Tube City Almanac

April 21, 2005

Raising a Glass Before Razing the Bar

Category: default || By jt3y

This week's City Paper has a wonderful tribute to Chiodo's Tavern, the contents of which are to be auctioned off on Sunday. Chris Potter reports that owner Joe Chiodo's decision to close the Homestead bar was expected, but even still, it came as a shock to longtime employees and was announced just before last call on March 25:

It wasn’t official until cook Marcia Anderson hung up her apron at the end of the 11 o’clock shift that night. "Joe told Marcia, and she walked out into the bar," says Josh Comer, who’s worked as a bartender for the past 12 years. "Everyone could tell just by looking at her.


"After that, it was a long three hours."


The news still hasn’t sunk in for some. Even as the auction workers packed up the bar, would-be customers appeared at the door, only to be turned away. Bud Ward didn’t know quite what to do with himself either.


"A place like this --" he shook his head. "It takes two or three lifetimes to create."


Potter also reports that Mark Fallon of the Homestead & Mifflin Township Historical Society is making a documentary about Chiodo's, and it will finally reveal the recipe (sort of) for the infamous Chiodo's Mystery Sandwich.

The Almanac is on record as stating that Joe Chiodo ought to be allowed to close his bar and sell it if he wants to. Chiodo is 87 years old, for crying out loud, and he's wanted to sell for years --- but no one ever came up with a realistic offer.

Still, it's disappointing and sad that Chiodo's Tavern is going to be torn down to make way for, of all things, a Walgreen's. A chain drug store! Lord knows, the Mon-Yough area needs another chain drug store. We don't already have our federally mandated allotment of overpriced greeting cards, Hazel Bishop lipstick, and cheap Chinese plastic beach toys.

As with so many things, this has moved me to song:

/ G - Em - / C - - - / G A / C - / G D7 G D7 /

Look what they've done to our bar, ma!
Look what they've done to our bar!
They're tearin' down Chiodo's,
To put up a damn drug store!
Look what they've done to our bar!

Look what they've done to our mill, ma!
Look what they've done to our mill!
They built a fancy shopping mall,
For the yuppies in Squirrel Hill.
Look what they've done to our mill!

Look what they've done to our town, ma!
Look what they've done to our town!
They let it go to rack and ruin,
Now nobody comes around.
Look what they've done to our town!

They say progress is all right, ma.
They say progress is all right.
Well, you can try to knock us hunkies down,
But not without a fight!
They say progress is all right.

Look what they've done to our bar, ma!
Look what they've done to our bar!
Still we doff our hats to good old Joe,
He'll always be a star.
Look what they've done to our bar!

(Thank you! Groupies can line up at the stage door.)

...

By the way: I want to remain on the record that people in Homestead and Munhall call it "CHI-oh-does," even though "Chiodo" is correctly pronounced "KEE-oh-doe." Saying "KEE-oh-does" marks you as an out-of-towner. (Though saying "CHI-oh-does" around the Chiodos is liable to get you a nasty look, or worse.)

...

In other news: Kris Mamula of the Pittsburgh Business Times has a story about Our Fair City's Blueroof Solutions, formed in part by retired McKeesport High School principal John Bertoty:

... with Robert Walters, Michael Richey and Jerry Gesmond called Blueroof Solutions to build safe, secure and modestly priced homes for senior citizens and people with disabilities.


What's different about these homes is complete integration of home security, phone, cable, energy management and video systems. Blueroof envisions one very smart house.


The electronic gear will allow seniors to, say, see who's at the front door by flipping on the television, or have family members "look in" on them, even from across the country, via unobtrusive Web cameras. Under development are blood glucose, weight, blood pressure and other tests that can be taken in the home and seamlessly transmitted to a caregiver.


...

Columnist John Leo --- mentioned in this week's Almanac rant about Ann Coulter (another of her detestable columns was in the Daily News the day that screed appeared, incidentally) --- has another fine effort in U.S. News & World Report:

Most of us, alas, are upset by vicious rhetoric only when it is aimed at our side. The extraordinary Bush-is-a-Nazi rhetoric of the antiwar marches and the presidential campaign drew very little criticism from the responsible left, just as the repeated accusations that President Clinton is a murderer, perhaps a multiple murderer, didn't ruffle many people on the responsible right. ...


