The cement rectangle looks like a small chimney that got lost—or simply tired—on its way to the roof. It juts out the side of the red-brick building, and inside the small grotto carved out of it are coins scattered around the base of a Virgin Mary statue.
A white sheet of paper taped behind it reads, “Please Take a Rosary.”
Roughly a first down away on the same building are two signs, identical in size. One marks “Big Jim’s ‘in the run,’” a popular restaurant/bar that is almost 50 years old. The other is black and gold and reads, “Welcome Home” with “Coach McCarthy!” underneath it.
There is a connection between the grotto that looks out of place but is totally Pittsburgh and the nod to Greenfield’s favorite son since Steelers fans are hoping Mike McCarthy is the answer to their prayers.
The franchise that is tied for the most Super Bowl victories hasn’t won a playoff game in a decade. The Steelers have hardly stubbed their toes left and right while feeling their way through life post-Ben Roethlisberger. But they have yet to find the light either.
McCarthy is blue-collar to the core yet built his reputation through his work with the most glamorous position in all of sports. At age 62 – and with one Super Bowl title on his resume as well as two more regular-season wins than Bill Parcells — he may face his greatest task yet in trying to lead the Steelers out of quarterback wilderness.
It is arguably his most meaningful one too since McCarthy broke into coaching as a graduate assistant at a Kansas junior college.
Fan response was mixed, at best, after the Steelers hired McCarthy to replace Mike Tomlin as the 17th head coach in franchise history — and only fourth since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
He won over more than a few of those skeptical of the hire during his introductory press conference. With family that included his parents watching in person, he got emotional about what coaching his hometown team means to him. He even gave the address of where he grew up—1137 Greenfield Avenue. The Trib’s Joe Starkey wrote a fun and illuminating column about McCarthy’s childhood house shortly after that.
Less than a month before McCarthy’s first training camp with the Steelers, I went to Greenfield to get a feel for the community that shaped him.
My night started after parking across from Big Jim’s, which sits in the shadow of the Greenfield and Swinburne bridges. The latter leads to where Dan Marino grew up in Oakland. The Swinburne Bridge is also a significant identifier.
Old Greenfield pronounces Swin with a strong “i.” New Greenfield pronounces it phonetically. Another dividing line, though not generational, is Mineo’s or Aiello’s. Both are famous pizza places in neighboring Squirrel Hill, and in Greenfield you favor one or the other (McCarthy and his extended family appear to be partial to Aiello’s).
I know this because my tour guide that night has lived in Greenfield most of her life. Lynn Guzzi Gagne is a handful of years younger than Mike McCarthy. She was good friends with his brother, Joe McCarthy III, who died suddenly in 2015 at the age of 47. And she is an authority on Greenfield, especially the Greenfield where Mike McCarthy came of age.
“It was strictly blue-collar,” Lynn said. “Growing up, we had steel mills and the smell of rotten eggs when the smoke was dispelled into the air. Families were very close-knit and had great pride being from Greenfield.”
Lynn, who works in pharmaceuticals as an executive sales specialist, waitressed at Big Jim’s for a couple of years in the late 1980s. Even then, with Pittsburgh’s steel industry running on fumes, she remembers mill workers lining the bar. They laid out quarters and dimes in front of them for post-shift beers, not far from a framed picture of Forbes Field that still hangs on the wall.
Big Jim Bochicchio was a fixture beyond the corner barstool where he always sat. He sponsored scores of Greenfield Little League sports teams before dying in 1991. His famous generosity lives on through restaurant portions that are nothing if not, well, big—from the veal parmesan sandwiches and Italian hoagies to the baskets of fresh-cut French fries.
Right down the street from Big Jim’s is Zanos Pub House. It used to be Joe McCarthy’s Bar and Grill. Owned by his father, who was also a firefighter, a young Mike McCarthy spent many Sundays there cleaning it for spending money.
***
Greenfield is more sprawling than I imagined. But one of its signatures is houses like those on the drive into Greenfield and the main road in lower Greenfield. They are packed together like offensive linemen in a three-point stance.
Greenfield also has streets so steep that residents ski down them after Pittsburgh gets socked with snow.
That was one of many nuggets I gleaned from Lynn as she, my cousin Tom Brown and his wife Gina – she and Lynn are cousins – drove around Greenfield. They showed me the brick building that once housed the Catholic school McCarthy attended. Lynn said he never forgot St. Rosalia after making more money than he could have imagined when he began his coaching career as an entry-level assistant at Fort Hays State.
