Welcome to City-Data.com Forum!
U.S. CitiesCity-Data Forum Index
Go Back   City-Data Forum > U.S. Forums > Pennsylvania > Pittsburgh
 [Register]
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
View detailed profile (Advanced) or search
site with Google Custom Search

Search Forums  (Advanced)
Reply Start New Thread
 
Old 03-13-2012, 04:54 AM
 
3 posts, read 8,747 times
Reputation: 10

Advertisements

hey hey.. dont be bad mouthing esplen. its a nice little hood when the grass is cut. all those dirty bars are gone. including the one mentioned, Riverside. good gosh could we tell ya some stories about all the bars. but they are finally all empty lots. and the neighborhood is much safer now. some the filthiest areas around there are the road that leads to the gas station and that crack den they call the car wash. get rid of that and it would be a perfect place again, the only area drawling criminal activity are the sunoco gas station and car wash. the car wash is worse cause there is no attendant and the cameras are all broken. I wouldnt wash my ride there cause its always broken.

no offense to the poster who's family ran Riverside. It was once a fine little place to eat and drink till the late 90s-2000's they soon become an attractive place for criminal activity. I believe there was 5 bars at one time. only one structure remains..

the picture of that stone church is also a empty lot now. Its had become very brittle and unstable. where the large stones with sand mortar would fall with the roof weight during storms. I was a kid we used to hang on that corner across from it. that would also be the last remaining bar building on oregon st/tabor..

to tell ya the truth its very quiet neighborhood now. quieter than ever. good thing too cause I wouldnt of moved back here if is was like before. but its really not that bad now.

very little housing left, since most are family owned and only some the larger properties remaining.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message

 
Old 03-13-2012, 08:25 AM
 
Location: Kittanning
4,692 posts, read 8,981,503 times
Reputation: 3668
Yeah, when you tear down every building in a neighborhood, it tends to be quiet.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 03-13-2012, 07:04 PM
 
3 posts, read 8,747 times
Reputation: 10
my girlfriend is from Virgina /Fredericksburg .. She likes Esplen.. We moved from here to there and now back to Esplen. Because shes a nurse and Pittsburgh is a great place to work if youre a nurse.. gasoline was killing us there back and forth. closest market was 15miles away. buses are easy to get to Esplen..
From an outsiders point of view she didnt like it before, but now its like the picket fence neighborhood shes always wanted. she loves the fireworks from downtown, we dont need to leave the house.
I dont have any use for Shearden, other than the park, we do use for tennis, its like our private park most the time. very few people use the tennis courts. once I was in the park and a family gathering of black folk invited us to eat. that was really sweet of them.
mckees rocks isnt all that bad a place to shop. In virgina all we had was dollar stores, walmart.?, ya get used to it, aldies isnt the best food store.impo we are vegetarians anyways. i wish there was a walmart near the ohio valley hospital- giant eagle kennedy..
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 03-13-2012, 07:20 PM
 
Location: Kittanning
4,692 posts, read 8,981,503 times
Reputation: 3668
I'm glad that you are enjoying living in Esplen! I do love the neighborhood. I just wish more of it could have been preserved. But it has had a long history of decline. If you look at old pictures, there used to be some beautiful homes and buildings there.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 04-03-2012, 06:46 AM
 
Location: Dundas, Minnesota
8 posts, read 19,692 times
Reputation: 24
Default Esplen: My Real Home

What a wonderful delight to run across this thread about Esplen...and with pics, too!

My connection to Esplen goes back to my birth in 1963. Both my parents were graduates of St. Vincent DePaul's School, were baptized there, confirmed there, had their first confessions there and were married there. They both graduated from Langley HS in 1958 where Dad was a football star who went on to play at Pitt.

My true Esplen "claim to fame" is that it was my great-grandfather and namesake, W J Bealles, who built and operated the Bealles Enco/Esso/Exxon gas station at Tabor and West Carson, eventually passing it on to his son, my grandfather, Alexander Bealles. The station was opened in 1925 and continued operating until 1976.

"Al", as he was known throughout the West End and the Rox, was married to my grandmother, Anne, and they had three boys, all of whom worked at the station here and there before setting out on their own. Both Al and Anne were proud Lithuanians and the language was spoken in their home, the apartment above the gas station's garage. Al was a veteran of World War II and came out of it injured badly in the Battle of the Bulge where he took seven bullets from the Nazis.

