Things to Do in Aspinwall This August: A Walkable Guide

The borough is 0.4 square miles. You can walk from the baseball fields to the river park to a dinner reservation on Brilliant in under fifteen minutes, and in August you will actually want to. What looks on the calendar like a handful of unrelated summer events is really one continuous program, staged across three commercial streets and a riverfront that the community bought back from a marina operator in 2011.

Here is what that program looks like from the inside, and how a resident already living here can string it together without ever getting in a car.

Why August reads as one week, not eight events

Look at the calendar for the first half of the month and a pattern emerges. Aspinwall Neighbors runs Big Night Out on a Thursday. Allegheny RiverTrail Park runs Food Truck Friday the very next evening. The History Walking Tour departs from a coffee shop that sits between them. The Summer Concert Series lands on a Friday one week later. The events are hosted by different organizations, but they were plainly timed to hand residents off to one another.

That handoff is the point. The park is a non-profit whose mission is to enhance quality of life by providing free public access to parkland and multi-use trails along the Allegheny, and it operates on earned income and private fundraising, not taxpayer dollars. Aspinwall Neighbors is a volunteer nonprofit. The Chamber runs its own calendar on top of both. None of these groups has the budget to draw a crowd on its own for a full month, so they don't try. They program in sequence.

Thursday into Friday, without moving your car

Big Night Out is the anchor. Aspinwall Neighbors hosts it on Thursday, August 6, from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Aspinwall Baseball Fields, and it is free. The evening's live music comes from Stealing Time, a band featuring two Aspinwall residents, taking the stage at 7 p.m., with DJ Doug playing throughout the evening. Bring a picnic or buy dinner from restaurants tabling on site. There is a 21+ Neighborhood Lounge with local alcoholic beverage samples in a dedicated area with proof of ID required, and free cotton candy, popcorn, and cookies while supplies last.

Two details separate this from a generic borough festival. First, attendees can meet local first responders from the Aspinwall Police Department, Foxwall Emergency Medical Services, and Southern Allegheny Valley Emergency Services, which is a useful thing for a new resident to do once and then not have to do again. Second, the event is intentionally zero-waste. In partnership with the Borough of Aspinwall and the Pennsylvania Resources Council, the event is a zero waste event, with efforts focused on reducing landfill waste, increasing recycling and composting, and encouraging environmentally responsible event practices. Bring your own reusable water bottle. You will be glad you did.

Then Friday, walk down to the river. Food Truck Fridays run all summer at Allegheny RiverTrail Park, and this year the series has a title sponsor: First National Bank stepped in as the flagship sponsor of Food Truck Fridays at Allegheny RiverTrail Park. August 7 adds Skate Night to the usual food truck lineup, which shifts the crowd younger and later than the Thursday event. If Big Night Out is where you catch up with the neighbors you already know, Skate Night is where your kids find the ones you didn't know they had.

Sunday, coffee to castle ruins

The History Walking Tour on August 9 is the sleeper on this list. It departs from Aspinwall Beans & Cream, which means you start with an espresso and end at the Sauer Buildings Historic District — a set of stone structures that architect Frederick Sauer built on his personal property in the early 20th century, inspired by castles and his own creative expression, and that have been preserved as a historical district. If you have lived here for years and still describe the Sauer Buildings to visitors as "those weird stone things off Center," this is the tour that lets you stop doing that.

The walk also passes stock most residents cruise by without registering. Well-maintained rowhomes and Victorians reflect the borough's history, when young upper-middle-class families settled in and developed the area in the late 1800s. The borough itself takes its name from Annie Aspinwall, from whom Henry Warner bought 155 acres in the era when Pittsburgh's steel industry was pushing east.

The concert-night dinner problem

Friday, August 14 brings the second Summer Concert Series date of the month, with Fruition headlining and Donora opening at Allegheny RiverTrail Park. Concerts here are free, which sounds like an unambiguous good until roughly 6:15 p.m. that Friday, when every walk-in table on Brilliant is full and you are the one holding a lawn chair and a growing sense of regret.

