I am lying on a table in the
Tabor Reiki Center in Millvale. I am feeling so warm. Enya-like sounds float out of the boom box nearby.
Minutes earlier, I had been sitting in my car on Route 28, swearing at the rainy Tuesday morning traffic. My heat wasn’t running in my car yet and I still had wet hair from the shower. Honking. Honking. Tension.
I was late, again. Even worse, I was late for an appointment with a nun, which seems really, really wrong. Then, miraculously, traffic began to move. I arrive for my appointment only 10 minutes late.
Sr. Mary Jo Mattes, Reiki master and teacher, stands above me. I feel warmth everywhere and calm. She has started with my head. After a few minutes of her hands hovering a few inches above my forehead, she lowers them.
Next its my arms and my hands.
She finishes with my heart.
A week earlier, during our interview, Mattes had been explaining that Reiki is a natural healing technique that uses the laying on of hands. It’s not a cure-all, Mattes explains, but rather a complement to traditional medicine to help in the healing process.
“You’re not going to write a story about Reiki and not experience it are you?” she asked?
Mattes explains that Reiki seemed a natural fit for the Sisters of St.
Francis, Mount Alvernia. From their
their mother house at Mt. Alvernia, the sisters operate a daycare, Montessori preschool, and learning center along with a prayer center, an all-girls high school and wellness center. Just to name a few.
The Reiki Center, like
Jean Marc Chatellier’s French Bakery, like
Mr. Smalls Funhouse, like the Attic Record Store, are all part of the individualistic, independent, business and cultural community that call Millvale home.
Out of the OrdinaryThere are no Starbucks or McDonalds to speak of but a group of businesses near the intersection of Grant and North avenues draw visitors from Pittsburgh and beyond for their rare offerings. Jean Marc Chatellier’s French Bakery pays tribute to the brightly-colored tarts and meringues and croissants of France and seem too beautiful to eat. Well, at least until you taste one that is.
Chatellier and his wife, Sandy, opened up his storefront 15 years ago and his reputation for fine pastries and delicacies has spread, along with his customer base. The really smart customers know to come early in the morning before the pastries sell out.
And when the bakery was flooded in September 2004, after the remnants
of Hurricane Ivan swept through the region, his customers stood by the couple, leaving thermoses of coffee on their doorstep during the cleanup.
Chatellier borrowed, rebuilt and opened again two months later, but he suffered another setback again this fall, breaking his shoulder bone when rain caused the banks of the nearby creek to flood again, Jean Marc broke his shoulder trying to carry supplies out of his basement.
His wife Sandy says that while her husband is in a lot of pain, he can still work and reopened his business in the last week of September. Jean Marc, in true Millvalian fashion bounced back from the flood and its devastating effects.
But determination is strong in this community and so is humor. The Community Days T-shirt used the logo from the Survivor television series.
Jennifer Lee Cohen, owner/operator of
Lincoln Pharmacy and a local historian of sorts, says that the business houses 100 sandbags in its basement. The pharmacy shares space with P&G Diner, which is run by Cohen’s sister, Pam, and her partner, Gail Clingensmith of Pamela’s Diner fame.
This is the local hangout. Most mornings the tables fill up with locals
hoping to grab a bite before work. On weekends, it draws families from Millvale and beyond.
Cohen, who grew up in Squirrel Hill, came to work at the pharmacy for two weeks, no longer, while her father’s secretary was having a cataract operation.
That was 29 years ago.
“They started picking on me and I fell in love with the community,” Cohen says over breakfast one Sunday morning. She pointing out a group of men who teased her mercilessly when she first started. “There’s a lot of family businesses here and that’s another thing.”
She rattles off a list of family-owned businesses including Yetter’s, which is right around the corner on Grant Avenue. “You go in there and its like walking on the set of ‘I Love Lucy’,” Cohen says of Yetter’s which sells homemade candies and operates a soda fountain in its storefront.
Arlene and Ed Carr run Yetter’s, a business Arlene’s mother started in 1950. For many years they sold candy and ice cream, but the Ivan flood waters wiped out their ice cream machine. Now, Ed Carr explains, they sell all manner of sweets, but only the candy is made in house.
“I learned from my father-in-law’s friend, who was an electrician,” Ed Carr
says.
While Yetters draws a local crowd, Attic Record Store Inc., just across Grant Avenue, regularly pulls in customers from Japan and Great Britain for its
“We specialize in hard to find things,” explains second-generation owner Fred Bohn Jr. His father started the business in 1980 using as inventory a record collection he started amassing at the age of three. Just that morning, he explains, a customer came in from Japan to peruse the collection of 12-inch singles.
