but keeps getting better.
Robert Fragasso
(Fragasso Financial Advisors)
Twenty years ago, Chuck Shane had a vision of what the Strip could fully become, and he began The Strip! magazine to report on and support the growth of that vision. The Strip! continues to fulfill that goal as it holds up a mirror to the dynamism of this geographic engine of commerce, living, and culture.
Sean Collier
(KDKA Pittsburgh Today Live / WDVE-FM / Shady Ave / Broadcast Film Critics Association)
My earliest memories of the Strip are seeing concerts at Metropol when I was a teenager. Living in the suburbs, this felt like the most quintessentially Pittsburgh experience—going to a historic neighborhood and listening to a rock band in an industrial setting. I have vivid memories of seeing System of a Down, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Flogging Molly, Ben Folds, and many more at Metropol. The club is gone, but I’m always happy to return to the Strip—particularly if music is involved.
Chip Walter
(Carnegie Mellon University / WQED, formerly; Space Age / Last Ape Standing)
The Strip and I go back a few years—well, decades, to be honest. I remember it when you could buy groceries out of the terminal building and when there was only one Primanti’s—where I could be found with a few close friends at 3:00 a.m. wolfing down capicola sandwiches loaded with fries, a fried egg, and coleslaw. Since then there have been countless excursions down Penn Avenue to the markets I frequented with our children as they grew up. So deep is our family affection for the Strip that we sold our house and moved to The Cork Factory, a building that is one of the first examples of the massive change the area has been seeing. I have been fortunate enough to have traveled seven continents, and still I find the Strip one of the world’s unique places, a wonderful blend of old and new, urban and suburban—always vibrant, always surprising, and always reinventing itself. We have a gift here in Pittsburgh, an urban gem, and it’s fun to see how the rest of the world and the region are embracing it.
William Powers
(Pittsburgh Opera)
The Strip District has been Pittsburgh Opera’s home since 2008. We’ve seen the neighborhood evolve and grow considerably during that time. We love its combination of energy and grit; its blend of both new and classic Pittsburgh restaurants and shops; its proximity to other Pittsburgh neighborhoods and it being its own center of gravity; its proud history and its bright future. There’s no place we’d rather call home.
County Executive Sara Innamorato
(Allegheny County)
The Strip District has always been one of Allegheny County’s most vibrant neighborhoods. As a lifelong yinzer, I grew up going there on Saturdays with my sister and dad for our Penn Mac and Wholey’s run, marveling at goods from around the world packed into a few blocks. If we behaved, we got a bag of the red pistachios from Penn Mac for the ride home—we loved dying our lips red with the shells!
I could go on all day about the simple memories packed into that neighborhood—dance parties at the Firehouse in college, pre-Christmas cocktails with old friends, a grocery run that included treats from around the world, and trying my first-ever Banh Mi from Lucy’s.
I had the privilege of representing the Strip in the State House, and now help build its future as county executive. The neighborhood has changed a lot since those Saturday pistachio runs—but the grit, the hustle, the sense that anyone from anywhere belongs here—that’s never going anywhere.
Sam Wholey
(Wholey’s Market)
We’ve been here since 1959; I started in 1962. The Strip! magazine was a great and important thing to establish—it’s unique.
KC Lapiana
(In The Kitchen)
With congratulations on 20 years of The Strip! magazine, In The Kitchen shares our success story in the Strip: We will be celebrating 25 years in June 2027! Finding a home for In The Kitchen in the Strip District was easy. Publisher Chuck Shane was a great resource when we moved into the area, having the magazine support us and introduce us to the neighborhood. The Strip’s wonderful local consumers and travelers were crucial to our success.
Councilman Bobby Wilson
(City of Pittsburgh, District 1)
For generations, the Strip District has been one of Pittsburgh’s most distinctive and dynamic neighborhoods, and it continues to be a place where the city’s history and future come together. From its small businesses, markets, restaurants, and community institutions to the tremendous growth and investment we are seeing today, the Strip remains a place that reflects what makes Pittsburgh special. It has been a privilege to represent the neighborhood and to see firsthand how much it has changed while still retaining the character and energy that have defined it for decades. Congratulations to The Strip! on 20 years of telling the story of this remarkable community, and thank you for helping preserve its history for generations to come.
Nicholas Dragga
(Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre)
The Strip District captures so much of what makes Pittsburgh special: a deep respect for its history alongside a constant sense of energy and reinvention. Its remarkable mix of families, merchants, artists, organizations, and visitors has created a neighborhood that feels both distinctly local and wonderfully open to everyone. It has been a privilege to experience the Strip’s growth over the years and to see it remain one of our city’s most vibrant and beloved communities.
Megan Stearman
(Oxford Development Company)
The Strip District reminds us that great neighborhoods are living things. They’re shaped not just by the buildings that rise, but by the people who fill the sidewalks, open businesses, gather in public spaces, and create memories together. Watching the Strip grow into one of Pittsburgh’s most energetic mixed-use neighborhoods while honoring the grit and character that made it special has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.