The Cafe - Pt. 2 - Buying a Town!

     The Hereda's Cafe was located in the town of New Kensington.  It is located along the Allegheny River.  The City of Arnold adjoins it.  Lower Burrell is like horseshoe hugging around New Kensington & Arnold.  At the time of the Cafe, Lower Burrell was a township.
     South of New Kensington was an area called Parnassus and beyond it is a community called Kinloch.  Kinloch was begun as a coal mining town.  About 1910 Valley Coal Co., led by Joseph G. Beale of Leechburg in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania developed a coal property in Lower Burrell Township.  This town is located on a terrace and hillside adjacent to Pucketa Creek along PA Rt. 366. Then, in 1914, it was acquired by the Beale's Valley Coal Co. based in Cleveland, Ohio and led by J.A. Paisley.  His General Superintendant was Harry E. Kinlock from Parnassus.
     The town of Kinloch and Kinloch mine flourished.  I was productive, even during World War I.  It reached a population of 800 workers.  There was a Company Store, Pay station, Community Building, several tenements, double and triple family houses and single family houses.  One tenement building contained 23, two level apartments/row houses.  It was a little south of the main area and was called "The Titanic."  It faced the Old Greensburg Road.  The first floor was on street level.  The back of the building was exposed to ground level.  There was a covered porch that ran the entire length of the building on the first level in the back of the building with wooden posts supporting it.
     So the town flourished as well as the mine, even with several fatal and non fatal accidents in the mine.  But that didn't affect the production of the mine.  Although the production wasn't at its highest, in 1935 the mine was closed. 
     On 18 Sept 1936, they auctioned the town off.  Can you imagine owning a complete town?  Auctioneer F. S. Moran offered the whole 1,600 acres of the entire town.  There were no bids.  Next he offered blocks of houses.  These did not receive any bids either.  The townspeople were concerned because they did not know if they would have a place to live that evening.  Most of the miners could not afford to purchase the houses they lived in.  The terms of the auction were 20% down and the complete balance in 60 days.
     There is documentation in newspaper articles of a woman purchasing the General Store and Community Building for $4,475.  The general store was built for a cost of $10,000 and the Community Building valued at $10,000.  I believe that woman was my paternal grandmother.  I know the reports are not accurate.  My family owned the Pay Station and the Community Building.  The Pay Station  had a huge, two story safe with many shelves and drawers lining the walls.  It had a combination lock outer door and double door metal inner doors.  I remember my grandfather opening the safe and spending weeks, once, trying out number combinations when he forgot the combination.  He remembered the numbers, but not the order of them.  So he wrote all the possible combinations down and tried one at a time, crossing it off when it didn't open the safe.  Eventually he got it! 
     The PayRoll building was where the family lived when they first bought the property.  They kept the Cafe on Fourth Ave in New Kensington, but lived in the Pay Roll two story building. 

The Cafe

     My paternal grandparents came from Polish Austria, living in various south west Pennsylvania coal mining towns.  After losing his leg in a coal mining accident, my grandfather settled his family  of seven children in New Kensington,  a town along the eastern shore of the Allegheny River about 20 miles north of Pittsburgh, PA.  They bought a huge building along Fourth Ave. in the 1200 block.  The building was two story, plus a cellar and was very long on the property stretching from the sidewalk in front, almost to the alley.  Behind this long building was a small, all cement yard with a two story red brick house on the alley.
     There was a long  narrow enclosed walkway along the northern side of the long apartment building.  At the end of the walkway was a door to the left that led to the upstairs apartment.  Outside the back of this hallway was a cemented, covered outdoor walkway.  It was outside the back door of the downstairs apartment.  The covering was actually a narrow porch off of the large upstairs bedroom.
     The family opened a shoe store in the front of the downstairs area.  It was well known for the quality of the shoes and the service of the sales people.  At some point the shoe store was closed and the family opened a Cafe, sometimes called "A Beer Garden."
     All of the children worked at the Cafe at one time or another.  Others got jobs in their chosen field and many worked at the Alcoa Aluminum Company located along the Allegheney River.  This Cafe was an important beginning to a very imporatant part of my life!