Little hope for Donora

Welcome to nowhere, chapter 12

By Scott Beveridge

Donora was an unsightly mess by December 1967, with little more than a prayer for a brighter future. And the once-thriving steel town in Southwestern Pennsylvania had papers to prove its state of despair.

Those conclusions were drawn by the U.S. Economic Development Administration that year when it made public a plan for the small borough to recover from the loss of U.S. Steel and nearly 4,000 jobs. The federal government had come to the rescue because Donora was home to the first such mill to close in an industry that made the United States an industrial powerhouse across the globe. By every indication, however, Donora’s luck had run out.

Elected officials in the town along the Monongahela River had enacted wage and business taxes that made it unattractive to new companies, the report revealed. The movers and shakers in neighboring Monessen, Charleroi and Monongahela – municipalities that were just then beginning their declines - were not cooperating among each other, let alone with Donora, to tackle their problems.

Donora also had a poor library, one that was cramped into the back rooms of an old hotel. The town had inadequate schools, parks, sewers and employments opportunities. The major highways even bypassed that bend in the river, making it nearly impossible for big rigs to move goods in and out of town.

The laundry list of economic development woes was published at the end of a front-page story about the study in the local newspaper, the Herald-American, at the story’s jump to page two. As if burrying that part of the bleak assessment would make the situation go away. Meanwhile, the story led with the news that Donora needed to find $1.5 million to climb out of its hole.

The federal government said Donora needed to put a strip mall, health center, restaurant and motel on 28 acres of former mill property along the river. Part of good news came in the form of one sentence in the story that informed the borough that it had plenty of land to redevelop. The story went on to promise 2,800 new jobs if the plan came to fruition.

Unfortunately, the borough had only received $45,000 from the federal agency, and that money had already been spent on the study.

The local paper missed the big story at the time that U.S Steel had already surrendered the mill property, a 4.2-mile swath of it, to a new nonprofit organization that had its sights set on developing an industrial park. The Middle Monongahela Industrial Development Association, run then by a group of men who had no idea what they were getting themselves into, received from the company the rod mills, billet yard, lime storage building, roll shop and boiler, pump and cleaning houses. The property switched hands for a paltry $35,000, according to MIDA’s files that are now dusty in a loft above its offices in an old, gray mill building.

Yet, back in 1967, MIDA officials only had commitments from four firms that wanted to establish a warehouse, chemical plant, sandblasting facility and truck terminal at the nearly 70-year-old abandoned mill. They were looking at 215 jobs, at best.




Introduction

Chapter 13

(The photos are courtesy of MIDA, reproduced from organization's U.S. Steel file from the 1960s)

Garden of glass

Please welcome guest blogger Dawn Keller. who recently visited Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens.

When you walk in each room, Phipps smells wonderful – the scent of a combination of plants from all over the world.
Now, there’s an additional reason to visit the Pittsburgh-based glasshouse full of plants. Until Feb. 24, the Chihuly blown glass exhibit will be on display. Renowned glass blower Dale Chihuly uses teams to develop complex and multipart sculptures.
I’m not sure what it’s like during the day. However, at night, the art is spectacular. The pictures here don’t do it justice. It’s something that you have to see for yourself.

Feeling love for this food

The Wooden Angel is worthy of praise

You’d have to be a log not to feel romance in the air at the Wooden Angel, a family-run restaurant in Beaver, Pa., which specializes in American wines. Angel sculptures appear to sprinkle love dust everywhere around the restaurant’s red walls to the point where the place exudes passion. A tacky spotlight in the shape of a heart shines on one wall leaving no doubt that love is in the air.

Kitsche aside, the outrageously great food and friendly staff make for a great experience in dining. The menu is famous among locals for its thin-crust skillet breads that have such names as Pierogi Bob and Duck Bread. The chef actually tops the bread with duck and a perfect compliment of apple, Brie and goat cheese.

Our waitress, Boni, also recommended the roasted five-onion soup. It arrived dripping in mozzarella and chock-full of red, yellow and white onions, shallots and scallions. For the main course, we selected smoked mozzarella raviolis and chicken with roasted potatoes and sautéed vegetables. A guy at the next table was dining on a beautiful, thick slab of rare prime rib. The food was so good that my friend practically stabbed the waitress in the hand with a fork when she tried to take away a plate with a few morsels of veggies. "My compliments to the chef," she said.

Reservations are recommended at the 40-year-old Wooden Angle that was full Saturday night of smiling people, some of whom embraced between courses. The staff worked tirelessly to please. After dinner, a waiter actually escorted me through the smoky bar and to the rest room that is hidden behind a wall. The menu is a bit pricey but it’s no wonder this place has won so many awards.

Church bells touch lives

MONONGAHELA, Pa. – Michael Milinovich was standing outside City Hall in Monongahela in 1982 pondering a career change after completing yet another boring municipal audit.

