Kaitlyn Hughes & Eliyahu Gasson & Josh Imhof & Naomi Girson | news editor & editor-in-chief & features editor & opinions editor

Although Jen Grippo, owner of the Original Oyster House in Downtown, has experienced the city during local events such as Picklesburgh and Oktoberfest, she has never experienced something as large as the NFL Draft. According to Visit Pittsburgh, 500,000 to 700,000 fans are expected to come to Pittsburgh for the draft which is scheduled April 23-25.

“I’m treating the NFL Draft week as back-to-back light up nights,” she said.

As the days draw near to the draft, Pittsburgh businesses are gearing up for the influx of people in their neighborhoods.

Trying to alleviate major stressors for herself and the staff, Grippo is keeping business operations straightforward that week with a simplified food and drink menu, temporary outdoor seating and extra staff members.

The restaurant is going to try its best to accommodate the expected number of people, but she recognizes she and her staff are only human.

About three weeks before the draft, Benny Fierro’s crew member Bev Bass said they haven’t done anything to physically prepare for the event, but all the employees have been mentally preparing for three days straight of lines at the door.

The crew members will start preparation by making an abundance of pizza dough, folding four times the amount of boxes they usually have and prepping about 400 2-ounce ranch cups opposed to their regular 150.

“I’m hoping that we get a lot of people. It’s always nice to see a lot of people waiting in line for food,” Bass said. “I hope it brings in a lot of people who want to spend money … and give back.”

At Mancini’s Bakery in the Strip District, crew members are gearing up with special draft items like football-shaped bread and a novelty NFL Draft-themed 140-pound bread art display in the middle of their store.

Six people are employed at the store, but according to general manager Erin Hodgkiss, the owner, his wife and his kids will most likely come in to help with rushes during the draft.

“We’ve been doing research and development for about a month,” Hodgkiss said.

Sugar Bird, a new restaurant in the North Shore, is up and ready for the draft, according to both Assistant Manager of the Kitchen, Maggie Zandier, and owner Herky Pollock.

The establishment only opened on April 2, but they have been planning special activities for the draft for the last two months, including three performances under their roof, with 2 Chainz, Nelly and DJ Steve Aoki.

“It’s an opportunity for Pittsburgh to shine on the global stage, and really showcase how spectacular our city is,” Pollock said. “I want people to leave here and make Pittsburgh the standard for future drafts.”

In her role as senior director of economic development with the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership (PDP), Cate Irvin has been preparing the Golden Triangle for the national spotlight.

Even prior to the announcement of the NFL Draft, the PDP has been looking to activate 50 storefronts in Downtown with either pop-up businesses or long-term leases. For spaces that are not retail ready, the organization has been working with local artists to curate art installations to get the spaces “spruced up.”

They also have a sidewalk grant program to help business owners get their sidewalks fixed up.

“The draft has been a good target date, but these are the types of things that we do on a regular basis,” Irvin said. “We do want to recognize that there’s going to be [500,000] to 700,000 people walking around Downtown. We want them to have good sidewalks, but we also want Pittsburghers to have good sidewalks.”

What to expect

Peter Gianiodis, the Merle E. Gilliand professor of entrepreneurial finance at Duquesne University, said there are two major economic impacts when it comes to large-scale events like the NFL Draft. The first is it will boost business, hotel and restaurant revenue immediately, and the second is it might spur additional trips to the Steel City in the future.

Gianiodis said that one of the biggest challenges for businesses will be ensuring their employees can get into the city and find a parking spot so they can get to work.

Although the Pittsburgh-area is expecting hundreds of thousands of people they might not be staying within city limits, he said. This means they might not come into the city everyday and frequent the businesses there.

Despite any challenges, Gianiodis said that hosting the NFL Draft is a positive for the city.

“It’s a huge boon,” he said.

But some businesses in previous host cities did not experience a positive economic impact.

“It was not quite what everyone expected,” said Missy Martens, co-owner of Copper State Brewing Company in downtown Green Bay. “I think expectations were very high, and maybe not correctly high.”

Martens said that in preparation for the draft, many restaurants around the area preordered extra products and food in advance that ended up going to waste because of a lack of visitors.

Copper State prepared by fully staffing their restaurant, with some servers taking off their other jobs for the weekend in preparation for the influx of people. In the end, many of them were sent home.

“The NFL is very good at keeping people where they want them to be,” Martens said.

