First, some housekeeping: I am going to be taking a few days off from the Almanac next week. (To quote Jack Benny, "there will now be a slight pause while you say, 'who cares?'") Anyway, it's about time for me to get that trepanning job I've been putting off. The good news is that it looks like Alert Reader Officer Jim is going to step in as the guest Almanac diarist. Please, be nice. (He's a trained killer.)
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Alert Reader Jeff asks if Our Fair City is "the new Connellsville." Meaning, with four fires breaking out the same night, do we have a firebug on the loose?
According to Pat Cloonan's story in the News, one of the blazes was accidental in nature. One was in a vacant house in the Sixth Ward, another was in a garage in the Third Ward, and the third was in a trash bin at Crawford Village.
All three sites are about a mile and a half apart, so it's possible someone took a stroll down Versailles and Shaw avenues and started lighting buildings up. There was also a torch job on Jenny Lind Street in May in which a house with nine people inside was set ablaze; thankfully, everyone got out OK.
It's good that people are asking questions when three suspicious fires break out the same night, though I think the Pittsburgh TV stations jumped the gun a little bit with their scary music and overwrought rhetoric.
I know, I know, TV news, overreacting? Never!
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Meanwhile, it looks like Picksberg developer Barry Stein and the city are going to reach an agreement to finish rehabilitating the old Midtown Plaza Mall, according to Jonathan Barnes in the Post-Gazette. A lot of people over the last 30 years have thought the best way to rehab Midtown Plaza would be to dig a big hole and push it in, but Stein is planning about $1.5 million worth of renovations to the large enclosed part between Fifth and Sixth avenues, as well as work on the parking garage.
Eliminating the parking deck over Fifth Avenue eliminated the loafers who used to frequent that dank, dark cavern, Stein says, and I'll agree it was a major improvement. I wish him lots of luck, and it's also nice to see the city is cooperating with him.
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From the Mon Valley Good Government Dept. comes word that you'll want to keep a flashlight handy if you're driving through Elrama. Scott Beveridge wrote in Thursday's Observer-Reporter that Allegheny Power is turning off the streetlights in Union Township because of unpaid utility bills. According to Scott's story, many property owners are refusing to pay the $18 streetlight tax, and Union Township is now into Allegheny Power for $2,500.
That's not the worst of Union's problems. There are $200,000 in other unpaid bills piled up at the township building, the police force is probably going to be disbanded, and there's a fraud investigation underway of the business office.
The next meeting of the township supervisors is set for June 13. It seems to me Union could make a couple of extra bucks by selling popcorn, because I have a feeling it's going to be very entertaining.
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Finally, a little good news to report: North Huntingdon Township's Police Athletic League has been promised up to $25,000 by General Motors and Major League Baseball to upgrade one of the baseball diamonds in Shafton. It was damaged twice by flooding, in September and in January.
According to Sarah Norris in the Tribune-Review, one of the board members at PAL, Al Bergman, wrote an essay to the judges of GM and MLB's "Diamond in the Rough" contest and enclosed a photo of the field to bolster his case. You can read his winning essay here.
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To Do This Weekend: Mon Yough Trail Council hosts its annual "Yough-N-Roll Bike Ride" tomorrow, beginning at the trail entrance in Boston, Elizabeth Township. Registration begins at 7:30 a.m. for the 40 mile ride and at 8:30 for the 20 mile ride. For more information, call (412) 754-1100. ... Animal Friends will sponsor a rabies clinic for dogs and cats, three months of age and older, at McKeesport Fire Department Station No. 2, Eden Park Boulevard near Renziehausen Park. Inoculations will be done on a first-come, first-served basis from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sunday. Call (412) 566-2103. ... Pianist and guitarist Matt Tichon plays Beemer's, West Fifth Avenue, at 9:30 tonight. Call (412) 678-7400.
In need of some essential, but essentially boring items --- a watch battery, some cassette tapes, shampoo, allergy medicine --- I faced a trip last night to any of three discount palaces. North Bittyburg is roughly equidistant from a Wal-Mart, a Target and a Kmart.
