How Charleroi got its distinct appearance
Debra Keefer, executive director of Mon Valley Regional Chamber of Commerce, displays some of the items Charleroi has received from its sister city of the same name in Belgium.
This former storefront at Seventh Street and Lincoln Avenue in Charleroi was constructed in the Flemish style of architecture to intimidate a glassmaking competitor.
A handful of buildings in downtown Charleroi were given a design like those once favored in Belgium, with S curves at their roofs and ornamental details above their first floors, providing the town with its distinct appearance today.
The Flemish architecture wasn’t, however, selected by the glassblowers who were imported from Belgium to the new town of Charleroi to work in a glass factory at its infancy.
The developers of Charleroi, led by M.J. Alexander, used the architecture style in one attempt to intimidate Pittsburgh Plate Glass, the first company in America to figure out how to make large storefront plate glass, said Monongahela historian Terry Necciai.
“They wanted Charleroi to be all about Belgium,” says Necciai, who’s also a preservation architect.
Prior to Charleroi’s rapid rise in 1890, all of the plate glass in the United States had been imported from factories in France and Belgium, industries that collapsed as a result of the then-new competition from PPG, Necciai says.
Alexander and his partners wanted PPG to think the Belgians were “coming back to get them,” he says. They also were instrumental in getting headlines in a local newspaper that screamed: “the Belgians are coming,” he adds.
And, they came in droves as anywhere between 300 and 500 Belguims were enticed to relocate to the borough in the Mon Valley and work for Charleroi Plate Glass Co., says Nikki Sheppick, chairman of the Charleroi Area Historical Society.
“They brought them over before they actually had houses for them,” Sheppick says. “They slept on the ground, in haystacks and in other people’s houses.”
The demand for housing is the main reason why the “rows and rows of worker housing went up so quickly,” Sheppick adds.
The Charleroi investors also subdivided the McKean Farm and started a land company on March 4, 1890, Necciai says.
The endeavor resulted in the selling of 1,000 lots almost overnight, helping to give Charleroi the nickname the Magic City because it developed rapidly.
The borough’s many narrow and deep storefronts lining McKean and Fallowfield avenues contributed to Charleroi once having some of the finest stores that collectively had extremely high retail sales per capita in Pennsylvania.
That all changed with the malling of America in the 1970s and the collapse of the steel industry a decade later. Today, nearly half of the downtown storefronts are vacant as efforts continue to preserve them because Charleroi is on the National Register of Historic Districts.
“The buildings that are preserved are amazing to me,” says Debra Keefer, executive director the Mon Valley Regional Chamber of Commerce, which is based in Charleroi.
Keefer oversees a façade restoration grant program for owners of downtown buildings who qualify for up to $5,000 to make improvements. The program, funded in part by the county’s share of the pot at The Meadows Casino in North Strabane Township, has helped to improve a string of buildings in Charleroi.
Many of the projects have involved painting the metal ornamentation on buildings, she says.
“It motivates private investment in properties,” she says, adding the grant receivers are required to match the grants with an equal sum of their money.
For additional details on the façade improvement program, contact Keefer at 724-483-3507.