Memory Lane Leads Nowhere...

Without some history to back it up: the case of Pottsville, PA.

A jumble of what has been lost: Pomeroy’s and S. S. Weiss department stores, Kresge’s, Woolworth’s and H. L. Green’s five-and-tens; Raring’s, Paramount, Triangle, Puddu’s for shoes; the Grace Shop, Mr. S., the Feel-Fine Shop for ladies, Wolowitz’s and Matt’s Kiddie Shop for kids, Dimmerling’s, Bossum’s for men; Knapp’s and Kerwick’s for leather goods, the Sunray (what a candy counter!), Cable’s Drugstore (the apothecary’s bottles and jars in the window). The Sugar Bowl or the Famous for when you needed a break from shopping: Hot roast beef sandwich, vanilla coke, coffee, apple pie. For splurges, the Necho Allen Hotel, its hamburger called a “Wimpy” in honor of Popeye’s hamburger-eating friend. Seafood and shellfish at Joyce’s, the Ladies Entrance around the corner in Logan’s Alley. For those on the run, a hotdog at the counter in Green’s five-and-ten, a bowl of soup with crackers at the Circle Diner behind Jay’s Jewelry Store. All on Centre Street: Mullen’s Pool Hall, the Market Basket and the Farmer’s Market in a converted movie theater, Pottsville’s first. Jaffee’s paint and art supplies, army-navy surplus, Pollack’s furs, Sears and Roebuck, Reiley’s Appliance Store, Hummel’s, Brighter’s, Diamond’s for furniture, Malarkey’s Music Store. Murphy’s Jewelers when it was still on North Centre in a long line of shops, where Nettie Hartstein, principal of Jalapa School, my great-aunt who raised my mother and aunt, went to buy corsets in a lingerie shop and had extravagant hats created by her milliner. Pottsville, a city of seven hills, like Rome, and seven movie theaters, Imschweiler’s for ice cream after the show. Every neighborhood, its greengrocer and butcher, Ulmer’s in Jalapa, Haag’s on Greenwood Hill, Keating’s, Hornung’s and Mickey’s (with soda fountain and music) on East Norwegian Street. Supermarkets all over town, Kovach’s, Lotz’s, Wachter’s; the Acme and the A&P on the boulevard. Back and back and back to the Pennsylvania Hall Hotel on South Centre Street, with its second floor balcony where a man could sit back, have a drink, smoke a cigar and watch progress and prosperity in action. You could have a hell of a good time in Pottsville too. The Hippodrome for big bands and dances, the second-floor skating rink above what is today the Salvation Army Store, social clubs like the Liederkranz, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Wars Vets on the East Side, the Catholic War Vets on the other side of town; barrooms everywhere. A drinking man’s—and woman’s—town, stay out all night and order home fries, eggs and bacon or salt cod at the Sheridan Diner before dawn.

A program from November 1913

Home, times past, nostalgia. The Germans have a better word: Sehnsucht, a yearning for what has never been, at least not the way we remember it.

I am living in the home of John O’Hara, where he lived when he was a child. He wrote about this house, about his father the doctor, about the grocery store on a side street off Mahantango, the poor sap who ran the place, the wife who served the customers and slept with the salesmen. He wrote about the barrooms in the neighborhood, but not on Mahantango Street, where all the “best people” lived in staid and respectable brownstones closer to downtown, in mansions as you headed further west on the tree-shaded avenue.

“Mahantango Street,” it has a ring to it. “Good hunting grounds” in the language of the Lenape. “I live on Mahantango Street.” That used to mean you were Somebody. Old money or new money, the right schools, the right clubs. All sounds pretty superficial today. Money does not make one person better than another. The best schools don’t always give the best education. A big house can be pretty empty inside.

But no money, no home, that’s another story.

That’s what Mahantango Street has become, at least in the block where I live. In my childhood, doctors still had their offices on the first floor of the brownstones, with their families living up above. Two doors away, there used to be a funeral home; across the street, the Braun School, once home to Dr. Braun who came to Pottsville from Germany early in the 20^th century, when the town had an opera house at the corner of Mahantango and Centre Streets, who founded his music school in 1912, steeped his students in the musical traditions of the Old World. My piano teacher, Miss Gladys Ludwig, who taught there in the 1970’s, showed me Dr. Braun’s private studio. It was in a separate building, up a hill behind the main house, a large, bright room with oriental carpets on the floor, a grand piano, dark wooden bookshelves, a writing desk. It was a room for music, for brooding, for composing, a room that looked very out-of-place in my 1970’s world.

The building is still there, covered with vinyl siding. It belongs to the school next door. It is no longer one big high-ceilinged room. On the first floor, the uniform exchange for Assumption BVM School. I don’t know what’s upstairs. Instead of a lush secret garden, Dr. Braun’s former studio is surrounded by a gravel playground.

The homes of the “best people,” the “first families” of Pottsville, have either been turned into parking lots—remember the “exclusive” Pottsville Club in the 300 block of Mahantango Street, with its annual Assembly, by invitation only, held to welcome in the New Year?—or into very sorry-looking apartment buildings where people come and go. I commented to my cousin that people were always moving, carrying scant belongings in and out, loading them into cars or battered SUVs, rain or shine, not caring if the mattress got wet.

“Section 8,” my cousin replied. “They’re getting out before the rent is due.”

Private housing paid for by rent subsidies provided by the federal government. But the State does not pay all, back rent can pile up and then it’s time to trip the light fantastic out of town.

I remember the funeral home. Two thick-walled, sturdy red-brick homes joined together to make one, with a long, deep room for funerals on the first floor. Today, both buildings still stand, thick-walled but going to rot. On the handle of the front door, someone has hung a plastic bag holding the Gospel according to Saint John. No one inside to be saved. On the ground out front, women’s clothing in a pile. Nobody wants it. None of it going anywhere. 

Neighbors sit outside on the stoops in fair weather, just like when I was a child living on Greenwood Hill. What would John O’Hara have to say? Young women with babies and young children already in their pajamas, taking advantage of a balmy autumn evening. Many speak Spanish. Some are African-American. I remember when Pottsville was a de facto segregated town, when Mahantango Street was exclusively reserved for whites of the “better sort.” As a child, I could not imagine living in such a place, in one of the regal homes that lined Pottsville’s most exclusive avenue.

No more. But why? What happened? Where did all the “best people” go? Mahantango, at least this part of the street, has become a neighborhood of transients, unstable lives, of mail piling up in entrance halls, the “last known address” before the addressee skipped town, skipped bail, or took up residence in the county jail. The neighborhood retains its beauty, I’d say, even its appeal. In New York or Philadelphia, this would be prime real estate.

There is nothing unique, many would argue, to what is happening here. It’s the fate of small towns all across America’s rust belt.

Yet each one has its story, each story is unique, and each one shares certain threads with the others that weave them all together.

Pottsville’s story is important.