Thursday, June 28, 2012

PITTSBURGH PENNSYLVANIA'S LAST HUNGARIAN CLUB CLOSES!

Breaking News...

Fortune has it that there is still a club in McKeeport. Linking to the AP Press article about the club: some excerpts.

"Today, this two-story brick haven in Hazelwood -- a spartan, smoke-filled forerunner of modern man caves -- passes into the hands of Pittsburgh Firefighters Local No. 1. The union, which paid $75,000, will use it for offices and a social hall after renovating the building at 120 Flowers Ave.

The last one remaining in the city limits, this Hungarian club was chartered in 1918, said Mike Kerekgyarto, a 37-year-old plumber who lives in Lincoln Place and is the organization's youngest member and its president. (The oldest member is Zoltan Palfy, age 92.)

"It was a place where everybody could sit down and talk about certain issues, political problems, family problems. You could always get advice," he said, adding that members included doctors, lawyers and judges, as well as the late Joe Chiodo, who owned Chiodo's Tavern in Homestead and whose wife was Hungarian.

Members said the causes for the closing included a 10 percent drink tax that took effect in 2008 and the club's dwindling membership, which has dropped from an all-time high of 1,500 to 35.

By the 1940s, more than 1,000 people belonged to the Hungarian club. On Friday nights, "In the 1960s, they used to have two bands, one downstairs and one upstairs. If you were not there by 5 p.m., you weren't getting a chair or a table," Kerekgyarto added. Now, the small Hazelwood-based fraternity will move southeast to McKeesport's Hungarian Social Club on Walnut Street which has about 65 members."