Brendan “The Everything Guy” Becker lost four board members when he chose to relocate the Bloop Museum from outside Baltimore to Pittsburgh.
And he doesn’t regret it.
The Pittsburgh address is 12245 Frankstown Road — the old Penn Hills Municipal Building.
Becker, 45, said he couldn’t pass up a space that large and a community engaged from the moment he arrived.
The three-story, 40,000-square-foot building built in 1967 had been on the market since 2018, when the $12.3 million Penn Hills Government Center opened along Duff Road.
In 2020, economic hardships during the pandemic deterred developers from following through with commercial plans.
Fast-forward to May 2025, and the Bloop Museum, a nonprofit electronic entertainment museum dedicated to the history of computers and video games, purchased the building for $370,000.
“I think Penn Hills needs this,” said Becker, the museum’s president and founder. “This building used to be an anchor of the community. It not being occupied is a bad thing for the community. I want to be a good thing.”
The Bloop Museum has 25,000 artifacts in its collection. It has edited thousands of online games and databases. One of its recent highlights was recovering a court transcription from an old floppy disk that led to the exoneration of two Maryland men who were falsely convicted of rape.
For the first 10 years of business, Bloop operated as a pop-up museum around the Baltimore area. For the past seven, it shared space with the System Source Computer Museum and National Electronics Museum near Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport. The three museums have a good relationship, but Bloop’s need for more space was crucial for Becker’s 70-pallet stockpile of items.
The process of moving has been a long and messy one. From strenuous location scouting to directorial disputes with board members, Brendan had his work cut out for him.
The Bloop Museum set up a GiveButter fundraiser, reaching its goal of $240,000 after a year and a half to purchase the building, and help from a private investor closed the gap. Now, the fundraiser has added $93,000 to its goal for unexpected renovation costs.
“Any donation that someone makes on that GiveButter page, they get a receipt right away and they can put it on their taxes,” Becker said.
The building holds a lot of sentimental value in the Penn Hills community. Residents recall the holiday train show that was displayed there for many years.
“I grew up in that building. They used to have the train shows the weekend before Thanksgiving until January in the basement of that building, and every single police officer and municipal worker and volunteers from around the community would come out,” said Vicki Stein, a home school tutor for her three children in Murrysville.
The building still has a long way to go before opening to the public.
The rooms and hallways are littered with debris and items left over from municipal government operations, including plaques, blueprints and desks. The building doesn’t have the Bloop Museum’s signature style because organizers are waiting for construction efforts to start.
Despite the challenges, Bloop is ready to engage with the community and already has started to integrate. They were invited to sell furniture during the adjacent Crescent Hills neighborhood’s yard sale. They also reached out to multiple schools in the area for tours and lesson inquiries.
“The fact that it’s going to be within our school district is great,” said George Karnbauer, the computer networking instructor at Forbes Road Career & Technology Center. “The fact that it’s in Penn Hills — you know, one of biggest feeder schools is Penn Hills — I think those kids could probably walk down from their schools. It’s going to give them a great opportunity.”
Noted Stein: “Seeing it and finding out how things work and how the first generation electronics (work) and how things didn’t need to be online. The games and everything else and just the learning aspect of it is going to be fantastic.”
Until the entire building is set up, the museum will start exhibiting on the first floor on the right side of the building. The entrance also will be located on the right, which will open up to the museum’s lobby, which previously served as the council chamber room.
A soft opening is expected to take place in the fall.
“That train display is something that brought people in from all over the region, and hopefully this will do the same,” Mayor Pauline Calabrese said.
