Fading memories of the old South Side
RICHARD PETERSON reflects on what his childhood neighborhood has lost
The South Side that I knew when I was growing up in post-World War II Pittsburgh was a thriving working-class neighborhood populated by ethnic enclaves, mostly Eastern European. By the 1970s, the South Side, impacted by the decline of the steel industry and the loss of thousands of mill jobs, deteriorated during the Rust Belt depression, only to be revived and gentrified, a few decades later, into a trendy community of art and antique shops, bookstores and coffee shops, and some of the finest restaurants in Pittsburgh.
These days, the South Side has once again fallen on hard times. One resident, walking through the South
Side recently, claimed that she passed 51 empty storefronts. On Feb. 16, the Green Front, one of the last steel mill-era bars and restaurants on the South Side, closed its doors after 40 years under its current ownership. When I was running in the Pittsburgh Marathon, my family and friends would gather at the Green Front on the Saturday before the race for a pierogi fest. We met there because the Green Front reminded me of the South Side of my youth.
Vibrant community
Most of the parents of my generation of South Siders were the children of European immigrants who came to America in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Our parents were the first in their families to speak without a foreign accent, the first to attend American schools (though they dropped out early to find work, usually in mills and factories) and the first to hide their ethnicity by Anglicizing their family’s last name. In my father’s family, the Lithuanian “Petrauskas,” translated “son of Peter,” became Peterson.
The postwar South Side, with the black soot from the Jones & Laughlin Steel Co. mill, the sour odor from the Duquesne Brewery polluting and fouling the air, and a railroad track cutting through the heart of the neighborhood, was hardly a poster child for Pittsburgh’s Renaissance, but it was self-sustaining. There were so many small businesses that families didn’t need a car and could fill all their basic needs by walking up and down Carson Street. Shoppers had a choice of grocery stores, including an A&P grocery with a butcher shop next store, as well as dairy stores, fruit markets and bakeries. There were also drugstores, shoe, clothing and hardware stores, barber shops, confectionaries with racks of comic books and packs of baseball cards, full-service gas stations (if you owned a car), a soft pretzel shop, a laundry, and three five-and-tens, including a Woolworth’s.
For entertainment, the South Side had four movie houses, two bowling alleys and several soda shops with jukeboxes and pinball machines. There were greasy spoons on just about every block of Carson Street, and so many beer joints that it was impossible to walk the streets and alleys from one end of the South Side to the other without passing a Kotula’s or Kalka’s along the way.
Choice of cinema
The centerpiece for entertainment on the South Side was the Arcade, located on 19th and Carson between a duck-pin bowling alley and the Arcade Cafe. On a Friday payday, if we could afford it, my family would eat at the cafe before heading for a double feature at the Arcade and a jackpot drawing in between movies. If you had the lucky ticket stub, you could win anything from 50 cents to $5.
The Arcade was one of four movie houses on the South Side, but the only one with a balcony and first-run movies, ranging from biblical epics and historical romances to Hitchcock thrillers and lavish musicals. The only problem was that if you were underage, you weren’t allowed in the balcony unless you were with an adult, for the justifiable fear that, on your own, you’d likely launch pieces of candy at the patrons below.
The other three movie houses on the South Side were shabbier than the Arcade, but they had those great black-and-white movies that pop up these days on Turner Classic Movies. The Colonial, just a block away from the Arcade, featured horror films, with the likes of the Frankenstein monster, Dracula, the Wolf Man, and the Mummy roaming the screen. My favorite was the Mummy, who had to drag one leg but still managed to trap and strangle his victims.
The Rex, down on 16th Street, with a gutter urinal in the back, showed propaganda-filled war movies and cliff-hanging serials (we called them “chapters”) on Saturday afternoons. I sat in the dark and watched John Wayne win WWII single-handedly, and marveled at the thrilling escapes of the Green Hornet, Dick Tracy and other comic book heroes from the collapsing walls and fiery crashes that would later find their way into Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies.
The run-down Liberty, on 12th and Carson, featured hourlong Westerns, called “oaters” back then. Hollywood was cranking them out for those of us who couldn’t get enough of gun-blazing heroes taking on cattle rustlers and marauding Indians, though it was a little distracting when they strummed on a guitar and burst into song.
While Gene Autry and Roy Rogers not only sang, but yodeled, the Western star Rex Allen was actually billed as the last of the singing cowboys. His voice was so deep and soothing that he later became the narrative voice in Disney’s nature documentaries.
Black Sheep
The Pittsburgh Marathon, with all of its heart-attack hills, has a demanding and grueling course. But its easiest stretch goes through what today is called the South Side Flats. It was also the best part of the marathon for me because, as I jogged up Carson Street, I could look for reminders of my old South Side. Most of the pleasure palaces and haunts of my youth are gone, but, just when I turned away from the South Side and ran onto the Birmingham Bridge, I could look across at Ormsby Playground, where I spent the best days of my young life.
While I grew up dreaming of playing someday for the Pirates, I learned to play ball at Ormsby. It was just a block around the corner from Merriman Way, where my family lived under the shadow of the decaying Brady Street Bridge. Ormsby’s all-dirt field, oiled in the summer to keep the dust down, was perfect for kids who were about the age of Little Leaguers because it was a bandbox, no bigger than a Little League ballfield. It was so small that Ormsby’s softball league used a 14-inch softball, rather than the traditional 12-inch ball. Fielders were not allowed to use a glove, and anything, fair or foul, hit over the fence was an out.
As a teenager, I played in Ormsby’s softball league for a team called the Black Sheep. I also played for Ormsby in the 12-inch park district tournament and still have the gold-painted medals, small enough to fit in the palm of my hand, for winning the city’s championship. I also have gold medals from Ormsby’s championship teams in touch football and basketball.
When my softball buddies and I became old enough to hang out at South Side beer joints, we looked for sponsors, so we could move beyond the South Side and play in citywide leagues sponsored by the Honus Wagner and Yank’s sporting good stores. We ended up playing for Dees, which, at that time, had an upstairs betting parlor, and the Club Cafe, where you could get the best and biggest fish sandwich in Pittsburgh.
Unfortunately, when we refused to sell raffle tickets, so that Moe, the owner of Club Cafe, could recoup the money he spent on uniforms and equipment, he dropped his sponsorship and took back his uniforms. We finished that season, appropriately, as the South Side Black Sheep.
Memories fade
I miss my days on the South Side, especially going to those movie houses, where I escaped for a few hours into a world that fired my imagination, and playing on those ballfields, where I first felt a sense of accomplishment and pride. There are a few vestiges of the old South Side still around, but today’s live rock-music venues at the Rex, Dees and Club Cafe would hardly be tolerated by workingclass patrons, sitting on their bar stools and drinking their boilermakers, unless someone was playing “The Beer Barrel Polka” on an accordion.
For some, leaving their old neighborhood is a good thing, a way of shedding one’s childhood and creating a new life, free of the past. For me, however, my life away from the South Side has, over the years, left me feeling like an exile, and the loss of places like the Green Front, feeling as painful as an amputation. It’s been a long time since I left the South Side in the 1960s, but I’ve never stopped looking back, even as what I’m looking for keeps fading away.
Life away from the South Side has, over the years, left me feeling like an exile.