Uptown Pittsburgh is turning into a coffee hub. The mostly residential neighborhood is sandwiched between the bustling center of Oakland and the high-rise buildings of downtown. It has a bit of a reputation. It’s a food desert, with the nearest grocery store in the South Side. A quick Google Search leads you to building demolitions and crime rate reports. Pittsburgh Regional Transit gutted several lines through the neighborhood in 2023.
Suffice it to say, there aren’t many gathering places outside of the pocket of Duquesne University buildings down Fifth Avenue. Like many Pittsburgh neighborhoods, lack of communal space and a history of class and racial segregation makes it difficult for “third spaces” to thrive.
With Trace Echo and Redhawk Coffee, Is Uptown Pittsburgh’s New Coffeeshop Destination?
But since Redhawk Coffee opened an Uptown location in June of 2024, a new coffeeshop has followed suite this fall. On October 4, Trace Brewing opened “Trace Echo,” a satellite location of their Bloomfield brewery and coffeehouse.
Trace Echo is at 1738 Forbes Avenue, in a historic pharmacy building the team has preserved the infrastructure of. One Instagram user writes “Been living in Uptown for 3+ years now, and I’ve been waiting for something like this for awhile. Awesome to see Uptown changing!” Another touted the new location as a place for a “pre-work coffee and a post-work beer.”
Trace has been in communication with nearby Moonlit Burgers and Uptown Kitchen for “BYOF” service to the new space. It has both indoor bar and table seating and an outdoor patio overlooking Uptown. Trace Echo will be continuing the sere high-quality coffee blends from Ghost Coffee Collab, just as the Bloomfield location does.
Coffeeshops don’t solve urban decay. And, yes, they can be a sign that your rent might be going up in the next year. When the New York neighborhood I grew up in got its first Starbucks in 2014, that was a pretty big deal, as well as a step towards it becoming a “cool” neighborhood people sought out, as opposed to one tourists or urban explorers avoided. And, well, rent did go up. But there was also a new place to go in the neighborhood.
Coffeeshops provide a gathering place for younger people that can’t go to bars, and also allow people a chance to mingle over a warm cup of joe. Trace offers drip coffee for as low as $1.50, so there isn’t a huge price of admission, either. Try them out in Uptown with an early roll-out of coffee service open from 8PM-3PM on weekdays and 9AM-3PM on weekends.
Story by Emma Riva / Photo courtesy of Trace Brewing
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