Preservationists tour suspected former speak-easy in Monessen
Scott Beveridge/Observer-Reporter
Matt Shorraw, right, now the mayor of Monessen, leads a tour of the city through its aging downtown district in June of 2016 after highlighting the former Monessen Savings & Trust Co. building in the background.
Members of Young Preservationists Association of Pittsburgh tour the former St. Leonard Roman Catholic Church Saturday in Monessen.
The remnants of a white porcelain fountain in a Monessen storefront basement, a room preservationists believe was once a speak-easy.
MONESSEN – A narrow wooden stairway with access to a back alley in a Monessen storefront building leads to an extraordinary basement with an intricate ceramic tile floor and remnants of a hand-painted ceiling.
A ceramic tile fountain sits in the center of this large underground room that is larger than the footprint of the building at 501-503 Donner Ave. in the heart of the Westmoreland County city’s aging downtown.
“Most of these stores were fronts for something else,” said Matt Shorraw, a member of the Young Preservationists Association of Pittsburgh, which hosted a tour Saturday of this former steelmaking town and Elizabeth.
The basement also has narrow, sealed-off hallways, adding to speculation it was once used as a Prohibition Era speak-easy in a city known for having had gambling dens, as well as a red-light district that was demolished in the 1960s.
The two-story building, which had uses as an appliance store and shoe store, was donated to the historical society for eventual use as a museum annex.
The association aimed Saturday to draw attention to the history and opportunities in the two municipalities with rich histories along the Monongahela River, said William Prince of Elizabeth, a YPA board member.
“We work to connect the downtowns to the riverfront through preservation,” Prince said Saturday in Greater Monessen Historical Society Museum, which is next door to the building with the unusual basement that extends under Donner Avenue.
Shorraw, of Monessen, began the tour at the museum by saying William Donner established Monessen Tin Plate Works in 1897, which “was the driving force for Monessen.” The town grew to having more than 20,000 residents before the steel industry vanished in 1986. The city once visited by President John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s has shrunk today to having a population of about 7,600 people, “leaving a lot of abandoned properties,” said Shorraw, 25, who also volunteers for Monessen Historical Society.
Elizabeth, which is smaller than Monessen and dates to 1787, was once a vital boat building center, and a keelboat built there in 1803 was used at the start of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
The tour Saturday in Monessen moved across the street to a long-vacant, ornate and deteriorating building that was built in 1905 with Monessen steel and limestone from Webster Hollow Road in nearby Rostraver Township, Shorraw said.
“That’s even more of a reason to save it because it’s all local,” Shorraw said.
He said Pittsburgh architect Marius Rousseau built the structure at Fifth Street and Donner Avenue for Monessen Savings & Trust Co.
Many of Rousseau’s buildings in Pittsburgh “have been torn down and here we still have two of them,” said Shorraw, before leading the tour to the second Rousseau building, the former St. Leonard Roman Catholic Church. Today, the church at 721 Schoonmaker Ave. is home to Orchard Christian Fellowship.
The problems with restoring the surviving downtown buildings involves their complicated ownerships, and some of them are involved in litigation, Shorraw said.
“Nothing can be done with them,” he said before moving the tour to the hillside residential district, which is littered with abandoned houses, and then to nicer homes in a neighborhood near Monessen City Park and its newly renovated amphitheater.