Many moons ago, I went to the OG Troy Hill Art House (La Hutte Royal) with Corey and Kara. Since that time, three additional houses were added to the mix so I added it to the list of THINGS HENRY AND I CAN DO INSTEAD OF SITTING AT HOME IN REPOSE list. The best part for Henry is that touring the art houses is free (music to his ears), you just have to schedule an appointment. We’re actually going to La Hutte Royal in two weeks with Shawn and Jess (it just reopened this month after being revamped and I’m excited to see the changes!) so I picked “Lighthouse Darkhouse” for just the two of us to explore on a random Thursday night in an effort to get out of the house.

I was so excited to log off work at 5:30! We went to Allegheny City Brewing for beer and light dinner from the La Palapa food truck. It was a really good start to the evening, especially when one of the bartenders tried to fake me out by asking, “What is that?” when I slid over my stupid beer passport and asked for a stamp. He immediately was like JK! when he saw that my face was probably contorting into “embarrassed school girl” right before his eyes BECAUSE IT DOESN’T TAKE MUCH TO MAKE ME FEEL STUPID. So  then we chatted about how many stamps I had collected so far and I told him about my faux pas that nearly put me on the SHE’S GOT A PROBLEM path when I thought I had to complete the book by the end of 2025.

“Yeah, these books don’t expire,” he said. Thanks, guy, I know this now. But that’s why I had to take an extended break from stamp-collecting!

I liked this one was called Hullaballoo because that’s been a favorite word of mine since the BATTLE OF THE NETWORK STARS days. It was OK.

This is blurry because I was trying to take pictures without looking weird, which just made me look weirder.

This place was nice – the people behind the bar were very friendly, there seemed to be some regulars sitting at the bar (one guy had his dog in his lap and that was precious), La Palapa was satisfying. It did get super crowded and loud pretty quickly after we arrived though, plus a band was setting up and they were supposed to start at 7. I really didn’t want to walk out during a band again like we did in Columbus, so I was like, “Yo, we gotta SPLIT before 7.” This just meant we still had nearly an hour to kill before our 8pm appointment in Troy Hill so Henry suggested going down the street to another brewery in my dumb passport.

Before I move on to that portion, I just wanted to mention that the last time I had La Palapa was when Chooch and I ate at their Southside location after I went to Kyklops to give my down payment on my Marcy tattoo. I always associate those two things now!

Henry and I both small pours at Late Addition –  mine was a Scottish thing and I really liked it! I think I’m figuring out that in addition to Belgian (real Belgian), I am leaning toward Irish and Scottish things. And some German. MAYBE I AM A TRADITIONALIST.

It was just us and the bartender, and one couple in a booth. Then an older woman came in, presumably a regular because she immediately started talking to the bartender like she knew him on a “you serve me beer regularly” level. The couple left, so then it was just us listening to this older broad tell the bartender the most mundane shit, like the chicken parm lasagna she made for her kids in college and how that made her the most popular mom that weekend. “This is the sauce I made,” she said, thrusting her phone in his face. I had to hand it to the guy, if he was actually disinterested, I certainly could not tell.

Oh! They were selling the Pgh Beer Week glass thingies that I had wanted to get at the time but was also too ambivalent about going out to a brewery in search of one. But the broad bought one which made me squint to get a better look and I hissed to Henry, “They have the glasses here! I’m going to pee, buy one for me.”

And when I came back, it was sitting in front of my seat – yay! I like getting things.

Then it was nearly time for our Troy Hill Art House appointment! We did have a few minutes to kill so we walked around a bit after parking in front of the house – Henry kept saying, “This can’t be it” because truly it just looks like a regular house that you’d see in a city neighborhood. We circled back around 7:55PM and Henry was like, “WHAT ARE WE WERE SUPPOSED TO DO?” Well looking at my appointment confirmation on my phone, I was saying that I thought when I went years ago with Corey and Kara, we just stood outside and waited for someone to come out, and just when I got to the part that said ATTENTION – DOCENT RULES: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO OPEN THE DOOR OR KNOCK and was reading it out loud, Henry went ahead and JIGGLED THE DOOR KNOB and then RANG THE DOORBELL.

“Why did you do that?” I cried.

“It didn’t say not to ring the doorbell,” Henry shrugged.

“IF IT SAID DON’T ATTEMPT TO OPEN THE DOOR OR KNOCK, YOU SHOULD ASSUME RINGING THE DOORBELL IS ALSO OFF THE TABLE!” I wheezing in embarrassment at this point. It was a Ring doorbell and rang kind of loudly – I was expecting a tinny voice to come through chastising us, but the silence was almost worse. Henry was like OH WELL and went back to sit in the car, leaving me alone to look like the culprit! Thank god Ring cameras don’t lie.

