Ever notice the Tamburitzans building off the Boulevard of the Allies in Pittsburgh? There's quite a history there!

I often drive down the elevated Boulevard of the Allies in Pittsburgh and pass by a beautiful old brick building, with block glass windows. Above the front doorway is white tile with artwork of people dancing and playing instruments, and the word "Tamburitzans". I've always been interested in what was there and the building's history. It does not look like it has been in use for some time and looks a bit rundown. Turns out, there's actually quite a rich history for both the building and the group that inhabited it.

For the building itself, it was formerly a Warner Brothers office in the early to mid 20th century at a time when much of the neighborhood revolved around such move offices in the film industry. It was common place for all large cities to have offices for distribution purposes, and Pittsburgh had many. This article is a good 20 years old but gives a quick history of these offices and how they moved from 4th Ave. Downtown to the Uptown/Bluff/Soho area. The article mentions a Paramount Pictures logo, which can be found right next door across Miltenberger Street, neighboring the former Warner Brothers office.

The Duquesne University Tamburitzans were founded in 1937, and some time in the proceeding years would call the former Warner Brothers office home, as the film industry's practice of distribution offices waned in popularity. As one could guess by the artwork on the building, the Tamburitzans were performers, and they specialized in celebrating eastern European tradition and heritage through song and dance. A group of musicians traveling the country stopped in Pittsburgh and were impressed by the ethnic diversity, which makes sense given the strong immigrant history Pittsburgh has, especially from south and eastern Europe at the turn of the century. The group set up shop here, partnering with Duquesne University to have scholarships for students to take part in the group.

Now if you're like me, you probably are thinking now about how that diverse ethnic history is mostly gone with older generations dying out, and how there probably isn't too much appetite for something like that nowadays. We can see these ethnic neighborhood's have diversified, their church populations dwindling, and social clubs going by the wayside, and you would be partly right to think that way.

The group is not long and gone like I had originally guessed, and is still performing to this day as "The Tamburitzans". In 2014, Duquesne spun-off the Tamburitzans into their own non-profit entity separate from the University. [My guess would be that this was to get more young adults from other institutions in the area with involved, as the relevant pool of interested applicants with dance experience and love of eastern European heritage had drastically shrunk over the decades and was probably minimal at Duquesne by the 2010's.] However, this helped the Tamburitzans free up performance schedules, find students from other schools, and probably most importantly fund-raise and partner outside of the university's sphere. They still travel across the country, with performances this year in Florida, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Missouri to name a few places. They now find their home on the North Side, in a large space with a bit more of a subdued exterior compared to the old Tamburitzan building. The new space is actually the social hall of the Holy Ghost Byzantine Catholic Church that is located across the street, the Tamburitzans having moved there in 2020. While the troupe now honors the heritage of many cultures across the globe, and not just those of eastern Europe, it is nice to see they found a new practice space in such a fitting place to honor their founding purpose. The old building off the Boulevard of the Allies lays empty from what I can tell, but how great to see that the legacy lives on elsewhere!