She pointed out the stately house that McCarthy built for his parents – and where he stayed for months after the Steelers hired him. And we made a stop at Magee Recreation Center.
As Lynn recalled – and Gina, who also grew up in Greenfield, remembers too – kids simply said they were going “down Magee.” McCarthy, like many others, surely pronounced it “dahn Magee.”
A chain-link fence frames two basketball courts where McCarthy once made more than his share of buckets. He was supposedly a heck of a hoops player. There is also a swimming pool above the basketball courts, and not much has changed other than a nearby pizza joint replacing the Dairy Queen where teenagers once hung out late into hot summer nights.
Magee Greenfield Field still anchors the complex, and people regularly fill the cement-slab stands that extend well into left field. If you want to become a local legend, just belt a home run that clears a cluster of trees beyond the outfield fence and lands on Greenfield Avenue.
Darkness had fallen when we made one last stop. It was an unexpected one, but it helped tie Greenfield together for me.
Lynn spotted her brother’s car on Greenfield Avenue, not far from a faded orange-brick building with no signage. She made a quick call, and we were soon buzzed into Frankstown Club. It is like many social clubs that are a staple in Western Pennsylvania. It has a spacious bar with strategically placed TVs that are usually tuned into sports.
On this night, the Pirates are putting the finishing touches on a 12-4 clobbering of the Atlanta Braves.
Frank Guzzi is a barrel-chested man who works as a track laborer for Union Railroad. He buys us each a beer and is more than happy to tell me about Greenfield and the club that at one time only closed from 3 to 7 a.m. so it could accommodate steelworkers who did not work 9-to-5 shifts.
He recalls playing baseball against McCarthy at Magee Field. Scared is not in Frank’s vocabulary. But he says it was never comfortable stepping into the batter’s box when McCarthy was on the mound. He could apparently bring the heat.
“I’ve been hoping for this for years,” Guzzi said of McCarthy coaching the Steelers. “His heart’s always been here.”
Roy Cochrane, who had been sitting across the bar from us, confirms this after joining our group.
A retired police officer, his wife is a first cousin of McCarthy’s. He spins tales, such as the time Cochrane and his wife were among the extended family who attended a Steelers-Chiefs game in Kansas City. McCarthy coached there from 1993-98, working with Joe Montana among others.
He found time before the game to stop at the family tailgate. There he spied Cochrane and started laughing as if to say, Really??
Cochrane was dressed in black and gold from head to toe. You can take them out of Pittsburgh, but you can’t take Pittsburgh out of them.
McCarthy knows that all too well. He has lived in six different states since embarking on his coaching career but has never strayed from 1137 Greenfield Avenue.
“No arrogance,” Cochrane said of McCarthy. “Just one of the boys.”
***
Just one of the boys is a week away from his first Steelers training camp.
That is when it gets real for the coach who once denied the Steelers their seventh Super Bowl title and will now try to lead them to it.
The feel-good story of McCarthy coaching his hometown team will recede into the background, but it will never exit stage right for a simple reason. McCarthy is more local than anyone who has ever coached the Steelers.
That includes Bill Cowher. He grew up in Crafton, a suburb about six miles west of Pittsburgh. McCarthy grew up where the city’s heart beats.
Pittsburgh is often described as a big city with a small-town feel. Everyone seems to know somebody who knows somebody. It is gritty. It is real. That is Greenfield.
McCarthy’s introductory press conference showed that he is still as Pittsburgh as gum bands, chipped ham and the “Proud to be Union” sticker I saw on the front door of a modest house as I walked around lower Greenfield.
Imagine the reaction people from Greenfield had while watching it.
Sidney Harwell grew up in Greenfield and works at Big Jim’s. We chatted shortly after I walked around lower Greenfield as he sat on a park bench across the street from Big Jim’s. He said he cried while watching McCarthy’s first Steelers presser.
“I felt that,” Harwell said.
So did Lynn.
She has seen change that she would not have imagined growing up. But it was inevitable as Pittsburgh pivoted from belching steel stacks to a tech- and health care-driven economy. On the street where Lynn lives, there are two families with grown children living next door. Her next-door neighbor is pursuing medical and doctoral degrees while also running a start-up business.
That is why she calls Greenfield a “splendid mix of old and new.”
One thing that will probably never change about Greenfield is its working-class sensibilities. They are as rooted as tree trunks, and there is no better example of that than Mike McCarthy. He never left Greenfield, no matter where his coaching career took him.
It has finally led him back to where everything started. That guarantees nothing, but Greenfield taught McCarthy long ago that he has to work for everything he gets.