Glad someone else remembered this old theater

CHARLEROI, Pa. – Despite having spent countless hours as a child in the seats of the old Coyle Theater in Charleroi, I have few memories of the place. That’s because I’ve always been a sucker for movies, and lost all sense of time and place after the credits rolled into the story.

Recognizing that at an early age, my parents probably knew they could drop me off at the Coyle in the late 1960s without a babysitter and that I’d stay safely in my seat until the movie ended.

Then I followed the crowd out the isle to the lobby and street and stood there under the lights of the marquee for a few minutes big-eyed, dazed and confused and still under the spell of Hollywood.

There were several other theaters in the Mon Valley at the time, including the Manos in nearby Monessen and the Liberty in Donora. But the Coyle was special because it always carried the best movies and had a mysterious balcony for adults only.

I didn’t know it then but the 999-seat theater at 331 McKean Ave. was built in 1895 for vaudeville and burlesque and originally catered to actors who came to town by paddle boat.

By 1999 the Coyle was shuddered, outsourced by television and mall theaters. The surrounding downtown lost its heart and soul without a theater, and businesses suffered even further from the loss of thousands of steel jobs in the region.

Along came Nancy Ellis, a local woman who had a vision to reopen the theater with a leaking roof and mounting debts from unpaid property taxes. Many people thought she was out of her mind, yet she kept her dream alive for nearly a decade, raising just enough money to repair the roof and stabilize the brick building.

Out of nowhere, Ellis has become a feel-good story drawn from the script of a Broadway musical about a stage lost, only to be resurrected by a song and prayer.

The nonprofit she formed, the Mid-Mon Valley Cultural Trust, was awarded $250,000 last week in proceeds from Pennsylvania’s new slots parlor revenues, those pulled from the purse of a casino that opened in 2007 at The Meadows Racetrack and Casino in Washington County. She now is seeking a project manager to oversee restorations and a local theater group to claim the stage.

Movies are expected to roll again, too, at the Coyle in the fall of 2009. I hope to be among the first in line to grab a ticket and fill in the blanks of faded memories of a downtown where crowds once gathered for a common purpose.



Photo: Observer-Reporter

Asian dining on another level

So it was Feb. 8, the second day of the Chinese Year of the Rat, and there I was ordering dinner in one of New York’s trendiest Asian restaurants.

Tradition suggested that you celebrate by decorating your table with inexpensive chopsticks. The pair on my table at Tao Restaurant in the city’s theater district was pretty fancy. For a brief second, I thought about taking them home, and besides knowing that stealing would have been wrong, I have never really mastered the art of handling sticks to put food in my mouth. (I swear some people can eat broth with chopsticks)

Instead, I ordered a bottle of Tsingtao beer and began the New Year celebration in the same restaurant where Madonna has been known to dine. The place has a nondescript facade lit by a giant hanging wicker chandelier that looked like something a hypnotist would use to put someone under his spell.

A 16-foot Buddha served as the main attraction inside, just beyond a noisy and lively bar. After being seated among intimate tables in the second-floor lounge, I ordered sea bass and soft-shell crab rolls. The food was fantastic, as was the service. Don’t believe the nasty things people have been saying online about the restaurant, such as the food isn’t especially Asian, the waiters were rude and the menu's too pricey. My bill came to $58, far less than what I was expecting to pay in such a joint.

Another bottle of Tsingtao and it was time to visit the men’s room. Located inside the tiny room was one beautiful urinal, so pretty in fact that it was almost too nice to soil. A waterfall cascaded down a large pane of blue-green, back-it glass into a black granite troth filled with river rocks.

What a way to mark the new year………

Credit, even for the departed

Yesterday, a new Sears credit card arrived in the mailbox for my dad, James R. Beveridge, even though he died a year ago.

So I called the 800 number on the back of the card and waded through several prompts before reaching a live person. She spoke clear English.

I told her the situation. She asked for my name. I supplied it, and then, she asked for the name on the card. I said: "James Beveridge."

"Can you put him on the phone?" she responded.

"Heee's DEAD," I said before she began to apologize profusely.

And then there was silence......

"Are you still there?" I asked.

"Yes. I'm sorry .. it'll just take a few seconds," she said in a hushed tone.
"The account is canceled."

Homespun jammers setting sail for fame

At first blush, Jugtown Pirates of Lake Champlain seemed to be on course for a shipwreck. The band's heroin-sheik dirty wardrobe also made its musicians look as if they needed a good scrubbing while following a Phish tour across the United States.

But after few minutes of being drawn to this frantic, Appalachian-inspired sound, I was convinced that it was the result many hours of serious practice. The notched-up pace of otherwise slow hick tunes sounded something akin to bluegrass on LSD. The noise was addicting.

I happened upon this upstart band playing a street festival last spring along Route 66 in downtown Albuquerque, N.M.

The precision was remarkable on such homemade instruments as a washtub bass and washboard. They tossed in a regular stand-up bass and a kazoo and pulled together one of the most creative sounds that I have laid ear to in decades.

All the guys need to do is hit the Laundromat between gigs.

