Liberty Avenue (Pittsburgh) is a major thoroughfare starting in downtown Pittsburgh, just outside of Point State Park. Liberty Ave. runs through Downtown Pittsburgh, the Strip District, Bloomfield, and ends in the neighborhood of Shadyside at its intersection with Centre Avenue and Aiken Avenue.
A section of Liberty Avenue in Downtown Pittsburgh was a red-light district in the 1970s and '80s, hosting the city's sex industry, including burlesque houses, strip bars, peep shows, and attracted vice and crime.[1] The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, formed in 1984, worked over the next 25 years to transform the area into the Cultural District, a center for the arts, eventually bringing the August Wilson Center for African American Culture, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust Arts Education Center, and a museum of cartoon art, The ToonSeum, to Liberty Avenue.[2]
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Liberty Ave. is a main road through the Strip District. It is the home to many businesses, mostly offices and business to business service and product providers. There are few retail establishments on Liberty Ave. in the Strip District.
Liberty Ave. is the site of the main business district in Bloomfield. Liberty Ave. is also home to West Penn Hospital as well as many small store fronts.
A semi-fictionalized version of Liberty Avenue is featured prominently in the American version of the television program Queer as Folk. While Liberty Avenue in Downtown Pittsburgh is considered the center of gay culture in Pittsburgh, with several gay-owned businesses, bars, and clubs, as well as the home of Pittsburgh's annual Pride Parade, it was portrayed as the heart of a booming "gay village," with even more gay clubs, cafes and shops than exist in reality. These scenes were filmed in Toronto's Church Street, due to financial reasons, which also contains a large number of gay and gay-friendly establishments. In addition, any QAF viewer familiar with either Pittsburgh or Toronto will recognize the red and black trolleys of the TTC occasionally passing in the background, which do not exist on Liberty Avenue in Pittsburgh. In one episode, the principal characters travel to Toronto for the beginning of the "Liberty Ride" and, while walking down Church Street remark to each other that it's eerily similar to Liberty Avenue back home.