While Henry was cowering in the car, acting like he felt no shame for breaking the rules, a group of 4 college girls came barreling at me out of nowhere. It was actually alarming how they seemingly just appeared out of thin air–like, it was a super quiet street and then suddenly: the signature sounds of a group of giddy girls. BOOM. BANG. BRAY.

I stepped out of the way to let them pass and then realized that they were looking for the Lighthouse. Four different versions of “This can’t be it” all at once, surround sound.

“You’re at the right place,” I buttinsky’d. “We’re waiting too!” And there was a collective sigh of relief from their group. Then I proceeded to tell them about Henry ringing the doorbell and they were like, “OH MY GOD HEE HEE” but like, for real and not sarcastically so I loved them from this moment on.

(I’m obsessed with wanting college aged kids to think I’m cool, but like not the sorority types—the cool, grungy, mom jeans-wearing kinds. That’s what these girls were like!)

A tinny voice came out of the Ring camera letting us know that he’d be right there, and about a minute later, the docent approached us from the other end of the sidewalk. No one was in the house when Henry rang the doorbell! Thank god. I was nervous that another tour was in progress. After we signed waivers and the docent opened the door for us (and it wasn’t even the door that Henry was trying to open!!!), the first thing Henry said was, “IS THERE A BATHROOM?” Oh for god’s sake I wanted to kill him. There wasn’t a bathroom, but there is one in one of the other adjacent art houses so the docent had us go in and wait for him while he called whoever was still at that house to tell them NOT TO LOCK UP YET BECAUSE SOMEONE’S GRANDPA HAD TO COME BY AFTER THE LIGHTHOUSE TO PISS.

!!!!!!!

Goddammit, Henry.

I don’t have any pictures of the rest of the evening because the Troy Hill Art Houses really stress that no photos and videos are permitted. I definitely broke the law at La Hutte Royal because the docent wasn’t following us around BUT I only posted three of them to my blog because I feel like Kara made up a loophole that was like, “You can probably take pictures as long as they’re not being shared publicly” so I took that for scripture.

It was a quick 30 minute tour and without giving anything away (because everyone should go and experience this – IT’S FREE!), it was just so incredible to behold, legitimately. Two people came into a house that had burnt so badly in a fire that it had no structural integrity and built a freaking lighthouse in the middle of it. The docent said that lighthouse is the only thing holding the house together. And yes– you get to go inside of it, because the actual house is not really accessible. The top has an actual lighthouse bulb thingie in it, and it works. And it’s blinding.

Embarrassment aside, I was impressed that Henry was interested enough to ask the docent legit questions about the artifacts and whatever inside. I asked about a feather that was hanging from the ceiling, wondering of its significance but apparently the artists just added it for the whimsy of the shadow it produced, lol.

Very near-future me: “Hey Henry, here’s a box of a 1000 neon-dyed feathers for you to tack to the ceiling, chop chop.”

After the tour, the girls giggled their way home and the docent told us to hang tight while he locked up and I blurted out, “BY THE WAY, HE’S THE ONE THAT RANG THE DOORBELL IN CASE YOU COULD HEAR THAT EARLIER” and then I felt so CLEANSED and FREE of that burden I was carrying. The docent just laughed and waved it off. “Oh no worries! I actually have the app on my phone because I live right down the right, so I can monitor it from there,” he said, WHICH WAS BASICALLY SAYING THAT HE KNEW HENRY RANG THE DOORBELL. I wanted him to be angry about it so Henry would feel like shit but he really seemed like he didn’t care after all – UGH. If it was that guy from the Bayernhof, he’d have passive aggressively woven references to it into his script for the whole 2 hour tour.

“And here’s our REGINA CORONA 27″ AUTOMATIC CHANGER DISC MUSIC BOX, it knows not to ring the doorbell.”

Anyway, he let us PEEK IN THE DOORWAY (the one Henry tried to act like was entitled to enter when we first arrived!) to see some “behind the scenes” magic. It was a chaos-tangle of lamps and chandeliers; I don’t even know what we were looking at but I felt so privileged for that sneak peek! Then we walked around the corner to one of the other houses, where idiot Henry got to pee. In addition to being one of the art houses, it also doubles as their office space and the artists’ housing. There was the super cool art fixture in the background, a bunch of bugs in Jello molds. Even just that part of it was super cool so I’m excited for when we hit that house up in the (near) future.

In sum: the tour was splendid, the docent was informative and friendly while giving us our space to explore, and those girls were so adorable! It’s nuts to me that these artsy gems are in some random neighborhood of Pittsburgh, hidden in plain sight (they are all inside legit houses that don’t have any signs or neon lights beckoning stragglers in off the street), and they ARE FREE. It’s like stepping inside someone’s crazy altered reality for an hour and forgetting the actual crazy reality you left on the doorstep.

It was a really good Thursday night!

No comments