[PRCo] Re: Suburban shopping areas

[Herb Brannon]

A comment on this one, Fred. I went to the Giant Eagle on West 116th & Clifton Blvd (Cleveland) the other day. I was passing by the deli section and to my surprise, what should I see but a sign advertising Isalys Chip Chop Ham. My mouth watered immediately. I, of course, had to get some. The only "training" I had to give the deli salesperson was how to 'shave' the ham off the loaf as I used to by it in Isalys on Bigelow Blvd in Pittsburgh. The girl first ask me if I wanted thick or thinner SLICES of the meat. I had to explain what Isalys was and generally went through half my life history about living in Pittsburgh and the Isalys on Bigelow Blvd and how original chip/chop ham was not sliced, but shaved. I instructed her to set the slicer on the thinest setting and start chopping. When she fininshed I told her to take two of the razor-thin slices off the pile and give me one to taste and she should taste the other. I asked her if she thought it was better tasting than
 regular thick slices of the ham and she agreed it was. I left the store happy and confident I had introduced a member of the younger generation to a tasteful bit of Pittsburgh history. BTW, the loaf of meat does bear Isalys name, so I guess they are still in business someplace. Also, it does taste the same as it did.
Fred Schneider <fwschneider at comcast.net> wrote:  My wife gets on me because my definition of suburban and hers do not 
match. I refer to suburban as anything beyond the original and then 
existing core ... there were foot suburbs, then horsecar suburbs, 
then trolley suburbs, then bus suburbs, and eventually automobile 
suburbs, and then we got to acre building lot suburbs made possible 
by expressways into the city. Her idea of a suburb is what she 
called suburbs in her lifetime.

If you become adept at identifying the ages when buildings were 
erected you can play a neat little game of recognizing how houses 
were built when or just before the trolleys came to an area. In 
Lancaster County it's astonishing how many homes alongside the major 
rural highways were built in the teens and twenties because the 
trolley was there, often even before the road was paved. If you are 
lucky you might find a program in your local historical society that 
will teach you how to recognize the ages of buildings. It can be a 
lot of fun.

So go back and think of those earlier suburbs in our cities. Each of 
them had their own shopping districts. Mount Lebanon, Carson 
Street, McKees Rocks, Wilkinsburg, Homestead, Allegheny, Dormant 
(ooops, Dormont), Mt. Lebanon, Squirrel Hill, etc.

If Rich Allman is still reading, he'll remember when 69th St. 
Terminal in Upper Darby vibrant ... and Lancaster Avenue and 
Frankford and we could find other neighborhoods all over Philadelpha.

Most of them also had neighborhood theaters. I think East Liberty 
had seven of them at one time.

As much as I don't like chain merchandising, we can probably all 
remember some early chains ... F. W. Woolworth (instead of Woolco), 
S. S. Kresge (instead of K-Mart), G. C. Murphy (instead of 
Murphymart), Sears Roebuck (before the malls there used to be one on 
the North Side and one in East Liberty and probably quite a few 
others scattered around Pittsburgh). Remember Fanny Farmer candy 
stores. And all those bakeries that served wonderful granulated 
sugar donuts? Thy were everywhere. Every neighborhood had them. 
And Isalys was everywhere purveying chipped ham and milkshakes and 
Klondikes.

As I pointed out before, my Pittsburgh grandparents lived off 
Perrysville Avenue ... 3462 Delaware Avenue to be precise ... one 
block up Chemung Street from the car stop. It was a streetcar 
suburb. They moved there from an earlier home on Veteran Street 
just off the north end of the Fineview line. Grandma patronized a 
little corner grocery store down at Perrysville and Chemung; it was 
still there a couple of years ago. But she was in between two 
neighborhood shopping districts. One was Perrysville and Charles 
Streets. I remember being asked to take a hike down there to a 
hardware store once when she needed a toilet plunger. I also 
remember a small store with a black sign across the front emblazoned 
with gold letters with read THE GREAT ATLANTIC AND PACIFIC TEA 
COMPANY. Long before A&P had supermarkets, they were the champion 
of the chain corner grocery store. This one was on the west side of 
Perrysville Avenue just south of Charles Street.

The other neighborhood shopping center that she could use was at 
Perrysville Avenue and East Streets. My mother went to high school 
at Perry High School (now Perry Academy) out there and she even 
remembered a girl friend who came in on the interurban from 
Warrendale (PHB&NC). Why, because cities had high schools and most 
rural areas did not. Oh yes, Perrysville and East had a movie 
theater. Wasn't it called the East Street Theater? I remember 
that before I learned how to do, I at least knew how to watch. Went 
there once when I was 14 or 15 to watch Marilyn Monroe in the movie 
Niagara. As the neighborhoods turned, the shopping district at 
Charles Street faltered. I'm not sure what is out at East Street any 
longer.

Even the little city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where we moved in 
1949, population 65,000 in 1950 and 55,000 today, once had at least 
one neighborhood shopping districts. The Laurel and Filbert street 
car served the intersection of Old Dorwart Street and Manor Street, 
not even 3/4s of a mile from the main shopping district. Yet this 
little neighborhood then nicknamed Cabbage Hill because of all the 
Germans cooking sauerkraut had its own supermarket, the Manor five 
and dime, a hardware store, and the Manor Theater. They're all 
closed today. The highlight of the neighborhood today is a couple 
that made the mistake of standing up during a wedding reception on 
Old Dorwart Street last spring and got nailed by a hail of 
bullets ... the court room replay was going on in the paper last 
night. The wedding reception just happened to get in the way of a 
drug deal gone sour. Oh yes, the Germans are gone. Columbians 
moved in.

Hope it brought back a few memories.






Herb Brannon