Although much of the inventory was lost in the flood three years earlier, the Attic Record storefront houses literally millions of 78s, 12-inch singles and cds in the four-room storefront, a basement and a warehouse across the street.
Hidden TreasuresLike so many structures in this Allegheny River town, you would never know from the bland, yellow brick exterior of
St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church, which perches on a hillside above Route 28, what treasures can be found inside.
The church’s interior serves as a canvas for the murals of Maxo Vanka.
Vanka, who came to the United States, from Croatia painted the murals in two phases in 1937 and again in 1941.
His works reflect the realities and events of the period during which they were painted. Belching steel mills serve as the backdrop for many of his works.
The murals extend from images of Christ and the Virgin Mary to pictures that describe the injustice of the times in both Europe and America. One mural depicts American women weeping at the death of a miner while
another shows Croatian women weeping at the death of a soldier killed in battle.
Mary Petrich, our tour guide and a St. Nicholas parishoner since her birth 1927, explains that Vanka painted the images in the wake of a mining accident in Johnstown and World War II which was ravaging his homeland.
The murals are as much a visual history of Millvale’s Croatian community, which began populating these riverbank communities in the last 1800s, as they are an accounting of world events at the time they were painted. For this, Petrich credits Father Albert Zagar with giving Vanka the creative freedom of expression.
“He was a very great proponent of social justice,” Petrich says of Zagar.
One painting in the rear of the church, The Capitalist, depicts a man reading a stock report dated 1941 while he is served a meal from a black servant while a skeletal hand with fire reaches out for him while shadows loom above him.
“Somebody asked Vanka when he painted this, why he painted this gentleman black,” Petrich says, pointing to the servant. “He said he saw that as the role of the Blackman in this society as a servant.”
Many experts believe the picture depicts Henry Clay Frick but Petrich harbors her own theory.
“I’ve seen pictures of Andrew Mellon and this is Andrew Mellon,” says Petrich “that’s my take on it.”
Most businesses here are run by second, if not third generation families.
Ken Vecenie and his cousin, Janine Vecenie, run
Vecenie’s Distributing Co., a beer distributor to Millvalians since 1933. Janine’s father, Joseph, is president of the company and the last vestige of the second generation. Janine and Ken’s great uncle and grandfather started the business in 1933.
For the last many years, Vecenie’s has become known primarily for primarily regional breweries such as
Iron City Brewing Co. and St. Mary’s, and craft breweries from Pittsburgh,
East End Brewery and
Church Brew Works, and beyond.
What make a craft brewer, Vecenie explains, is that of the four primary ingredients in malt beers – malt, hops, water and yeast – there is no corn adjunct in place of 100 percent malted barley.
But the sense of community and the inexpensive rents have drawn some first generations to this riverside town.
Mike Speranzo, a former skateboarder, and Liz Berlin, formerly of Rusted
Root, started Mr. Small’s Funhouse which combines a concert venue on the site of a former church, along with a nearby recording studio and a skate park.
Tricia George and her roommate, Brian Wolovich, recently founded
New Sun Rising, a non-profit organization with plans to bring a library to Millvale. Geroge and Wolovich, a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh and a middle school teacher respectively, are in the planning stages at present but they are planning big.
“Right now where we’re at is fundraising and finding and restoring a building in Millvale,” George says. “What we’re really trying to do is put Millvale on the map. We want the building to be state of the art and certified green. We would prefer that it add to the energy grid rather than take from it.
George, 22, and Wolovich, 31, met when she responded to his Craig’s List ad offering a room for rent. “I called and told him he forgot to add the ‘zero’,” she says. When Wolovich told her that ‘no, he hadn’t’, she moved in. George, who grew up in Ohio, says Millvale feels more like home than any other Pittsburgh neighborhood she has lived in.
“It is a true sense of community and neighbor helping neighbor here,” she says.
Heidi Price previously wrote about Jean-Marc Chetallier's bakery in Millvale. To read it click
here.
Captions:
Therapy at the Tabor Reiki Center
P&G Diner
Croissants at Chatellier
Lincoln Pharmacy
Ice cream bar at Yetters
Detail of Maxo Vanka's murals at St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church
The grounds at Sisters of Saint Francis
A quiet corner behind Millvale's main streets
Photograph of Chatellier's Bakery copyright Jonathan Greene
All other photographs copyright Brian Cohen