Photo ID’d as John’s coffee house
Last week’s Mystery Photo was identified as a coffee house owned by Nick Johns approximately 100 years ago.
The Pihakis building on Blaine Avenue was torn down in the 1970s.
The area of Adams Avenue in Canonsburg where the Greek coffee house and the miners’ hall once stood
More than a dozen of our readers called or emailed us to correctly identify the location of last week’s Mystery Photo as Canonsburg. But many of them were wrong about exactly where this Greek café and miners’ hall were.
Manuel “Bunz” Pihakis thought it was his father’s Greek coffee house in the 500 block of Blaine Avenue. Just about every Greek immigrant lived above the café after arrival, Pihaikis said. “It was the Ellis Island of Canonsburg.”
But there was another Greek coffee house in Canonsburg about 100 years ago, when this photo was taken, and it was at the corner of Adams Avenue and Brown Alley. The crowd in the photo is standing in front of Nick Johns’ business, according to the late Greek immigrant’s daughter, lifelong Canonsburg resident Catherine Kisella.
Kisella and her younger brother, Manuel Johns, are the only survivors.
“It was where the men would congregate and drink coffee,” Kisella said. “My mother used to make Turkish coffee; it was very strong. The upper rooms were rented to male boarders who worked in the mines or bridgeworks. We lived in a house behind the building.”
James Gregorakis confirmed the location. “The buildings were torn down for redevelopment,” he said. “It was later Hector’s Tavern, and then Carmen’s Meat Market after that, and the little building was Carl’s Cleaners.”
It was in that little building that Carl Luisi and his teenage clerk, Tina Spalla, were murdered during a robbery in August 1979. Although all but the last building visible in the row were torn down about five years ago, the first and fourth structures still exist in the street view on Google Earth.
Pam Nixon of Westland emailed us with this information: “UMWA Local No. 1826 was the Hazel Mine owned by the Pittsburgh Buffalo Coal Co., which opened in October 1900, and from the style of the buildings, I suspect this was taken 1900-1915.”
It’s easy to understand why so many Canonsburg residents might have thought the photo was of the Pihakis coffee house, which certainly resembles the one in our Mystery Photo. But there are obvious structural differences.
The buildings may be gone, but Canonsburg’s Greek heritage is well preserved.