The art of a steelworker

MONESSEN, Pa. – It appears the self-taught artist, Nick Churlig, was playing a crude joke with his sculpture, “Mind Over Matter,” that he created from scraps he picked up at a steel mill.

He plopped a piece of coke used to produce steel directly under a toilet float dangling on a chain, and then spray-painted the items gold.

The rest is left up to the imagination because Churlig died in February at age 86 and didn’t have any descendants to keep alive his story.

He liked to create art from items he recycled from Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel mills in Monessen, Pa., and nearby Allenport. This is the story volunteers tell at the Monessen Heritage Museum, where a half-dozen of Churlig’s creations are on display in a glass case.

Not visible to the right of his "Owl, shown in the above photo, is a shiny missile-shaped piece he painted black and blue before gluing just one tiny seashell to its side. The sculpture is appropriately titled, “Black and Blue.”

Churlig’s primitive art might be a little weird, but it speaks volumes to the resourcefulness of the clever men who toiled in steel mills that have vanished from the region’s landscape.

A beer garden where I could dance a jig

Sharp Edge in Pittsburgh has enough varieties of beer to choose from to make your head spin.

McMURRAY, Pa. – A stranger to Sharp Edge Brasserie shouldn’t expect its décor to be about anything other than beer.

Hundreds of expensive bottles of brew line a wall in a jail-like cell at the entrance to the business at the end of a dying strip mall in the otherwise-wealthy Peters Township section of Washington County, Pa.

Further ahead, behind the bar, are more than 50 different draft beers to choose from, as well as 350 other varieties, selections that spin my head well before any alcohol reaches my belly.

“How do you keep track of that much beer?” I ask the young female bartender.

“It can be a challenge,” she responds, before recommending a cold glass of Bavik, a Belgian Pilsner of the lighter variety.

This bar is among four in the Pittsburgh region of the same name and owned by Jeff Walewski, whose flagship location can be found in the city’s Bloomfield section.

The mood is welcoming and calm tonight inside the Peters pub off Route 19. A distinguished man is talking to a complete stranger about the history classes he teaches at a public school. Two nearby rows of high-backed, oak booths are filled with customers quietly drinking dark beers in fancy glasses. The air is pleasantly free of cigarette smoke. The location is exempt from the unwelcoming, costly and controversial drink tax in neighboring Allegheny County.

The bartender announces that Comcast TV will be filming a show here as part of a story about places with good beer and grub, beginning at 5 p.m. Friday.

The Buffalo chicken bites and personal pan pizzas are half price tonight, as are the Belgian drafts. That’s good news because the Bavik normally sells for $6.10 a glass. It has nothing on the Chimay, which will set you back $11.10 per goblet after happy hour expires.

Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” album is streaming from the speakers when my cheese pizza with a bit too much garlic arrives on my plate. The crust is so wafer thin that it could double as a tortilla, but the pizza is not bad washed down with two lagers that were brewed for only the finickiest of Pils connoisseurs.

The meal ends when the British progressive rock band’s mellow tune, “Goodbye Blue Sky,” fades to the Grateful Dead’s “Tennessee Jed,” a song about death and rock 'n' roll in hillbilly country. It’s time to leave.

I never cared much for Jerry Garcia.

But, there is reason to smile. The tab comes in at just under $10, a bargain during happy hour that is enough to make me think for a passing second about putting on my clogging shoes. Heck, that price can’t be beat by the string of grimy, smoke-filled joints in southwestern Pennsylvania and beyond.

This old brush truck is a keeper

Charlie Ward admires his 1955 Willys Jeep fire truck.

Members of a tiny fire department in Webster, Pa., didn’t want to forever part with their 30-year-old Willys Jeep brush truck when they retired it in 1985.

So they stored the 1955 1-ton truck in a garage until the right person came along to put the tiny vehicle back on the road.

Vintage fire truck enthusiast Charlie Ward, who lives nearby, took possession of the Jeep for a dollar after it sat under roof for 18 years. Part of the deal requires him to offer the truck back to the Rostraver Township Volunteer Fire Department No. 1 in Webster for the cost of his repairs should he ever decide to put it up for sale.

“It’s one of America’s first brush trucks,” Ward says. “It’s the oldest fire truck still in operation in Rostraver Township.”

The fire department purchase it for $8,700 from Buck’s Garage in Webster at a time when fires often swept through Buffalo grass that had spread across the hills above the village about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. The grass was the first vegetation to reappear on the hillsides after a heavily polluting zinc mill closed in nearby Donora. Webster needed such a 4-wheel-drive pumper truck to reach those fast-moving fires on the steep hills above the Monongahela River.

The truck was equipped with a 226 cubic inch super hurricane engine and a 200 gallon water holding tank. When connected to a larger water source, the pump had the ability to spew 500 gallons a minute.

