Empty Buildings Part 3: 'Survivors' dot downtown landscape
Third in a series
The vacant buildings of downtown McKeesport are survivors of another time.
"It is an old community," Mayor James Brewster said. "Not (just) McKeesport, the region."
Many people who survived that time still visit downtown, or at least used to visit Jaison's, a former department store where bingo was played until last October.
"We have had discussions with regard to the old Jaison's building," Brewster said recently.
He's had discussions about quite a few buildings in and near downtown, but there could be new owners soon for what at one time was the local outlet of a chain that opened in Braddock in 1909 as Balter's.
Balter's became Jaison's in 1932. It opened one McKeesport store in 1928 at 416 Fifth Ave., then in 1947 it opened its outlet at 215-221 Fifth Ave.
As former Daily News historian and "Bygone Days" columnist Gerry Jurann pointed out, Jaison's moved into a building that had housed one of two theaters once owned by vaudevillian George Altmeyer.
His first location, built in 1892 and destroyed by fire in 1896, is where the now-vacant Penn McKee Hotel was built in 1926. That building reportedly also has drawn outside interest in recent months.
His second location, where Jaison's later would be located, opened in 1907.
Like Cox's, Jaison's expanded into nearby malls. Unlike Cox's, Jurann said, Jaison's was bought out by Philadelphia-based Charming Shoppes in 1983, becoming part of the Fashion Bug chain.
The Jaison's name still can be found at 215-221 Fifth Ave. Mon-Yough Senior Citizens Friendship Club bought the building in 1991 for $65,000 and used it for weekly bingo games.
In October, the club moved to a new bingo hall in Christy Park and listed the property with Howard Hanna Wilson Baum agency in McKeesport, which has had had nibbles but, so far, no buyers.
"We're had interest," Realtor Robert Baum said. "We have people looking at it."
While the Allegheny County real estate website gives the building an assessed value of $138,200, Howard Hanna Wilson Baum has it on the block for $88,000.
It has a basement and two stories. As HHWB's posting noted, it is "well built" and "very sound" with an entrance along Fifth and another along Lysle Boulevard that needs a roof.
Many living in this city with some of the nation's oldest demographics recall a $5 million fire in the downtown area on May 21, 1976, which centered around a store that ironically was called the Famous.
This infamous blaze would extend from the Penn-McKee Hotel down Fifth Avenue toward the heart of the business district.
While that fire largely was contained to a four-block area and spared many later-vacant buildings, local historian Jason Togyer said it "was arguably the first major setback in a long series of events that eventually gutted the once-bustling commercial center of the Mon Valley."
Togyer was commissioned by the G.C. Murphy Co. Foundation to research and write "For the Love of Murphy's: the Behind-the-Counter Story of a Great American Retailer," published last year by Penn State University's press.
He made the point that McKeesport-based Murphy never forgot its roots. The foundation survived the sale of the Murphy's chain to Ames Department Stores, which later also folded.
Ironically, one of the vacant spaces now available along Fifth Avenue was the first Murphy's location, opened in 1906. PlasmaCare had a center there from 1995 until last October.
Not far from there, a parking lot sits where the flagship of the century-old Cox's chain once was located.
Cox's succumbed in the 1980s. A wrecking ball took out that building in 1994.
Other setbacks were an emigration of retail business to the malls, including old Eastland in North Versailles Township (which literally has come and gone, having been demolished in 2007) and West Mifflin's Century III, the nation's third-largest when it opened three decades ago.
Today, it's the Waterfront in the Steel Valley that dominates area retail.
"That is tough to compete with," Brewster said. He said retailers "want foot traffic."
There also was the closing of U.S. Steel's National Works in the late 1980s.
"The reuse of those buildings has been tremendously impacted by the steel industry shutting down," Brewster said.
Baum said the presence of a number of vacant buildings doesn't have an impact on the sale of a particular building.
"We have very good pricing in McKeesport," the veteran real estate agent added. "It more comes down to what the bid is, what the amenities are and the conditions."
The old Jaison's location isn't the only building Baum's firm is trying to sell in downtown McKeesport. Others on sale along Fifth include the AMVETS hall and the old Photographics Supply Inc., both across Fifth Avenue from the city's "new" municipal building, the former McKeesport National Bank building.
In fact, Baum said, his firm thought it had a buyer for the Photographics Supply Inc. site, but recently the "for sale" sign returned there.
Next: There are possibilities.