My uncle, who now lives in rural Beaver County, tells me stories of Al taking me around in my infant jumper soon after I was born to all the bars and garages in the Rox and Esplen and coming back covered in grease and oil with dollar bills stuffed in my little pocket! I have another uncle who lives now in Ford City.

I was born in Steubenville where Dad, Al and Anne's oldest, was attending school at the then, University of Steubenville. Baptized at SVDP, my Esplen roots were planted deep.

Mom's parents were proud Esplenites, too, and lived in three different homes in their time there, on Sagamore Street for decades, on Stafford, then on Tabor in their later years before they lived out their rich Pittsburgh lives in a senior apartment home near Langley. "Grandpap" was a German Catholic steel man with roots in The Bottoms and Grandma was a Slovak woman who was born in Czechoslovakia and emigrated there in 1924. I remember copies of "Sokol", a Slovak newspaper, lying around their home. She spoke Slovak to her friends on the phone while I was a kid, sitting there sipping on Pepsi, eating chipped ham on Mancini's bread and Snyder's of Berlin potato chips from the Giovengo's store next to the gas station. Grandpap was an usher at St. Vincent's for years.

Mrs. Giovengo was a kind woman who, if I sat on her store's front stoop long enough, would invite me in and give me any candy I wanted. I thought I was so cool to have this "in" with her. I found out much, much later that my parents always squared with her my "candy tab" before we headed back to Illinois!

Dad completed college and went to medical school in Chicago, where my sister was born in 1964. After that, returning to Esplen was a rather rare event, as we lived in Toledo, Chicago, Texas and California. Dad took a job with General Mills, the food company, in 1965 and was transferred around quite a bit. When we moved to Illinois from California in 1973, my Esplen story began again with thrice-yearly trips to what was, and still is, one of my favorite places on the planet. One summer, when I was 12, I got to stay there for an entire month!

I roamed Esplen and Sheridan and McKee's Rocks for hours and hours every day I visited, completely oblivious to what became a rather dangerous place. Still, I could not get enough of the old buildings, churches, stores, bars and the many characters in the neighborhood. All the churches mentioned in previous posts were still in operation and every Sunday, I was required to accompany the family to Mass at SVDP. I recall going to midnight mass on Christmas Eve a time or two and the Church being filled with "Holiday Catholics", those who showed up only once or twice a year. Some were drunks and itinerants. Otherwise, by the mid-70's church attendance had dwindled severely.

Walking the railroad tracks was my favorite activity. I would get down below the bridge over Radcliffe Street and walk all the way to the big bridge that took trains across the Ohio, then I would walk back and go the other way to the furthest reaches of Wind Gap and beyond. My young brother and I were big into the beer can collection thing back then and we were a huge hit back in Chicago for all of our Steeler Iron City cans and those of Rolling Rock, Fort Pitt Brewing and Big Cat Malt Liquor.

In the mid-to-late 70's, as well, there came to be a large black population that moved into Esplen. Sadly, I remember there was a racist streak in the hood. "Kill ******s" was scrawled in chalk on the sidewalk in dozens of places up Tabor Street.

Re the Riverside Bar, our family knew it as The Fish House. Each visit ended with a large family dinner there on Saturday night with aunts uncles, Grandma Anne and we all ate fish sandwiches and the shrimp basket. I can still taste that wonderful fried fish patty on a soft bun, slathered in ketchup, all washed down with West Park cherry soda and ginger ale.

Both my grandfathers, true to their generation, frequented the several bars in Esplen, among them, Flo's, Johnnies and the Riverside. There is a picture of one of them, the name of which I do not recall, in alleghenyangel's pic post. It was located just across the alley from the southeast corner of the SVDP "playground". I remember going to Flo's with my maternal grandfather when I was 19. He bs'd the bartender lady into serving me by saying that, where I lived in Illinois, it was legal for me to drink and that carried over into Pennsylvania! Ha! She was still hesitant, but served me, nevertheless, and made me sit at a table in the corner while Grandpap bellied up to the bar watching Pirates games, quietly taking in too much Seagram's 7.