Target is fine for some things --- Michael Graves pastel-colored teapot cozies, for instance --- but I've found their selection isn't exactly deep on many staple items. Wal-Mart often has a great selection, but I've tried to cut back on purchasing items from companies that lock their employees in and force them to work overtime. I also strongly suspect, but have no evidence, that Wal-Mart executives amuse themselves between buying trips to China by torturing rats with hacksaws. That left me with Kmart.
Actually, it left me with virtually a private shopping trip to Kmart, because I was one of only a handful of customers in the entire store. It was clean, well-lit, and had everything I was looking for.
It was also mostly empty.
I'm not much of a shopper, but over the past six months, I've been in several different Kmarts and Targets as well as the North Versailles Township Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is always crowded. Too crowded --- I actually get a little bit uneasy from the crowds at times. I'm sure Wal-Mart has the same uneasiness, thinking of ways to spend the money. (The number 1 idea? Build more Wal-Marts.)
Target doesn't build stores quite as big as the largest Wal-Marts, but they're usually pretty crowded, too. It's interesting, too, that the customers largely fit the popular stereotypes. Wal-Mart attracts a lot of customers with big hair, NASCAR jackets and glitter on their fingernails, while Target seems to attract yuppies and young urban hipsters.
I'd make some sort of snide comment about the kinds of stereotypical customers I see at Kmart, but the last half-dozen times I've been inside a Kmart, I haven't seen enough people to develop a stereotype. (The only crowded Kmart I've seen was in Elizabethtown, Pa., a few months ago, when I was doing some traveling. It was Friday night, and I popped into Kmart to grab a few small items. But Elizabethtown is a college town in the middle of nowhere, and as best I could tell, there wasn't much else to do on a cold Friday night but hang out at Kmart.)
I have no special knowledge about retailing, though I've been interested in it for a long, long time, and over the past year or so, I've obviously been doing a lot of research on retailing for my other project. So feel free to take this prediction with as much salt as you like. But I will be very surprised if there are any Kmart stores left in five years. (Surprised and impressed with Kmart's management.) I don't see how they can stay in business for much longer by operating empty stores.
Kmart's financial disclosures don't exactly paint a rosy picture, either. Sales at Kmart stores declined 4.5 percent during October, November and December of last year --- the Christmas shopping season, traditionally the biggest three months for retailers. That, according to a Kmart press release, was actually a "significant improvement": During the previous three years, sales in the fourth quarter had declined 12.8, 14.9 and 13.5 percent, respectively. Egad.
Now Kmart has merged with Sears, Roebuck & Co., though the surviving company is, effectively, Kmart. To twist an old metaphor, it's like a man swimming in shark-infested waters offering to rescue a man in a leaky lifeboat. I'm probably in Sears on a more regular basis than Kmart or Target, and the Sears stores I frequent are starting to look a lot like Montgomery Ward stores did in 1997 or '98. That's not a good sign.
I think Sears has the potential to last a few years longer than Kmart, mostly on the strength of its hardware, appliances, paint and other hard-lines. In fact, I wouldn't be terribly surprised in a few years to see Sears divest its clothing and jewelry lines altogether and turn its stores solely into hard-line outlets, in which case I also wouldn't be surprised to see whatever was left of Sears sold off to Best Buy, Circuit City or Home Depot.
It's worth noting that some Wall Street experts think I'm all wet. The "new" Sears stock --- which is Kmart's old stock --- was up to $148 per share yesterday. It was trading at less than $60 a year ago. But more than one person I've talked with thinks that the value of Sears and Kmart is solely in their real estate --- all of those prime mall and shopping center locations --- and that their stores are, to put it in technical terms, "dooky."
Time will tell if Sears Holdings, nee Kmart, can turn things around. In the meantime, if you're in a hurry, I suggest you try shopping at Kmart. You might get lonely, but at least you won't have to wait long at the check-out.
As promised, I added more information about the B&O crossing plan last night to Tube City Online. That takes the place of today's Almanac, except to ask whether there's something in the water over in Dravosburg.
In short, the mayor is being lambasted because he told the producers of a reality TV show to contact two families in the borough. The show pits two rival families against one another a la the Hatfields and McCoys, and it's called "Loser Leaves Town." After a series of competitions (I suppose the families have to eat bugs or mud wrestle or something), the losing family has to move away.
This is what passes for entertainment in 21st Century America. It also goes a long way toward explaining why my TV has scuff marks all over it; I keep throwing my shoes at the screen.
