Jones & Laughlin Steel’s Pittsburgh Works shadowed several miles along both banks of the Monongahela River.  For eight years, I worked on the Monongahela’s south side.   Just 25 blocks from the city’s Golden Triangle, the big old mill rumbled, its stacks steamed, its railroad yards clanked and its sirens whistled and clanged.  I worked where men and women boiled steel, poured it into moulds, cooled and extracted it and then crushed the 20-ton ingots into plank-shaped “blooms.” 

Across the Monongahela, in Soho and Hazelwood, the Coke Ovens incinerated coal, the Blast Furnaces cooked iron, the Hot and Cold Strip Mills pounded 6″x6″x9′ billets into sheet metal and the Rolling Mills squeezed those same billets into 120-foot rods.  The north side of J&L’s Pittsburgh Works also had the quintessential greasy spoon … The Greek’s. 

By 1987, the Blast Furnaces were dynamited, the Foundry was gutted and the gloomy Strip Mill grounds sprouted bobbing green grasses and dirt patch meadows.  Except for the Coke Ovens upriver, all North Side operations were rusting and hushed.  Angel’s Breath, ragweed and Queen Anne’s lace flourished on train tracks.  Sumac trees poked through darkened windows and waved above the tin roofs.  But I’d heard that — though abandoned — The Greek’s was still there, nestled behind the Ingot Mould Foundry. 

In the mid eighties, as steel operations shut down, many photographers sneaked in to document steel mill remnants.  I walked alone up a half mile of wildflower cluttered train tracks.  A bright sun and river-cooled breezes caressed the autumn landscape.  I had no trouble slipping into the lonely mill but — in an isolated corridor — nearly fell through rotted railroad ties that ran atop deep ore bins.  I didn’t know the north side layout and promised, if I got out safely, I’d never return alone.

“You couldn’t fit another roach in that place,” Lou Kohle had told me.  Lou was a portly and straight-speaking man.  “And, I mean, there WERE roaches in that place.  (Yet) Any where’s from 11 o’clock in the afternoon until 12:30, that place was JAMMED.  And he sold everything he brought in.  You go after 12:30, you couldn’t get a sandwich.”

“I don’t know anybody working today that,” remembers the “original” Greek, Lou Kohle said.  “They said that this Greek had come over from Greece and — later on — hired Walter to work with him.” 

In 1937, when Al Scheidl started at J&L, Jesse Owens had just triumphed in Hitler’s Berlin Olympics.  Scheidl remembered how The Greek treated his raisins.  When steelworkers spotted one climbing up the wall, The Greek, “would take the spatula he was going to get your eggs out of the frying pan with and swat that fly.”

Steelworkers believe that the original Greek did not pay his assistant, and some reported that Walter kept a water-filled bucket beneath the cash register.  When the money drawer rang open, Walt dropped coins into that bucket and left each day with sagging pockets. 

“And, when the Greek retired, he went back to Greece and Walter kept the business,” Lou said.  “They say (Walt) could throw a quarter in the register and have 50 cents come back out.”

The “original” Greek stood just over four feet tall.  At first — back when J&L’s coke ovens and blast furnaces were further up the Monongahela River — the Greek’s cafe huddled among the other small Hazelwood businesses.  J&L operated one of many ore yards that creaked and crashed and rained cinders into that valley.  When J&L acquired chunks of Hazelwood in the early 1900s, the original Greek refused to sell.  The company built the Eliza blast furnaces over his tiny cafe.  Then the company barred the original Greek from the plant until the courts ordered the mill gates opened so that The Greek could reach his own property.

The monstrous Eliza blast furnaces clouded a mile-wide area with flatulent gas and dust.  Steelworkers rated the gritty ingot mould foundry Pittsburgh Works’ filthiest operation.  Yet steelworkers fondly remembered how, each dawn, The Greek shuttled his day-old unsliced Italian loaves, the not-quite-fresh apple and peach pies, the fat bologna tubes and the 30 dozen doughnuts through the locomotive smoke and blast furnace stink.  They recalled the jar of root beer barrel candies and cigarettes kept on the counter.  They described how he worked at a butcher block with dime-store skillets. 