The pump no longer works because it cracked from frozen water that was left inside the assembly over a winter. Ward said he chose to keep the pump as is rather than replace it with a modern version that would not match the truck’s original appearance.

Most of the green paint and hand-painted lettering on the vehicle is original. There were just 50 vehicles of this model produced, and Ward surely has one of the sharpest of them still moving.

Saturday afternoon at Three Rivers Arts Festival

This video from the 50th annual Three Rivers Arts Festival, Pittsburgh, Pa., features Caribbean Intercultural Vibrations, a snake, a skip-dancing dude, ketchup dinosaur, other weird art and more.

Lincoln slept here, well maybe

The so-called Lincoln bed on display at a new Sen. John Heinz History Center exhibit on the former president.

PITTSBURGH – The bed where President Lincoln rested his head in the Monongahela House hotel was surely comfortable, but whether or not it survived has become an awkward story in Pittsburgh.

A fancy bed now featured in a special Lincoln exhibit at the Sen. John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh made local headlines in 2004, when it was discovered in a secret room in a storage warehouse. The bed was quickly identified in news accounts as having been taken from the celebrated Lincoln Room at the hotel before the building was demolished.

Then, the dedicated staff at the history center’s museum did some digging and found enough evidence to cast doubt on the validity of that claim.

Researchers found an 1889 newspaper report about a devastating fire at the hotel that once stood at 1 Smithfield St. Firefighters flooded the entire building to douse the blaze, rendering “every destructible article ruined,” the newspaper reported without any mention of the Lincoln bed.

That president did spend Feb. 14-15, 1861, in the hotel while en route to Washington, D.C., for his inauguration. Soldiers need to use their bayonets to clear a path for him through the nearly 4,000 people who packed the streets outside the hotel upon his arrival about 9 p.m. during a pouring rain, according to “The Lincoln Train in Pennsylvania,” by Bradley R. Hoch. Once inside, Lincoln stood on a chair and said, “that if all the people were in favor of the Union, it can certainly be in no great danger – it will be preserved,” Hoch noted in his book.

Lincoln gave another speech the following day from a hotel balcony before continuing his journey. And then, nearly every hotel guest in the years that followed requested to sleep in the hotel bed used by the president.

The original Monongahela House was leveled in Pittsburgh’s Great Fire of 1845, only to be rebuilt in a more-luxurious style two years later. The hotel then became a favorite among actors, presidents and such writers as Mark Twain before it was torn down in the 1930s.

An earlier article in the Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph stated the Lincoln bed was going to be preserved by the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania. The society since has been absorbed by the Heinz museum, whose staff found yet more information that makes it difficult to even confirm that report.

It seems former Castle Shannon Borough Councilman George Dietrich claimed he crafted a hammer and gavel from the same Lincoln bed before he donated those instruments to his council president in November 1937.

Even so, three blueprints – including one of the Lincoln Room at the hotel – accompanied the bed, shown in the exhibit, when Allegheny County workers found it bug eaten and under burlap in a maintenance shed at South Park. A headline followed the find in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette declaring: “Bed found in shed is the one used by Abe Lincoln here.”

The museum since has only been able to confirm the bed in the shed was made from walnut and poplar, woods that were commonly used for furniture during Lincoln’s lifetime. It’s also typical of the Renaissance Revival style that was fashionable when Lincoln visited the city.

Regardless, it looks presidential.

A town hotel is just a memory

It isn’t the trolley car that catches my attention in this old photograph of another era in downtown Charleroi, Pa.

The art-deco façade of Hotel Charleroi jumps out of the image, sparking memories of better times in what was once one of the most prosperous retail districts in Pennsylvania.

When I was a kid, our family made regular trips to the hotel dining room when dad had a few bucks left in his pocket on his paydays at Page Steel and Wire Co. in neighboring Monessen.

His good friends, Ed and Eunice Hank, ran the place after they got out of the butcher shop business in North Charleroi. It also was a big deal at the time to be seen in this hotel at the intersection of Fifth Street and McKean Avenue in the vicinity of shoe shops and fine clothing stores.

When you walked in the door, there was a well lit bar hugging the wall to the immediate right. It seemed there was always a craggy woman who had one too many drinks sitting at a bar stool. Further ahead was the lunch counter and an expansive door that opened to the large dining room. Popular items on the menu in the 1960s were the shrimp dinner, and a hot turkey sandwich between two thin slices of Wonder Bread drenched in gravy.

The upper floors remained true to the hotel’s Victorian redbrick construction style, reached by a grand oak stairway hidden from view by a odd remodeling project. By the 1970s, the rooms had been rented too often to drunks, drug addicts or prostitutes.

That was before a fire turned the building into a parking lot, leaving the town without one of its central hotels that helped to give it a sense of place.

(Photo courtesy of Pennsylvania Trolley Museum)