With the recent demolition of Monroeville's landmark Palace Inn, here's a re-post of some recollections of the place that I did a few years ago.
In retrospect, my mom was right.
It was a wild place, and I probably shouldn't have been working there.
Actually, the initial family response to having learned that a Howard Johnson's was coming to Monroeville was a positive one. "Oh boy! Ice cream!"
We never did get around to going there for ice cream, however. Al Monzo's Howard Johnson's hotel replaced the dumpy Monzo's Motel at the corner of Routes 48 and 22 in Monroeville in 1973. I, however, didn't set foot in the place until September, 1979.
My buddy Mike worked there as a busboy, in the Casa di Monzo lounge. This was not your typical HoJo restaurant — not by a long shot. It was, actually, a pretty good restaurant, by hotel lounge standards. Heavy on Italian, of course, and extra-heavy on the red sauce. This is Pittsburgh, after all.
Mike instructed me to ask the hostess for a job. "Look for the redhead with the cleavage." There was no mistaking her, of course, and soon I gave up my Pittsburgh Press paper route in favor of four nights a week of bussing tables.
In addition to being a pretty decent restaurant, every night at 9pm we would roll back the salad bar to reveal the dance floor underneath. Six nights a week a lounge act would take the stage, and my friends, let me tell you — Monzo's hopped. We were busy for dinners, but for dancing, the place would get packed. Fridays and Saturdays were wall to wall, but the other nights were pretty happenin', too.
Once the dining was done for the evening and the dancing had started, we busboys could coast a bit. Often, that meant sneaking over to the coffee shop to help ourselves to ice cream and hits of nitrous oxide and gum. (HoJo-brand gum, to be specific, a sickly sweet concoction that is likely responsible for the majority of the cavities in my back molars.)
I've tried to come up with a description for the HoJo clientele, but everything I come up with sounds like a cop-out, so I'll just blurt it out and if it's classist, well, then classist I am. But it always has seemed to me that these were folks who were, well, not nouveau-riche, but more like nouveau-solvent, and they wanted to make sure everybody knew that they were somebody to be reckoned with.
Our patrons were the blue collar sons and daughters of Pittsburgh — with a special emphasis on Italians, but there were more than a few Greeks and your standard Pittsburgh assortment of Slavs and Croats and Poles. The children of the mills. But remember, this is the late 70's. The mills were running strong, night and day, and the unions were strong, too. Our clients were making good money. DAMN good money. And they wanted to flaunt it. Conspicuous consumption was everywhere.
A significant portion of our customers were not, at least to the hired help, nice people. They wanted to flaunt their wealth, and they did that the best way they knew how — by being ignorant to the staff. It wasn't unusual in the least for a customer to snap his fingers and wave a dollar bill at you to get your attention, and then insult you once you got there. I dunno, maybe that sort of attitude was everywhere in that era and I'm a classist — and classless — jerk.
I should also point out that a significant portion of our clientele gave off the impression that, perhaps, they might belong to a particularly notorious Italian social club. (Twenty years later, during my second tour of duty at Monzo's, I was offered a job "busting kneecaps", so I suppose that some of those rumors were true. The guy who offered that gig had taken a liking to me, and told me, "With that face, nobody would ever think that you were going to walk up to them and bust their kneecaps." A proud moment — there I was with three college degrees, working the same job I'd had in high school, and being offered a career in organized crime.)
It was a fun job, though, and lucrative. Probably TOO lucrative for an 17-year-old kid. I had more money than I knew what to do with, which is the primary reason for my extensive record collection. I'd hear a song I liked on the radio, and immediately run out and buy the album, and perhaps a couple MORE albums. A good way to build a collection, I suppose, but considering that most of us have wretched taste in everything at that age, I ended up with some real crap, too. Molly Hatchet, I'm looking in your direction...
But it really WAS a wild place. My mom was right. Monzo's was the scene of, or at least indirectly responsible for, so many "firsts" in my young life that my parents would've camped outside with rifles to stop me from entering the doors of the place had they known what was going on.
It was a wild place, and it got wilder once Monzo opened the Ritz Disco. I suppose a lot of people have an idealized image of what discos were really like. People imagine Studio 54, with beautiful people dripping off the walls. And I suppose that image was reality in some places.
But the reality of disco was that it was, at least in the beginning, a blue-collar, lower-middle-class phenomenon. Remember Saturday Night Fever? That was the true disco crowd, and that was the crowd we pulled in at the Ritz. Dressed to the nines, but rough around the edges. And pull them in we did. For a couple of years, the Ritz was at or near the top of the heap in the stratus of local dance clubs.
