The End of an Era on Penn Avenue
For nearly a decade, the pink-and-white mural building on the corner of Penn Avenue and South Beatty Street has been shorthand for East Liberty's tech boom. Duolingo, the language-learning app that grew from a Carnegie Mellon University research project into a publicly traded company worth billions, has occupied that roughly 77,000-square-foot building at 5900 Penn Avenue since 2016. That chapter is now ending. The company is relocating its Pittsburgh headquarters to a larger space about half a mile away, and its longtime home is already being marketed to new tenants.
Where Duolingo Is Headed
Duolingo's new home is Liberty East, a mixed-use tower at 141 South St. Clair Street, also in East Liberty and anchored on its ground floor by a Whole Foods Market. The move isn't Duolingo's first connection to the building — the company already leased around 38,000 square feet there starting in November 2021. What's changing now is scale. Duolingo signed a 10-year lease in March 2024 for roughly 140,000 to 150,000 square feet, nearly doubling its local office footprint. The lease runs through June 2035, with a reported cost of close to $400,000 per month. The full transition is expected to take about a year to complete.
What Happens to the Old Building
With Duolingo moving out, 5900 Penn Avenue is now on the market. Hanna Commercial Real Estate is advertising the three-story property for sale or lease, putting one of East Liberty's most recognizable addresses back into play. For a neighborhood that has watched its retail and office corridors stay in high demand, losing an anchor tenant like Duolingo raises real questions about what comes next for the site — and whether another high-profile company steps in, or the space gets reimagined entirely.
A Pittsburgh Success Story, Still Growing
Duolingo was founded in 2011 by Carnegie Mellon University alumni Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker, and its Pittsburgh roots have remained central to its identity even as it expanded into one of the most downloaded apps in the world, serving hundreds of millions of users studying dozens of languages. Keeping its headquarters in East Liberty rather than relocating to a larger tech hub has long been treated locally as a point of pride — proof that a homegrown Pittsburgh company could scale globally without leaving the city that built it.
What It Means for East Liberty
Nearly doubling office space in the same neighborhood signals something different from a company quietly downsizing or leaving town — it's a bet that East Liberty itself, not just Pittsburgh broadly, remains the right place to grow. For local businesses near both the old and new addresses, that continuity matters. A departure would have been a loss for the neighborhood's daytime foot traffic; an expansion two blocks over keeps that economic activity local, even if the exact building changes.
The Allegheny Chronicle will continue following how the vacated Penn Avenue building gets reused, and what Duolingo's larger East Liberty footprint means for the neighborhood going forward.