Recollections of W. H. “Hook” Warner

(Excerpted from: For Monroeville the Bloom is not Off the 30-year Boom, by Eileen Foley, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, East Suburban Edition, March 20, 1980.

W. H. “Hook” Warner, whose abbreviated nickname serves from a childhood preference for sledding over schooling, is a Monroeville old-timer.

The first boom Warner remembers was the 1914-1921 coal boom when R. H. Cunningham & Sons and others dug trenches in cow pastures to get at the rich, thick Pittsburgh coal seam, sending it in chunks to Europe to fuel the Allied cause. They left torn earth and spoil piles of dirt and slate in their wake.

“I used to come out here and fish and pick elderberries 50 years ago, “ said Monroeville Councilman Miles Span. Patton Township was one of the ugliest farmlands. It did not have the nice contours that Murrysville has today. It was coal country. There were big hills of coal and strip.”

Warner went into business for himself when the paved William Penn Highway opened in 1924. It winded and twisted around, said Span who recalls it as the worst road in the east suburbs. But it marked the end of dirt roads and nearly day-long trips to Downtown by horse and buggy to Turtle Creek and the streetcar to East Pittsburgh and on. And it put Monroeville in daily touch with the mainstream of city life.

“It was countryside in 1924,” Warner said. “We were farmers. Everyone was a farmer. But the highway was paved. The automobiles began coming in. And I built a garage and started in the garage and service business in Monroeville Village. About 1936 I went into the excavating business. They started to develop farms and put in streets and dig cellars. I was here, so I started in. I did some stripping, too.”

Business Route 22, completed in 1942, marked the beginning of another boom, which World War II stalled, Warner said. There are Monroevillers today who do not see today’s business strip as an asset, he conceded, but as one who helped make it what it is, he sees it as the aorta of a bustling body politic he helped create.

When the Pennsylvania Turnpike reached Monroeville in 1950, it wiped our Warner’s house and property, located where the tollgates now stand. He didn’t mind.

“You can’t help change. You have to live with it,” he said. “It has all been exciting from the start.”

And it started all over again in the ‘50s for Monroeville and Warner, just as it did for all America.

After the war there was a surplus of money seeking investment. At least one of those looking to take advantage of that was Joe Griffith, a school board member for 24 years.

“Along with Penn State we made up a book of benefits derived from (Route) 22 going through,” said Griffith.

The school board had property on Route 22, about 30 acres of it. It had been stripped mined. Hook Warner had leveled it off. Board members thought of putting up a school there but changed their minds. They wanted to sell it.

The route 22 benefit book somehow reached Columbus, Ohio where Don M. Casto, Sr., found it. Casto was a miracle man for his time. He was a pioneer in shopping malls, who built his first strip shopping center in 1928, survived the crash of ’29 without going bankrupt, and began buying lad for suburban shopping centers as the depression moved to the boom of wartime economy, building his first in Ohio in 1949.

Casto had just put up a big mall in Columbus, and someone had told him Pittsburgh was a good place for another. The mall conceived by Casto was one that brought about a revolution in retailing. For the first time, major firms accustomed to building in major downtown arteries moved out of town. They extended their hours well into the evening at Casto’s insistence and used neon signs to be visible after dark.

Casto came to Monroeville with Joseph Skilken, a Columbus contractor. They looked at the turnpike and figured that with the GI bill everyone could afford a down-payment on a house, and made the school board an offer. The board visited Columbus, liked what they saw there, and accepted. They got $165,000 for the land, and a sign went up on Business Route 22: “Future Site of Miracle Mile.”

At the same time, home developers Sampson-Miller Associates, set about creating Garden City, a 500-acre, 1,500-home residential area nearby. The new $10 million shopping center and the new homes that sold for $11,500 to $25,000. made each other successful.

When it opened on Nov. 1, 1954, Casto and Skilken’s Miracle Mile with its long row of stores flanked with the supermarkets that Casto thought made any shopping center recession proof, had everyone agog. There were prizes, free pop, fireworks and a forerunner of Evel Knievel, called Suicide Pete crashing a tunnel of fire on his motorcycle, to celebrate the gala.

“You can’t imagine what it was like then,” said Dorothy Larson of Penn Hills. “There was nothing but a couple of gas stations between here and Miracle Mile. We had shopped in small towns like Wilkinsburg, East Liberty. They had everything under the sun., like a bake shop, things we weren’t used to having. We had an A&P on Frankstown Road. Period.”

“I got interested in it all,” said Hook Warner. “I was into everything in Monroeville, the Kiwanis Club, the Chamber of Commerce. I was one of the organizers of it and the first president for a couple of years -- the Monroeville Industrial Development Authority. I organized it and became president of that, and I was part of the original group that started the hospital which became East Suburban Hospital.”

After Miracle Mile, other shopping strips sprang up along Business Route 22,along with gas stations, car dealerships, fast food stands and banks. It wasn’t until 1962 that the Route 22 bypass to the turnpike was completed; and in the meantime area industry giants picked Monroeville as a site for their research arms. U.S. Steel began the trend in 1953 and 1954 by consolidating its research facilities there.

Westinghouse built its nuclear center in 1965, having established its research center in nearby Churchill. Koppers dedicated its research center in August 1961, and Bituminous Coal Research went in the following year.

And the third wave of development in 1968 of Monroeville Mall, a “shopping environment” rather than a center, complete with piped-in music, elegantly tiled floors, fountains, plants, a skating rink bigger than Rockefeller Center’s and a feel-good atmosphere. The mall outstripped the strip centers such a Miracle Mile as a retailing phenomenon.