South Side Fire (buildings, location, robberies)

[Doowlle34]

Hate to lose any of these buildings on the South Side, but fortunately no one was hurt today.

https://www.post-gazette.com/local/c...s/202102080097

I took a quick look through the newspapers archive for the address and found your expected century and half's worth of calamities at the location. Seems to have been a grocery around the turn of the century before serving duty as a variety of saloons from 1904 and for the next 50 years. You can imagine the myriad of calamities that occurred at the saloons that occupied this location over the years. A patron suddenly dropped dead (75 year old fellow in the 1920s); a patron committed suicide (a young soldier in 1964); and (of course) there were a variety of robberies, including one in the 1940s, wherein the bartenders chased the thieves away so quickly and violently, that the would-be robbers got nothing and even ended up dropping 10 bucks of their own while fleeing.

Also forgot to add that the poor fellow who owned it during prohibition, Valentine Kulpa, appears to have gotten busted several times for selling booze (and he even had a secret compartment for hiding it). He ended up serving 60 days in jail.