We may be into another big anti-Clinton assault, this one aimed at Hillary Rodham Clinton. Last week a breathless item on the Drudge Report said that an anti-Hillary book, out next September, will be the equivalent of the Swift Boat Veterans campaign against John Kerry and may well derail her chances to be president. This is a cringe-making prospect. Do we really need yet another major assault on a prominent politician, or can we spend some time discussing actual issues? ...


Our political rhetoric is routinely awful. Let's work to clean it up.


With that in mind, I'm almost reluctant to pass along this vicious cartoon from Pulitzer Prize winning former L.A. Times artist Paul Conrad.

I said, "almost."

...

Finally, comes this story from Florida. While the Almanac deplores gun violence, I think everyone has wanted to do this at one time or another:

John McGivney had enough. He loaded his .380-caliber handgun Friday afternoon, walked out to the parking lot of his Lauderdale-by-the-Sea apartment building and fired four shots into the hood of his ailing Chrysler.


"I'm putting my car out of its misery," McGivney told his landlord.


But the Broward Sheriff's Office didn't see it as a mercy killing. They arrested McGivney on a misdemeanor charge of discharging a firearm in public. After a night in jail, he was back at his Bougainvilla Isles apartment on $100 bond -- the bullet-riddled 1994 Chrysler LeBaron LX dead in the spot where he left it. McGivney said Tuesday he hasn't tried to start the car and suspects that the four slugs he fired into it probably made his car trouble worse. (Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel)


I hope McGivney fights these charges; in my opinion, he has an excellent argument for an insanity defense. Four years of driving a Chrysler K-car would drive anyone to violence, and not a jury in the world would convict him.






Your Comments are Welcome!

It was widely known that he wanted to sell the watering hole. It was also known that he was going to close it.
Chiodo has every right to sell his bar. But this overblown and public affection for the place that we’ve seen recently belies the fact that everyone’s love for the place never amounted to people actually buying the bar before he decided to sell it to Walgreens.
And paying tribute to a place after its gone, without giving a reader a chance to take a last look, is kind of cheesy.
Jonathan Barnes - April 21, 2005



I sort of agree with Jonathan (have been following the Chiodo’s story, which I discovered via google, for some time now). A few years ago, our neighborhood mom ‘n pop True Value hardware closed. People wore varying expressions of shock and dismay (can I say maudlin?), their response to this, the last domino in the strip of local vendors to fall.

“Did you support the business?” I asked one neighbor who had been remodeling his home for, like, two years (can you say Home Depot?).

“No. sigh“

During their close-out sale (which was wildly patronized) I asked the owners if they would be taking a loss by eliminating their merchandise this way.

“We’ve been taking a loss for years.”

I like the song, though. I don’t know what do do with those chords at the top.

At the first bar I worked, one of my gay coworkers was feeling kind of frisky (latent heterosexuality?) and undid my bra through my shirt. I agreed to take it off, placed it in the bustub, and, after one of the busboys wore it on his head for about 1/2 hour, we agreed to hang it from a deer head mounted to the wall. It wasn’t busy yet, so we could get away with f***ing around. The dinner rush commenced, and nobody wanted to call attention to the offending garment by taking it down, so it remained up for the evening. (I went home and got another for my own purposes). I died when I read about Chiodo’s bra collection, and wish I could have gotten an opportunity to contribute…. How much do you think they’l go for?
heather - April 21, 2005



To Jason’s credit, I think he did mention Chiodo’s in an earlier post, imploring us to all pile into the station wagon and pay final homage to the establishment by eating a mystery sandwich, before it closed (Chiodo’s, not the sandwich).

Or I read that somewhere else…....
heather - April 21, 2005



I didn’t mean to imply that Jason hadn’t mentioned the imminent closing—of course he had, to his credit. I was talking about the City Paper.
Jonathan Barnes - April 21, 2005



In other bar news, D’s SixPaks and Dogz in Regent Square acquired some neighboring space and will be expanding within the next six months, according to one of their bartenders.
Jamin (URL) - April 21, 2005



I’m proud to have been an out-of-towner who had gotten a chance to visit “KEY-o-do’s.” Three cheers for the Homestead, West Homestead, West Mifflin, and Munhall people, and the out-of-towners who made the bar what it was.

By the way, for some reason that song was running around my head before I saw your post. Synchronicity, perhaps?
Mark (URL) - April 26, 2005



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