One busy Saturday night, I was pulled off bussing duty in the lounge to go park cars for The Ritz. It was a revelation. Instead of being crammed inside a smoke-filled bar, listening to music that I hated, I got to spend the evening outdoors with a couple of crusty buddies, accompanied only by the incessant THUMPTHUMPTHUMP of the heavy disco beat vibrating off the walls. It was amazing, actually. If you remember much about disco, you'll recall that nearly every song had the same tempo (roughly 120 beats/minute). We couldn't hear any of the music but the kick drum. All we heard, five hours straight, was thumpthumpthump.
It was a good place, though, ol' HoJo's, and it holds a lot of good memories. I watched the '79 Pirates fam-a-lee clinch the World Series there, and a few months later I watched the Steelers beat the Rams in the Super Bowl. On my 18th birthday, I was promoted to waiter. That promotion led to my hanging out with a number of older waitresses, who got me into bars and into trouble of varying degrees.
Fast forward 20+ years. I've completed grad school, and have moved to Philly for an internship, with a potential job looming in NYC. My mom gets sick, and I move back to Pittsburgh, where a degree in "Television, Radio and Film" is about as useful as it sounds. A buddy of mine and I make a quick visit into Monzo's (now renamed "The Palace Inn," after Mr. Monzo decided that the HoJo franchise fee wasn't worth the price of admission). We're talking to Mrs. Monzo, who has a vague recollection of my having worked there. She remembers my friend well — it's hard to forget a guy who goes 6'9" and weighs upwards of 350 pounds. We mention that I'm out of work, and Mrs. Monzo — God love her — offers me my high school job back.
Pathetic, but I took it. A few nights later, and I'm hanging the very same goddamn glasses in the very same goddamn overhead racks that I'd done in high school. A real low point, made even lower by the temp job I was also working during the morning. (That's the temp job that is the subject of the popular "I Was Kneed In the Ass by an Evil Leprechaun" blog entry from a while back.)
There's not much to say about my second stint at Monzo's. I waited tables, I dj'd there one night a week for a while, I was snowed in with about 100 contestants in the "Miss Pennsylvania" pageant one St. Patricks Day weekend, and I generally did my best to make the best of the situation. And it wasn't that bad, to be honest. I actually always kind of liked waiting on tables.
(As an aside, that idiotic leprechaun ass-kicking temp job led me to a temp job helping to put Westinghouse out of business, where fortune smiled on me in the form of my future wife. Sometimes you just need to endure a few knees in the arse from a few evil leprechauns to get to the good things that are waiting just around the corner.)
Al Monzo died a couple of years ago. Mrs. Monzo wanted out of the game, but after an extended search for a buyer came up empty, she recently closed the place. The building is still in good shape, but it seems unlikely that anyone will buy it as a hotel. That's a valuable piece of real estate, at the corner of what I once heard described by a PennDOT official as the busiest intersection in Pennsylvania. The Turnpike and I-376 meet up about a tenth of a mile from the front door.
Mr. Monzo was a tenacious battler. His friends called him a "maverick," and his detractors called him a criminal. Either way, nearly every politician in Monroeville, and a number from a broader region, made a path to his door. Various Monroeville councilmen spent the vast majority of their evenings at Monzo's bar, and I can think of one Pittsburgh councilman who likely owes his position to Monzo money.
Al Monzo never bothered with building permits. He would make additions to his building the old fashioned way — he'd rev up one of his backhoes and start digging. Codes and building standards were an afterthought, as we all found out when the Ritz burned down in the mid-80's. (My buddy Frank and I were there that night as patrons, and our friend Chuck, the big guy I mentioned earlier, was bouncing. Frank and I were cheap, poor college students, so we snuck in a case of "Sterling" brand beer and would refill our glasses under the table. Chuck told us that the next day, while sifting through the rubble, they found empty "Sterling" cans all through the smoldering building.)
Mr. Monzo later built a building on Route 48 for Westinghouse which would go on to create some controversy after it was discovered to contain a "penthouse apartment" that was NOT on the building plans. Westinghouse executives used it as their own personal little love nest instead of doing the work that might've kept Westinghouse in existence.
We drove past Monzo's last weekend. I was hoping for a glimpse inside, but the entire parking lot is fenced off. You can't even get close. Sad. I wanted to take some pictures, but it's probably better I didn't. It had gotten a little bit run-down over the past few years. Better to remember it grand and lively and full of the vices that would've put my folks in a mental home, if only they'd known what was going on under that orange roof.