“I loved the eggs,” Lou shook his head and hunched his shoulders, “But, did you ever see an egg floating in this much grease?”  His fingers were nearly two inches apart.  Lou licked his lips. “Then he’d come by and throw some sausage in for another guy.  And he’d have that sausage in there, just floating. They were greased!  And he wouldn’t drip/dry your eggs or your sausage.  When he took it out of that fat, when it hit the bread, the bread would absorb the grease.”

Jumbo was a large-diameter, ten to fifteen pound roll of bologna.  “You would order a ‘hot jumbo,’ a fried jumbo sandwich,” Lou said, “and he would cut off a slice of jumbo that was anywhere from a half-inch to an inch thick, never less than a half-inch though.  He’d throw it3456|}…and he’d go on to somebody else.” 

“He fried bacon and never took the grease off,” PRSTuv~†id.  Kenneth Randall said.  Kenneth is a warmly humored and soft-spoken black man.  He’d started at Pittsburgh Works in 1973 after the Duquesne Brewery shut down.  He “would just add (bacon and bologna), you know.  That’s how the grease built up,” Kennet said, “And that sort of give a flavor to the other sandwiches.” 

Lou added, “out of a loaf of Italian bread, he got three sandwiches.  You got two heels, and then you got the center cut.  You only got three sandwiches out of a loaf of bread … and in the sixties, the first time I tried it, the fried jumbo sandwich, it was just a quarter.  Twenty-five cents for a sandwich.”  Lou and Kennet smile, savoring the memories. 

“You’d say that you wanted mustard on it, okay?  He had a gallon jar of mustard, and he would take this butcher knife and stick it in there, and what he come up with was what you got. WHACK!  I mean, and you’d better like mustard.  If you didn’t like mustard, you didn’t ask for mustard.  And he never changed knives.  The same knife you got mustard, you got onions with it,” or whatever else was on the knife from the last three or four people he’d served.

“When you got a piece of pie, you got a fourth of a pie.  That was another quarter.  And, for fifty-cents, you couldn’t eat another thing.  His place was as dirty as dirt could be.  But you couldn’t get another guy in there.

“Somebody figured they wasn’t gonna pay,” Lou said.  “They’d walk out.  Next day, he’d say … `Hey Lou, you didn’t pay me yesterday.’  He’d remember if you tried to cheat him.  If you told him that you didn’t have any money, that was no problem. 

“He also remembered things like, there were a couple guys down there got sandwiches off of him and, like it’s all the way to payday, and … he knew who owed him, and how much, and when.  …  And they didn’t get any less of a sandwich than anybody else.

“There was one guy that come in there from the Foundry.  Every day I’d see him come in there, and, I mean, this guy, he could have been a black man, but he wasn’t.  But his hands, they never bothered washing their hands. And that man’d go in there and he’d eat, the sandwich wasn’t wrapped up or anything.  I mean, he’s putting these,” Lou held out his palms, “well, there was no place to wash between the Foundry and The Greek’s, because … we came out of our door, and the Greek was in the same building the Ingot Mould Foundry was in. 

“Some guys would want their egg sandwiches every morning, so he’d have these sandwiches stacked up behind the grill.  I think I only saw him dump a skillet once, and that was because he couldn’t get any (thing else in the pan).  Yeah, he emptied everything out and started over again with fresh grease.

“Somebody turned him in.  They come in to give him a sanitation rating.  Yeah.  They tried to shut him down, but the guys wouldn’t let them.” 

“He was a very needed enterprise in that area, because your nearest canteen was way down past the Strip Mill (half a mile away) and (when) these guys from the Blast Furnaces and the Boiler House and the Rigging Gang and the Carpenter Shop had to walk down to the Canteen for a sandwich,” Lou paused, “the corporation was going to be hurting.  And the Ingot Mould Foundry for that matter too.  We couldn’t stay away that long, to walk all the way down to the other end of the Strip Mill to get lunch, you know, there was not that much time.  And people working overtime are entitled to lunch.”

“Now, I don’t think he dealt with meal tickets (overtime food vouchers), but the guys didn’t care … they’d rather get a sandwich out of the Greek’s than go all the way down to the Canteen and get half the food for twice the money.  Even with a meal ticket, you’re still spending something, you know, and what you could get at The Greek’s for a dollar, the Canteen couldn’t touch it.”

