This is WESA Arts, a weekly newsletter by Bill O'Driscoll providing in-depth reporting about the Pittsburgh area art scene. Sign up here to get it every Wednesday afternoon . Leave it to a professional stand-up comedian to put the best face on a dream that didn’t quite pan out.
Steve Hofstetter announced this month he’ll be selling the property that’s been home for four years to his Steel City Arts Foundation — or, as it’s amusingly known, Steel City AF. Hofstetter came to Pittsburgh from Los Angeles in 2021 to launch a nonprofit comedy performance and production center , complete with residencies for emerging comics. He created the foundation to honor his late father.
Hofstetter achieved some of his goals in the former Methodist church he purchased in Stanton Heights. Key successes included residencies for a dozen comics, most notably Learnmore Jonasi, who rose to national fame this year as a finalist on “America’s Got Talent.” Another comic who came to town for a residency and stayed is Ronnie Fleming, a nationally touring comedian who now hosts Pittsburgh’s “secret” pop-up Don’t Tell comedy nights .
But to completely realize his vision, Hofstetter said, he needed zoning changes it proved too difficult to obtain. In a nutshell, he said, the property when he bought it was listed as commercially zoned. But that was a mistake: In reality, it was zoned as a church, and if Hofstetter had been up for starting one of those, he’d have been fine.
But what h.