Summer days were also spent playing basketball with the neighborhood kids in the SVDP parking lot. Black kids, white kids, we all got along. It was my first interaction with blacks in my life and proved to be a very positive one.

Heck, I could go on for hours and hours here talking about Esplen. It has been a dream of mine to write a history of the neighborhood, perhaps a novel based on my experiences there. I actually pursued it mildly in the late 1990's when I called the Archdiocese of Pittsburgh, inquiring about the location of the records from SVDP church. I found out from them that they reside at St. John's in McKees Rocks (is this church still open?) and at Holy Innocents in Sheraden. Started having kids and building a career and the dream died. But, maybe, someday, when I hit the lottery!!

I go back there every few years, the last time being in the Spring of 2011. Took my young sons with me, 13 and 10, and we take a tour of Esplen, the Rox and Sheraden. "Modern" kids from Minnesota, where we now live, they could have cared less. While trying to explain to them my sweet childhood at the St. Vincent DePaul playground, they got into a big fight in the truck about who's turn it was to play Pokemon on the PSP. Have been talking to family members about a reunion in Pittsburgh for August of 2012. Esplen will be the focus, of course. Since there are no operating eateries there, I suppose we'll have the grand meal at Eat 'n Park in McKees Rocks.

I've told my wife that I want to be cremated and half my ashes are to be spread at my uncle's property in Beaver County and the other half on the grass at the SVDP playground, thereby nourishing those Esplen roots.

Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 04-03-2012, 06:51 AM
 
Location: Dundas, Minnesota
8 posts, read 19,692 times
Reputation: 24
By the way, my maternal grandparents lived in the house that USED to be on this vacant lot!

Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 04-03-2012, 07:37 AM
 
733 posts, read 981,593 times
Reputation: 683
Awesome post, Esplen Billy. I enjoyed reading it very much.

You should write that novel!! I'd pick up a copy.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 04-03-2012, 11:11 AM
 
Location: Dundas, Minnesota
8 posts, read 19,692 times
Reputation: 24
Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainPittsburgh View Post
Awesome post, Esplen Billy. I enjoyed reading it very much.

You should write that novel!! I'd pick up a copy.
Thanks, Cappy. Maybe I'll just keep writing more reminiscences, then one day, copy and paste them all to one big manuscript!

Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 04-03-2012, 12:05 PM
 
Location: Dundas, Minnesota
8 posts, read 19,692 times
Reputation: 24
More FABULOUS Esplen Pictures from my uncle's Facebook "Esplen Neighborhood" page!!!! Quite a few of the gas station that used to be there at Tabor and West Carson. Looks like my father and another uncle at the door in this first one.



http://a3.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/414721_310011959050327_310010509050472_917176_1554 449194_o.jpg (broken link)


Al Bealles outside the Bealles Esso Station:

http://a6.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/424433_320906464627543_310010509050472_941927_7485 8252_n.jpg (broken link)


Third generation of the family run business!




1956 SVDP First Communion class!

http://a6.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/415978_316516405066549_310010509050472_931133_6371 70422_o.jpg (broken link)


http://a6.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/402615_313836108667912_310010509050472_925239_1068 169810_n.jpg (broken link)


Riverside Bar (aka The Fish House):




Locomotive running by Esplen near Sacramento St in the 1950's:




Giovengo's Store, now boarded up:


Last edited by Esplen Billy; 04-03-2012 at 12:29 PM..
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 04-03-2012, 12:30 PM
 
Location: Dundas, Minnesota
8 posts, read 19,692 times
Reputation: 24
Long live Esplen!!!!!
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.

Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.


Reply
Please update this thread with any new information or opinions. This open thread is still read by thousands of people, so we encourage all additional points of view.

Quick Reply
Message:


Settings
X
Data:
Loading data...
Based on 2000-2020 data
Loading data...

123
Hide US histogram


Over $104,000 in prizes was already given out to active posters on our forum and additional giveaways are planned!

Go Back   City-Data Forum > U.S. Forums > Pennsylvania > Pittsburgh

All times are GMT -6.

© 2005-2024, Advameg, Inc. · Please obey Forum Rules · Terms of Use and Privacy Policy · Bug Bounty

City-Data.com - Contact Us - Archive 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 - Top