Anyway, one of the families that was contacted is irate, naturally: Would you want to be contacted for a show called "Loser Leaves Town"? They went to a council meeting last month to complain that their personal information was given out without their consent.
The mayor told Jennifer Vertullo of the News on May 19 that he doesn't care: "I have never seen a more bickering set of neighbors that want to blame my police department and my office as mayor for their childish problems. ... And by them taking it public, it shows how childish that situation up there is."
Several correspondents have pointed out that Eric Heyl also had a very funny take on the same topic in the Tribune-Review a few days later, and Vertullo has since followed up the story.
As I've said before, I love the Mon Valley, but we're in no danger of getting our own chapter of Mensa any time soon.
I was asked last week, "Where were the old railroad tracks that ran through town located? Who owned them and when and why were they removed?"
Well, that reminded me that I forgot about a very important anniversary in Our Fair City's history. May 6 marked 35 years since the last Baltimore & Ohio train ran through the middle of Downtown. Starting that day, trains were detoured via the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad at Versailles, and the tracks that bisected Downtown were torn up. Since this is the last day of May, it seems appropriate to mark the 35th anniversary today.
I wrote a long screed several years ago about this very topic, but briefly stated, the Pittsburgh & Connellsville Railroad arrived in Our Fair City in the 1850s, running along what was then the far outskirts of the Borough of McKeesport. The P&C became part of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Unfortunately, before the 19th century was over, the city had grown up and over the B&O tracks, and by the middle of the 20th, the tracks had become a major nuisance.
There were 28 grade crossings in the city in 1945. Among the most aggravating were the ones at the corner of Walnut at Sixth and on Fifth Avenue near Locust; according to an engineering study, Walnut was blocked for up to three hours daily, while Fifth was blocked for up to four hours per day. Office workers and shoppers frequently tried to crawl over, under, or between stopped trains, risking life and limb.
Here's a map of Downtown, showing the location of the tracks. The B&O is outlined in blue. The Pittsburgh & Lake Erie (which ran up the middle of Fourth Avenue, and was also a nuisance) is highlighted in green, while the Pennsylvania's spur line from Duquesne is outlined in red. The B&O's passenger station was on the north side of Fifth Avenue between Locust and Sinclair.
There were a variety of schemes proposed for rerouting the B&O, and I'll be posting a larger article about that in the Tube City Online history pages in a few days. (The railroad itself proposed a tunnel running underneath Downtown from roughly near the current McKeesport-Duquesne Bridge to the 15th Avenue Bridge. Other proposals included a massive cut through present-day White Oak and North Huntingdon Township.)
What's less well-known is that there was also a scheme to erect a "union station" in McKeesport that would have served both the B&O and P&LE (which offered some commuter train service to McKeesport through the '50s) as well as the post office and Railway Express Agency (a sort-of predecessor to today's UPS and Federal Express).
"McKeesport Union Station" was contigent on the B&O tracks being elevated and rerouted through town, and would have been located along Lysle Boulevard --- near, I suspect, the current location of the Port Authority's bus terminal and former train station.
Naturally, it was never built, which in the grand scheme of things is probably a good thing. Those cities that built modern, efficient railroad terminals after World War II wound up with expensive, empty white elephants once the railroads decided they wanted out of the passenger business in 1971. McKeesport Union Station likely would have languished for a few years as a commuter terminal before being closed when Port Authority killed off its passenger train service. As it is, we have more than our share of empty buildings already, thank-you-very-much.
Speaking of which: I see that the Masonic Temple is for sale now, too. It's currently assessed at $156,000, according to the county's website. The listed owner is the Masonic Temple Association of McKeesport. A search of the Pennsylvania Grand Lodge website shows that at least two Masonic organizations are still using the Temple for meetings --- Alliquippa Lodge No. 375 and Youghiogheny Lodge No. 583.
Too many fraternal organizations have had to close over the past 20 years (people just don't join clubs and lodges any more). I hope the decision to sell the Masonic Temple in McKeesport isn't a portent of some trouble; the city long had a very active and vibrant group of Masonic organizations. Maybe it's just a sign that the commercial real estate market has picked up.
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P.S. There was no Almanac yesterday, on account of me being too busy on Sunday. Your indulgence is appreciated.
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