If the streets of the Gayborhood could talk, they’d tell quite a story — and one local history buff is looking to help them do just that.
Bob Skiba this summer launched “The Gayborhood Guru,” a blog in which he explores the history of Philly’s gay enclave.
Each week Skiba posts about a site or property within the ’hood, detailing its past and the role it played in the evolution of the LGBT community.
Skiba has worked as a Philadelphia tour guide for more than a dozen years and is president of the Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides. He serves as archivist at William Way LGBT Community Center and in recent years has led a walking tour of the Gayborhood.
“The blog grew out of the work I’ve been doing in the archives and the talks I’ve done on the history of the Gayborhood,” he said, noting that earlier this year he ventured into the blogosphere with a dance-history blog. “I thought, What better way to get this information out there than in blog form? The Gayborhood has a really interesting history and I thought this would be a good way to tell it.”
So far, he’s profiled the history of locales such as Tavern on Camac, ICandy and Westbury, using vintage photos and ephemera to help tell their stories.
The blog also highlights buildings without an LGBT-specific history in postings Skiba dubbed “Straight Snapshots.”
While his archival work at the center and his tour-guide experience have been invaluable for the blog, the venture has also given Skiba the opportunity to collect new perspectives on the Gayborhood’s past.
“Since I’ve been doing this for so long, I have a lot of the research in place, but this is moving me to get first-person stories as well,” he said.
He reached out to Alan Kachin, the now-Florida-based former owner of Equus — a gay bar that occupied 254-56 S. 12th St. from 1977-83, now home to ICandy — who provided Skiba with a colorful account of the property, with some stories not fit to be detailed in the blog, Skiba joked.
He was also able to connect with the great-great granddaughter of Francesco Basta, the man who opened the first business on that site, a restaurant called Leoncavallo, at the end of the 19th century. After Basta’s death in 1917, his family purchased the property next to it at 256 S. 12th St., joining the two buildings into the current structure. The restaurant shuttered was in the 1960s, paving the way for a series of gay bars.
Skiba said he was recently showing an out-of-town friend around the Gayborhood and, during a stop at Venture Inn, mentioned his interest in the area’s history to a staff member, who had been an employee for three decades and who shared a wealth of knowledge and stories with him.
A manager at The Bike Stop happened to recently contact Skiba with news that, during renovations, staff uncovered brickwork arches and tilework dating to the early 20th century. Skiba incorporated photos of the work into his posting about the club’s history, and also linked the bar with his contacts at the Athenaeum.
“This has been a great way for me to connect people in the city and work with the contacts I have both in the gay and straight communities,” he said. “The response has been great.”
In two months, the site has generated more than 1,000 hits.
Skiba is currently co-writing “Lost Philadelphia” — about city structures that have been torn down — and said he’d ultimately like to turn the blog into a book.
“If I write one post a week for a year, that’s 52 stories. That’s a pretty painless way to write a book,” he said. “We’ve had books like Marc Stein’s [‘City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves’] that was great on covering gay politics from post-World War II Philadelphia and a lot of other books. With this, I’d want it to be more of a social history of LGBT Philadelphia, particularly the Gayborhood.”
Visit “The Gayborhood Guru” at http://thegayborhoodguru.wordpress.com/.