Many draft attendees focused their attention on the NFL sanctioned food options within the corral of the event, while others only ventured as far as the locations around Lambeau Field, the restaurateur said.

Despite this, Brad Toll, president of Discover Green Bay, said the event was a success for the community as a whole.

While Green Bay and the rest of Brown County were projected to receive $20 million in economic impact, the final number ended up being $72,917,186, according to Toll.

“We were a little off there,” he said.

As a whole, the economic impact across the state of Wisconsin was $104,769,486, Toll said.

Toll said that the immediate monetary effects of the draft are helpful, but there are also other benefits to hosting the event. Instead of having to buy ad space to try and convince people to come to the city, news publications and TV broadcasts can do it for free.

“As people are watching in Pittsburgh, seeing all of those beautiful shots along the river and beautiful skylines, people that don’t know Pittsburgh that are watching that, it’s changing their perception,” Toll said.

He said Pittsburgh will also benefit from a convenient location, just a few hours from other NFL cities like Cleveland, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and even Baltimore.

“I think Pittsburgh’s really perfectly situated,” he said.

‘A lot like Pittsburgh’

According to a news release from the Detroit Sports Commission, the 2024 NFL Draft generated $213.6 million for Motown from the roughly 775,000 people who visited the city.

Eddie Barbieri, owner of downtown Detroit pizzeria La Lanterna, said his 60-seat restaurant hit capacity every night of the draft, helped by its close proximity to Campus Martius Park and Hart Plaza.

Barbieri attributed much of La Lanterna’s continued success to the attention it got from draft attendees.

“We were a very busy restaurant beforehand and with the draft, because I think we did a good job, and our food is good, and we’re very consistent, it has carried over,” he said. “It just transcended us, and we’re even busier now.”

Barbieri said he thinks Pittsburgh establishments have similar continued success to look forward to because of how similar it is to Detroit.

“I would think Detroit is a lot like Pittsburgh. They have the same kind of down-to-earth people working hard, you know, blue collar,” he said.

Another aspect of Detroit’s success, said Alexis Wiley, who served as co-chair of the Detroit Local Organizing Committee (DLOC) leading up to the draft, was bringing local communities into the fold.

One of the ways the DLOC did that was an “On the Clock Tour,” a four-month-long event that brought free recreational events to community centers around the city.

The other way they got the community involved was a business engagement program where organizers walked small business owners through the opportunities presented by the draft.

“I really think what you do is you make sure that people are engaged. More than a year ahead of the draft, we were working to develop a strategy to engage,” Wiley said. “Detroit-base businesses had a significant impact from the draft. And that was because we were very intentional about that. It didn’t just happen.”

A black and white scenario

Eric Bachman, owner of Bill and Walt’s Hobby Shop in Downtown, said he is not expecting to make anything the week of the NFL Draft because he does not sell food or sports memorabilia.

“I bet you I will be annoyed by traffic, and I will get a lot of bathroom requests,” Bachman said. “Somebody is gonna make a lot of money off this draft thing. It won’t be any of the small businesses.”

Lou Bosser, the owner of Peppi’s Old Tyme Sandwich Shoppe located in both the Strip and the North Side, feels uncertain about the draft.

They are planning on business as usual, with both an establishment in the Strip and the North Side they are expecting much more business.

They want to prevent lines, so they are planning on selling cold sandwiches out on the sidewalk to help with wait times for patrons.

They will also be extending hours during the draft, tentatively past their usual 5 p.m. closure.

“If it’s dead down here, then we’ll close, but we’re just gonna do the eight o’clock (close) and then we have the option to just turn the lights off and go home.”

Irvin said that it is hard to predict the economic impact the draft will have on the city.

“For the folks that are within the draft footprint. We do expect to see some nice rise in business particularly in the food and beverage categories as well as … I think our hotels are pretty happy,” she said. “It’s a little less predictable for how other businesses and other districts will be impacted.”

Gianiodis said that for events like the NFL Draft, it is a black and white scenario.

“If your business is aligned to events, you’re going to do very very well but if your business isn’t necessarily aligned to an event it might behoove you … just maybe take a vacation and not have the business open,” he said.

Kaitlyn Hughes can be reached at hughesk10@duq.edu

Eliyahu Gasson can be reached at gassone@duq.edu

Josh Imhof can be reached at imhofj@duq.edu

Naomi Girson can be reached at girsonn@duq.edu