Around 1792, when Pittsburgh was barely a city and the surrounding region was still very much a frontier, the Woods family built a stone house overlooking the Monongahela River in what is now Hazelwood.
That house is still standing.
It is a two-and-a-half-story vernacular rubblestone house with hand-hewn beams, wide-plank floors, and fireplaces at each end. It has outlasted the full arc of Pittsburgh’s industrial rise and collapse, and decades of sitting vacant with boarded windows and crumbling stonework while the neighborhood around it changed beyond recognition.
Today it’s a Scottish pub and restaurant called The Woods House, and it is widely considered the oldest surviving house in Pittsburgh. The Fort Pitt Block House (1764) is older, but it was built as a military redoubt and is the city’s oldest building, and the Old Stone Tavern (c. 1782) is considered its oldest commercial building.
That combination — oldest house in the city, now a working bar — is either the most Pittsburgh thing imaginable or a perfect accident of history. Possibly both.
Who Built It and Why It Matters
The Woods family weren’t random settlers who happened to put up a durable house. Press accounts credit Colonel George Woods, the surveyor who laid out Pittsburgh’s 1784 street plan, as the builder, with his son John Woods, a lawyer, living there. The National Register lists it as the John Woods House, so sources differ on which Woods built it.
So the family that built this house helped build the city around it. That’s the kind of detail that makes a place feel less like a historical curiosity and more like an actual anchor point in the region’s story.
The house stands along what is now Monongahela Street. The National Register describes it as a vernacular stone house built in rubblestone fashion with large corner quoins, two and a half stories and three bays wide, with chimneys at each end.
The property later passed out of the Woods family and remained a private residence for many years. Then it sat empty for a long time after that, slowly deteriorating while preservationists argued about what to do with it.
What Surviving Two Centuries Actually Looks Like
The City of Pittsburgh designated it a historic structure on February 22, 1977, and it was added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 29, 1993, as the John Woods House.
But designation doesn’t equal preservation. For decades after that, the house sat vacant. Windows boarded. Stonework crumbling. One of only a handful of eighteenth-century structures remaining anywhere in Pittsburgh, slowly losing the fight against neglect.
It also predates some of the city’s best-known disasters. The Great Fire of 1845 wiped out a significant portion of Pittsburgh’s built environment in a single afternoon. The 1936 St. Patrick’s Day flood submerged whole neighborhoods. The Great Fire never reached rural Hazelwood, miles upriver from downtown, and the house sits on a bluff above the Monongahela; it predates the 1936 flood as well.
The fact that it’s still here at all is a minor miracle of structural engineering — those rubblestone walls were built to last — and a major accomplishment of the people who eventually decided to do something about it.
The Building Itself
The original bones are intact. Hand-hewn beams overhead. Wide-plank floors underfoot. Fireplaces that were heating this space when Pittsburgh had a population in the hundreds. The restoration repaired the stonework, replaced the roof, and recreated period-appropriate woodwork without erasing what was already there.
The pub design layers Scottish elements over the eighteenth-century structure — tartan patterns, dark wood, antique photographs — which makes more sense than it might sound. Hazelwood had significant Scottish settler roots, and the aesthetic nods to that history while giving the space a coherent identity as a functioning bar and restaurant rather than a museum exhibit you happen to be able to drink in.
Why Scottish
The Scottish angle isn’t arbitrary.
Hazelwood’s early community included a substantial population of Scottish settlers, and the neighborhood’s character was shaped partly by that heritage. When the group of local entrepreneurs and preservationists who took over the building decided to reopen it as a pub, leaning into that history was a way of connecting the building’s present use to its actual past rather than imposing something unrelated onto a historic structure.
The menu reflects it — Scottish dishes, locally sourced meats, craft beverages — and the programming continues with live music and community events that keep the place integrated into neighborhood life rather than cordoned off as a relic.
If you want to see how The Woods House fits into Pittsburgh’s broader landscape of historic drinking establishments, Pittsburgh’s oldest bars and the history behind them puts it in good company.
The Reopening
The Woods House opened as a Scottish pub and restaurant on December 4, 2020, which given the timing was either very brave or very unfortunate depending on how you look at it.
The fact that it’s back in use as a pub, keeping the building occupied and maintained, is the continuation of a preservation story that could have ended badly multiple times across the past two centuries.
That’s the model: make the place economically viable as a neighborhood establishment, and the history takes care of itself.
What a Visit Actually Is
Going to The Woods House is a layered experience in a way that most bar visits aren’t.
You’re sitting in a room built around 1792. The walls around you are older than almost any other structure in the city. The Monongahela River is visible from the property. The neighborhood outside has been through versions of itself that would be unrecognizable to anyone who only knows the current one.
And, when it’s open, you can get a beer and a meal there.
The Lewis and Clark Trail Experience listing describes the John Woods House as “considered the oldest house in Pittsburgh.” That’s the common framing. The practical version is simpler: it’s a genuinely historic place that is also a genuinely good reason to spend an evening in Hazelwood.
Both things are true at once, which is rarer than it should be.
Visitor Information
Address: 4604 Monongahela Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15207
Hours: Listings conflict, so check the website for current hours and confirm it’s open before visiting
Website: woodshousepgh.com
Reservations and events: Check the website for current availability
The Woods House was built around 1792 by the Woods family and is widely considered the oldest surviving house in Pittsburgh. It was designated a Pittsburgh historic structure in 1977, listed on the National Register in 1993, and opened as a pub and restaurant in 2020.
To see where 1792 falls in the city’s story, read From Fort Duquesne to Tech Hub: A Timeline of Pittsburgh’s History.
Sources: National Register of Historic Places, John Woods House (ref. 93000353); City of Pittsburgh historic designation (Feb. 22, 1977); Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (2021); Pittsburgh Magazine (2021); NEXTpittsburgh (2019, 2020); Lewis and Clark Trail Experience listing.