Solve for it by picking your dinner strategy in advance. The commercial core gives you three walkable options within a couple of blocks of the river gate:

Sit-down, reserve ahead. Avva, a Mediterranean eatery, opened in April in the former Mike & Luke's Front Porch space and has become the borough's hardest reservation on a summer Friday. The menu features grilled kebabs, seafood, and meze, with brunch and dinner service, and one of the best outdoor dining spaces in Pittsburgh, featuring a cozy backyard patio with retractable pergolas. Foxhole Tavern at 211 Commercial and Cornerstone at 301 Freeport both take reservations and both handle a pre-concert crowd well.

Grab-and-go for the lawn. Independent groceries make this town unusual for its size. Independent groceries like Patty's Farm Market and gourmet options like Labriola Italian Market and Feast on Brilliant will all handle a last-minute picnic build faster than a restaurant kitchen will handle a walk-in of four.

Truck food at the show. The food trucks rotating through the concert nights are the same operators that show up on Food Truck Fridays. If you liked what you had on August 7, you already know what to order.

The Brilliant Avenue afternoon, if you build one

The stretch of retail between the baseball fields and the river is what makes the walking distances work. It is not a mall. It is a working village core of independents that has held its shape for two decades — Erica Miller has owned the boutique clothing store One Brilliant for 23 years, describing the borough when she started as a cute little boutique community with very few retailers and an old-school village vibe.

A short list worth knowing by name and address, because "the shop on Brilliant" is not a search query that gets you back to the right door:

• Nota Bene, 9 Brilliant Avenue — a fine paper and stationery boutique whose name comes from the Latin for "to take note."
• Fox & the Fleur, 105 Brilliant Avenue — florals that range from large-scale events and weddings to everyday deliveries, each arrangement custom, with local and seasonal sourcing when possible.
• Beautiful Boutique on Brilliant, 101 Brilliant Avenue — Pittsburgh's first lifestyle and home decor boutique, with home accents, custom and repurposed furniture, jewelry, and gifts.
• Developmint, 14 Brilliant Avenue — photo specialists offering personalized service and premium print quality. If you have a phone full of park pictures you have never printed, this is the fix.
• Method, 207 Commercial Avenue — full hair services in a space designed for the comfort, privacy, and attention of clients.

Add Beans & Cream for the coffee stop and Aspinwall's boutique retail row basically programs itself: coffee, florals, a card for whatever event you were forgetting about, prints of last year's summer, then dinner.

Notes for the practical neighbor

A few things that will save you a search bar on the day of:

• Big Night Out is at the baseball fields, not the river park. Park at the Borough Building on Commercial and walk in.
• The 21+ Neighborhood Lounge at Big Night Out is ID-gated. Bring the license.
• Concerts at Allegheny RiverTrail Park sit on lawn. Chairs and blankets are on you.
• The park is a PA State Certified Land Trust unaffiliated with any government entity and is maintained through earned income and private fundraising. If you use it more than a few times a summer, this is the argument for a small donation.
• The History Walking Tour departs from Aspinwall Beans & Cream on August 9. Reserve a spot before the day of, because groups are capped.
• Friday concert dinners on Brilliant fill up by 6 p.m. Book Wednesday.

The through line across all of this is that Aspinwall is small enough to be programmed as a single place. Big Night Out hands you to Food Truck Friday, which hands you to the walking tour, which hands you back to Brilliant Avenue for a Friday dinner before the concert. That kind of coordinated month is not accidental, and it is not something a borough of this size gets for free. It is the reason a lot of people who move here for the school district and the river end up staying long past the point when either of those was the reason.

If you're thinking about how a home in Aspinwall might fit your next chapter, or you know someone who is, Alisha Schweiger lives and works in these neighborhoods and would rather have a real conversation than send a form email. Let's Connect.