Then he noticed the melody from the set of bells that chime on the quarter hour across the street in the belfry at First United Methodist Church, and they inspired him to change his life.

It was his first calling to the ministry.

Milinovich joined the seminary and was briefly appointed to a Methodist church in nearby West Newton before fate sent him back to lead the Monongahela congregation that worships in the century-old building with those bells.

“You can’t make that story up,” he said. “It’s unbelievable how those bells play into people’s lives.”

The bells, 11 in all, were a gift from lumber mill owner Charles E. Stephens in 1925, when there were many wealthy residents of the small city hugging the Monongahela River, said Jim Barnhart, the church’s historian.

The bells weigh between 525 and 3,000 pounds each, and contain 80 percent copper and 20 percent tin. They were manufactured by McShane Bell Foundry of Glen Burnie, Md., a company that now charges $22,000 for just one bell. No other church in Southwestern Pennsylvania can boast such a collection except First Baptist Church of Pittsburgh, which owns 12, Milinovich said. However, the bells at First Baptist no longer chime because the system malfunctioned, a church spokesman said.

The set cost Stephens an estimated $200,000, Barnhart said, as part of badly needed renovations to the building at the time. The steeple had to be removed in the 1920s because of damages from a lightning strike, and the brick tower it sat atop was about to collapse.

Originally, the bells were controlled by a small keyboard behind a hidden door at the altar until the miniature organ’s keys began to stick. Then the men of the church had to run to the bell tower and pull ropes to sound the bells, which were eventually electrified in 1969, Barnhart said.

Many modern churches play recordings of bells chiming because they cannot afford the real thing, he said. Some old churches have sold their bells for the value of their copper or brass in order to keep the doors open.

“It’s a landmark,” Barnhart said of his church. “Our church cares enough to keep those bells ringing.”

But caring for the belfry can be a challenge.

While the four-story spire stands as an impressive addition to the red-brick facade, its rough interior could serve as a backdrop for a Charles Dickens play.

A door in the second-floor choir loft, above the sanctuary, opens to a few stairs and a tall chamber lit by a couple of incandescent light bulbs dangling from chains. Exposed wood support beams criss-cross the room, some of which have graffiti left behind by children. There are three more steep climbs to the top. A darker, cramped level that would send chills down the spine of a claustrophobic can be found atop a set of 33 rickety, winding steps.

Visitors are wise to step on the edges of the stairs because of the wear on the middle of the wooden planks. A third, tight set of 15 steps spiral toward a ladder and a trap door to a narrow catwalk between the bells and belfry’s bricks walls.

“It’s an experience, especially when the bells start ringing,” Barnhart said. “It sort of blows your eardrums out. You get to the see the town from a whole different view.”

Click here to watch a short film about the bells.

Reprinted from the Observer-Reporter

No danger in this pizza

CHARLEROI, Pa. - Business owners in this borough fear the discovery last week of a body in a downtown trash bin is going to frighten people away from shopping in their stores. It’s kind of ironic because there really aren’t many places left to shop there anyway thanks to the collapse of the steel industry in the Pittsburgh region.

But in Charleroi’s defense, local and state police were quick to make an arrest in the brutal slaying of a woman who had just moved to town the day she was killed, allegedly by her boyfriend. Click here to read about the case.

And downtown Charleroi is not a Hell’s Kitchen or anything close to being infected with such blight as Aliquippa or Braddock, municipalities to the north and west along the Ohio River watershed.

In fact, Charleroi's downtown was placed in November 2007 on the National Registry of Historic Districts because its storefronts and mansions are representative of a boomtown from the late 1800s. There also are plenty of restaurants and offices along the main drag that keep a steady flow of people who earn legitimate paychecks on the sidewalks. And many of those happy feet are heading to a fantastic pizza parlor.

If you live in the area and haven’t discovered Salatino’s Pizzeria, make it your life’s goal to eat there the next time you have the munchies for a pepperoni pie. Owned by Michael Coury, the restaurant at 532 McKean Ave. has drawn great reviews by Internet junkies as well as members of the local media with beer bellies. Coury is one of the friendliest businessmen around, and especially in Charleroi, where he has been selling pizzas for three years. He sometimes even passes out free samples of his yummy homemade baklava, a sheet of which is usually on the counter. In three weeks, Coury will expand his hold on the Charleroi restaurant trade by opening a new jazz club, River Café, in the old Miller’s women’s clothing store a few doors down from his restaurant.

Here's hoping the place sings. This stretch of the Mon Valley is screaming for a classy place with good food, a friendly staff and live mellow music.

The Bells

The First United Methodist Church of Monongahela, Pa., boasts the second highest number of bells in any belfry in Southwestern Pennsylvania. It's an effort to reach to the top of the tower that has 11 McShane bells. The Observer-Reporter in Washington, Pa., will publish a feature story on the church Sunday, Jan. 20, 2008.