Restaurants along Route 30 landslide see business slide, too
Are counting days until road reopens
Business at Robbie’s Super Stuff restaurant in East Pittsburgh is down nearly 40 percent since March. A nearby Eat’n Park has seen a decrease of about 10 percent, while sales at Vincent’s Pizza Park have dropped on certain days of the week.
All are secondary victims of a landslide on April 7 that brought more than 200 feet of Route 30 tumbling down a hillside above Electric Avenue in East Pittsburgh.
The immediate concern after the collapse was the 31 residents displaced from their homes. Now, as the road closure stretches into its third month and many of the 25,000 to 30,000 vehicles that used to travel the road daily are diverted, local businesses are counting the days until it’s easier to reach them.
While the collapse did not render any businesses completely unreachable, it did cause a detour that has rerouted many vehicles onto the Parkway East and away from East Pittsburgh, North Braddock and North Versailles.
“It’s not as busy as we’d like it to be,” said the manager of Robbie’s, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Renee. The barbecue restaurant is just
three-quarters of a mile west of the collapse on the Lincoln Highway.
Many customers mistakenly believe the restaurant is closed or inaccessible, she said.
“My faithful customers do come,” she said.
The establishment has been on Route 30 since 2007. Its menu includes half slabs of pork ribs for $11.50 and chicken wings for $7.25.
Across the Westinghouse Bridge in North Versailles, a manager of the local Eat’n Park who did not provide his name noted that sales have declined by between 8 and 10 percent.
“It’s definitely been a negative impact,” he said.
Not everyone is seeing the same impact from the traffic shift.
A FedEx employee, who asked not to be named, said the company’s branch in the strip mall at Route 30 and Yost Boulevard, about a mile from the collapse, had seen no change in business. An employee at Boulevard Hair Salon, in the same strip mall, said it hasn’t been impacted either because most customers make appointments in advance and then find ways to get there.
The most striking difference between drop-in customers and intentional traffic may be seen at Vincent’s Pizza Park, just west of Robbie’s Super Stuff.
Manager Lisa Zollner said business has been down 25 to 30 percent on Wednesdays and Thursdays, but it has been relatively normal during the rest of the week.
She attributed the uneven drop in sales to differences in the customer pool. During the middle of the week, she said, many customers stop in by chance after seeing the shop by the roadside or on a map. On weekends, most customer traffic is planned.
“People intentionally come here,” she said. “A lot of people come from out of town” because of “the attraction of the product.”
Founded in 1952 by Ms. Zollner’s grandfather, Vince Chianese, Vincent’s Pizza Park has become a fixture of the community. Name recognition and customer loyalty mean that patrons have continued to follow the neon red arrow to the “home of the Vinnie pie,” according to Ms. Zollner. “We’re probably the luckiest business around here,” she said.
For the most part, businesses haven’t seemed inclined to “go fishing” for a while or lay off employees because of the road closure. So far, at least, signs announcing “Hours reduced due to landslide” have not been erected.
The businesses are trying to maintain the hours that people expect. “It’s been 11 years,” said the manager of Robbie’s Super Stuff. “Regardless, we’re still here.”
In a May 21 news conference, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation said the road was expected to reopen at the end of June. Reached on Monday, Steve Cowan of PennDOT’s District 11 office said more information about the construction and reopening would be released later in the week.
Once the rebuilding does finish, most managers agreed that business should return to normal fairly quickly.
Vincent’s Pizza Park customer Steve Granche, who said he has been a regular patron of the shop for 35 years, may have summed up the situation best: “If they want a Vinnie pie, people will find a way to get to it.”