At Pittsburgh Works, the steelworkers’ lunch hour lasted 20 minutes.  In addition, if the foremen needed a man at lunchtime, finding him between the blast furnaces and the Strip Mill Canteen, among the trucks, trains, shops and hundreds of identically dressed, soot-faced steelworkers was almost hopeless.

“At one time, my doctor thought I had an ulcer.  … Now, granted I’m in a shell and afraid to come out,”  Bystanders chuckle at Lou’s self-assessment. “But I never considered myself as an ulcer-type person.  So, [the doctor’s] giving me this Maalox, and I’m thinking, there ain’t no way in hell that I’ve got an ulcer.  I’m going to find out if I’ve got an ulcer.  I went over and I got a fried jumbo sandwich, which, I figured, if I’ve got an ulcer, this’ll kill me.”  Lou grinned triumphantly.  “I didn’t have no ulcer!”

                                                 *

To find the restaurant, finally, I went past the tall, black stone walls that rose like a fortress above Second Avenue.  I climbed beyond the whirrr of cars and the roar of buses and through the weeds cluttering the quiet dirt patch between the train tracks and the half-flight of metal steps.  Golden-tipped leaves bounced before the open entrance with the sagging screen door.  Inside, within small, dark-green door frame, the dingy windows diffused the Sumac shadows on the gray floor tiles. 

Seven people would have cramped the L-shaped counter that still held a couple cheap frying pans, corroding salt and pepper shakers and a magnificent cash register, the kind with great big number cards that rang up in the window.  Yet, it was said that at lunch time, more than 20 steelworkers would stuff inside.  A legless, ceramic sink hung in one corner.  Mottled pink and yellow Styrofoam egg cartons were stacked inside the glass double-door cooler.  The narrow cooking shelf still held the one-burner hot plate that was really orange-painted bars above a heating element.  Three orange electrical boxes jutted from the shelf’s grimy wall.  None of their switches brightened the wire-enclosed ceiling bulb. 

Standing in that cramped space with just wind whispers and rustling leaves outside the sagging door, it seemed the blackened, red-brick walls surrounded me like old men with secrets.  Their mortar held in the smoked and greasy air.  They had sniffed up memories of the sizzling jumbo and the floating fried eggs.  Shifting shadows nudged each other and watched because, less than a cricket’s leap from the door, locomotives still hauled sloshing iron vats up the alley and the oily engine fumes still mingled with the steaming coffee. 

“It was a very, ah, specialized clientele that drank that coffee,” Lou had said.  “I tried once.” 

Folklore held that The Greek mixed coffee and chicory equally and used those grounds until they turned white inside the gleaming vessels.  “I guess they (the coffee urns) each held 150 cups,” Lou said.  “I never seen them anywhere that big.  And, whenever you shut the lever off, the coffee didn’t stop (brewing), it just quit running.  I mean that stuff (like other memories from the last steel mill in Pittsburgh) got thick.” 

                                                 *

Walter Spolsky was the second and last “Greek.”  Steelworkers claimed that he was Polish, although both of Spolsky’s parents were Russian.  Whatever, steelworkers named him after the man who founded the restaurant. 

Spolsky was tall and, though weak and thin from a heart attack when I met him and his wife, he proudly displayed photographs from more robust days.  Spolsky had a rich, vibrant voice. 

Spolsky’s eyes shone when recalling the trains, especially the huge cars carrying molten iron that rumbled through the alley outside his door.  He talked about how he’d hosed down his restaurant daily to chase the Foundry’s grit and the Blast Furnace smoke.  He recalled the clanging, booming, shrill-whistle-blasting, raucous environment.  His face brightened when sharing how cross-country truckers gave his Jumbo sandwich a nationwide reputation. 

The Spolsky’s lived in a 1950-ish cul-de-sac of split level, brick homes in a white bread suburban community.  Repeatedly, in their fastidiously scrubbed home, the Spolsky’s bragged about the high quality of their food, the care they took in preparing it and how scrupulously clean they’d kept their cafe.