Category: default || By jt3y

Apparently prompted by Monday's Almanac, "A New Year's Resolution," an Alert Reader from Yorba Linda, Calif., writes:

I left McKeesport (in June 1962). Downtown died a thousand deaths since then. Among them:

Former mayor Andrew Jakomas's scandal and "banishment" to Miami. Taking out the streetcar tracks, not allowing parking and painting that hideous "artwork" on the pavement of Fifth Avenue. Not rebuilding downtown after The Famous fire. McKeesport's "Finest" not cracking down on the crime downtown. I could go on and on.

Finally, I took my wife back there in '95 to show her my native city. Susie always looks at the positive and pictures her living in all of the places she has visited in the country. McKeesport is the first place where she said she would "never" want to live. We haven't been back since.

Unless McKeesporters wake up and clean house of your crooked politicians, you're doomed to never recover.

How did Greeky Jakomas get dragged into this?

McKeesport of the 1960s was a wide-open place that allegedly was run by U.S. Steel and the rackets. Those allegations have been well documented, notably by John Hoerr in And The Wolf Finally Came and by David Chacko in the novel Brick Alley. (The Allegheny County district attorney's office had several investigations of McKeesport government underway in the 1950s and '60s, mostly connected to influence peddling and gambling, but no charges were ever brought as far as I know.)

All of the complaints about the haphazard schemes to redevelop Downtown (including the notorious pedestrial mall on Fifth Avenue, which lasted less than a year, I'd like to point out) have been hashed and rehashed for 40 years. You can read about some of them here, you can read about the Famous fire here, or you can read about allegations of political corruption here.

Fixating on the problems of the 1950s, '60s and '70s is not going to help us now. What happened 40 years ago is not terribly relevant to the problems that face the area today --- yes, we are dealing with the consequences of what happened then, but the players are long gone.

Andrew Jakomas left office in 1965 after losing the Democratic primary to Albert Elko, for goodness' sake, and Mayor Jakomas died in 1994.

As for the trolley tracks, that was a Pittsburgh Railways decision that was made in 1963, and although McKeesport pushed to have the streetcars removed, they were going to be eliminated anyway, no matter what McKeesport did.

When the current Glenwood Bridge was built in 1966, it was constructed without trolley tracks. That would have eliminated the heavily trafficked 56 line, and the 68 line (McKeesport via Homestead and Duquesne) had already been converted to buses in September 1958!

Nostalgia is fun, but wallowing in historic grudges and scandals gets us no further along than mourning the loss of Cox's, Jaison's and Immel's, or the National Works for that matter. Fighting these battles again is pointless.

Speaking of losses: Several people have pointed out to me that the National Tube general office building and the old Henry B. Klein men's store on Fifth Avenue are both being torn down this week. Both had fallen into serious disrepair, and although the last thing McKeesport needs is another vacant lot, neither is a serious preservation loss.

It's a shame the G.O.B. couldn't have been used for something --- it was kind of an attractive, funky-looking building, and I was always amused by the cupola on the roof. I was told that the cupola was used by company guards to spy on employees, especially before the plant was unionized in the 1930s, but I have a feeling the uses were more prosaic --- monitoring train movements in the freight yard in front of the plant, for instance.

The Klein building, located about two blocks from the hospital at the intersection of Fifth and Center, wasn't particularly appealing from an architectural standpoint, but according to last night's Daily News, demolition proceedings were stalled for two years because of the building's location in a historic preservation area.

I know next to nothing about Henry B. Klein (or as the old-time McKeesporters still call it, "H.B.K."), but it was once one of the region's leading haberdashers. Anyone with stories or recollections of H.B.K. is welcome to share, of course.

Also to be demolished is the old Stern Enterprises parking garage near the Executive Building and the Midtown Plaza --- a building with no particular value (except as a pigeon roost) and another thing about which I know next to nothing.

Knowing next to nothing has never stopped me from commenting in the past, of course.

. . .

To Do This Weekend: Do you have happy feet, even though you're not a penguin? Box-step your way over to the Palisades, Fifth Avenue at Water Street, where country line dancing gets underway at 8:30 p.m. tonight. Call (412) 678-6979 for details. Or swing by tomorrow night when the Pittsburgh Area Jitterbug Club takes the floor --- the Lindy hopping starts at 9. Call (412) 366-2138.