Donora is spooky without "TV tunnels"

DONORA, Pa. – A popular television thriller series about the “ghostly” otherworld is making a star out of Donora.

CBS’s "Ghost Whisperer” is set in the fictional town of Grandview, which is actually a section of Donora, and at least one plot line involved mysterious tunnels that are supposed to be under its downtown.

Most likely, however, the Donora underground exists in the vivid imagination of one of the show’s executive producers, Kim Moses, who grew up in the borough, locals say. She also was once married to professional football legend, Joe Montana, who grew up in nearby Monongahela.

“That has to be fiction,” said Donora photographer Chuck Muia, 75, who knows the borough inside and out.

Moses is an incredibly gifted woman who has often incorporated Donora in the plot lines of her productions, said borough council President Karen Polkabla.

“Ghost Whisperer” stars Jennifer Love Hewitt as the fictional Melinda Gordon, who communicates with spirits and ghosts that have unfinished business on earth. An earlier story line involved a war memorial in a town park that was inspired by one that existed in Donora.

Polkabla never heard of the tunnels, either, and laughed at the thought of a mysterious underworld in the borough.

“Cool. Maybe that’ll bring visitors,” she said.

Muia said many houses in the Mon Valley have tunnels in their basements where people used to mine coal to feed their home furnaces. Others were known to tunnel into basements to create a personal fallout shelters during the Cold War, he said.

There is a creepy old network of large sewers leading to the Monongahela River from the former U.S. Steel mill that once dominated the riverfront, Muia said. Those sewers were sealed, though, because children were known to climb into them, he said.

But as far as tunnels under the businesses, “There’s nothing to that,” Muia added. “If that were the case, (a bank) would have been robbed a long time ago.”
(Photo caption: A still night along Donora's main street otherwise known as McKean Avenue)
Observer-Reporter

Another mill folds

Welcome to nowhere, chapter 13

By Scott Beveridge

Dad saw wicked times in 1972.

Jim Beveridge was fast approaching 50 and sweating the withdrawal from nicotine while kicking his long habit of smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. Worse yet, he had sworn off the Iron City beer after his physician warned him about his shrinking liver. This was a man who couldn’t stray five miles from our home in Webster, Pa., to pay a bill or pick up groceries without twice stopping at a bar. He spent more than a few long nights pacing the floors.

And then came the announcement from the steel mill in nearby Monessen, where he had worked since before World War II: The plant was shutting down for good on Feb. 17 of that year.

Our lives spiraled out of control, almost in an instant.

The Page Division of American Chain and Cable Co. furloughed its 250 workers because the 72-year-old factory was no longer profitable. Sure, there had been times when work was slow, and others when the union halted production during stalled negotiations. But this mill had woven wire to hold up the magnificent Golden Gate Bridge that opened in 1937 in San Francisco. There would always be a demand for Page’s products, the workers assumed, even though their numbers had dwindled from a record high of 1,100 in 1940.

J. Wallace Page of Adrian, Mich., constructed his blooming, rod and wire mills in Monessen in 1899. He was considered to be the “father of the wire-fence industry” in the United States, having developed the technique of hand weaving wire at his home. In no time, his Monessen operation was producing 3,000 tons of steel a month. Twenty years later, Page’s operation would be absorbed into the holdings of American Chain and Cable of New York.

But by January 1972 the demand had weakened for wire and fence to the point that members of United Steelworkers Local 1391 in Monessen took concessions to keep their factory churning. The agreement paved way for the company to reduce the workforce from 300 to 150. With his seniority, my father initially doubted he would lose his job as a pipefitter and union position of grievance man. Then the national union called a company-wide strike on Jan. 31, and within two weeks, the Monessen mill was history.

The five-minute announcement from the company was a shock and surprise to the workers. “It’s a black day for us at Page,” local union President Elliot Bianchi told the local newspaper. “I’m sick to the stomach,” he stated in an article in The Valley-Independent.

Knowing his medical benefits would soon dry up, dad encouraged mom to check herself into Charleroi-Monessen Hospital to have a tumor removed in what proved to be a false cancer scare. She was on the second floor while dad’s mother was on the fourth, entering the throes of dementia.

While our hardships seemed unique to our family of five, they would prove to be just the beginning of what was about to happen to thousands of dependents of Pittsburgh-area steelworkers in a collapsing industry. Being the first to receive pink slips, the Page employees weren’t offered extended unemployment paychecks and free retraining as were the masses who would join the ranks of the unemployed in America’s rust belt by the mid 1980s.

With two sons about to enter college, dad took a low-paying job as a Pinkerton guard until something better came along. In the fall of 1974, I was off to Edinboro College near Erie, Pa., to study art on a free ride with government grants because my parents’ earnings fell below poverty guidelines. In my mind, I was forever turning my back on the Godforsaken Mon Valley.

Ironically, one the first things I did after finishing my degree was to apply for a job at Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel Corp. in Monessen.

THE END



Introduction

(Captions: An early postcard view of the Page wire mill in Monessen, top, and a photo taken by John Hurrianko in the 1960s of Webster from the ramp to the Donora-Webster Bridge. The images are courtesy of the Greater Monessen Historical Society)