{"id":215589,"date":"2026-06-10T14:43:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T14:43:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/215589\/"},"modified":"2026-06-10T14:43:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T14:43:08","slug":"mobile-grocery-trucks-once-filled-the-streets-of-pittsburgh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/215589\/","title":{"rendered":"Mobile grocery trucks once filled the streets of Pittsburgh"},"content":{"rendered":"

Between 1940 and 1955, the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh<\/a> built nine public housing communities. These dense apartment complexes had approximately 8,000 units, but none of the essential infrastructure of other neighborhoods, including grocery stores. By 1951, mobile grocery stores had begun operating in the Hill District\u2019s Allequippa Terrace and Addison Terrace and St. Clair Village off Beck\u2019s Run Road.<\/p>\n

The mobile grocery stores that served Pittsburgh\u2019s public housing appeared decades before the term food desert<\/a> first appeared in print in the 1990s. Yet, they fulfilled an essential function that contemporary mobile groceries perform in food deserts throughout North America and Europe. The converted buses and bread trucks and the people who drove them have all but disappeared from Pittsburgh history and memories, yet the residents of public housing communities depended on them. \u201cPeople knew that Joe\u2019s bringing the bus up here at 1 o\u2019clock,\u201d recalls Chris Pirollo, whose father Joe operated one of the mobile markets.<\/p>\n

The mobile markets filled an important gap created by 1940s slum clearance and later urban renewal. \u201cI think one of the shortcomings of public housing is the lack of businesses and stores around these developments,\u201d historian Dan Holland told NEXTpittsburgh. He\u2019s written about urban renewal and displacement in Pittsburgh in academic articles, a University of Pittsburgh doctoral dissertation and a 2025 book, \u201cCommunities of Resistance and Resilience in the Post-Industrial City<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

But where people shopped for food in the years after Pittsburgh built its first public housing hasn\u2019t been part of Holland\u2019s research. The topic has eluded other scholars whose books, dissertations, documentaries and articles have dissected Hill District history and life for decades. Though the Pittsburgh Courier in 1946 published a comprehensive survey of the city\u2019s Black residents\u2019 shopping and buying preferences, no follow-up appeared after urban renewal began.<\/p>\n

\"\"In 1946, the Pittsburgh Courier published the results of a survey documenting consumer habits in Pittsburgh\u2019s Black neighborhoods, the paper dubbed \u201cCourierville.\u201d The survey documented where Black Pittsburghers bought groceries and the brands they preferred.<\/p>\n

Ervin Dyer is a sociologist, journalist and occasional NEXTpittsburgh contributor<\/a> affiliated with the August Wilson House<\/a>. He collects oral histories from current and former Hill District residents \u2014 he hadn\u2019t encountered mobile markets in his research.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have not heard of this,\u201d Dyer says. \u201cI hear people lament the disappearance of those things, because they remember clearly just being able to walk down the block and have access. But, I don\u2019t remember anyone referencing what filled the gaps.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hucksters in the Hill<\/p>\n

\u201cSome enterprising folks carried on the huckster tradition with a \u2018store bus,\u2019\u201d recalled historian Ralph Proctor<\/a> in his 2022 book, \u201cSong of the Hill.\u201d \u201cThey purchased old, yellow school buses, stripped out all but the driver\u2019s seat, and installed a countertop, a refrigerator, some bins and shelves, a meat counter and some kind of cooking device.\u201d<\/p>\n

Proctor connected the mobile markets to earlier hucksters who circulated throughout the city selling food and other essential items to people from horse-drawn carts.<\/p>\n

Proctor died in 2024. He left one of the few published first-hand accounts of the mobile markets. \u201cThe drivers circulated through the housing projects, stopped at locations throughout the community and honked their horns,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

Renee Aldrich is a writer who grew up in the Hill District in the 1950s and 1960s. She remembers the old- and new-style hucksters, the men with horse-drawn wagons and the mobile grocery trucks and buses. Her grandmother Erin Godfrey owned the Ma Pitts restaurant at the intersection of Wylie and Townsend streets. That corner gave Aldrich a vantage point in the heart of the Hill District teeming with shoppers and merchants like her grandmother.<\/p>\n

\"\"Frank Crisanti posed for a photo with his family\u2019s huckster cart in this undated photo. The Crisantis bought produce in the Strip District and sold it in Pittsburgh neighborhoods. Photo courtesy of the Heinz History Center Detre Library & Archives.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese hucksters, with these huge wagons and huge horses, would come up and down Wylie and Townsend,\u201d Aldrich remembers. \u201cThey would come up and down and they would have cabbage and tomatoes and cucumbers and string beans and greens and everything, and the man would be calling out what they had: cabbage, tomatoes, greens \u2026 you know.\u201d<\/p>\n

The watermelon man was her favorite, she says. \u201cThey would go out on a big truck with these watermelons every day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aldrich connected the hucksters of her youth to the characters in the August Wilson play, \u201cThe Piano Lesson.\u201d \u201cIn \u2018The Piano Lesson<\/a>,\u2019 it seems that Boy Willie and his partner came from down South up to Pittsburgh for the purpose of selling these watermelons,\u201d Aldrich says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Wilson\u2019s fictional take on Pittsburgh hucksters, Boy Willie and his friend Lymon drove from Mississippi with a truckload of watermelons. Throughout the first half of the play, the men sold their melons to Hill District residents and in white neighborhoods like Squirrel Hill.<\/p>\n

\u201cSoon as you holler \u2018watermelons\u2019 they come right out their door. Then they go and get their neighbors. Look like they having a contest to see who can buy the most,\u201d Lymon tells Boy Willie in Wilson\u2019s script.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Public housing creates needs for a new type of huckster<\/p>\n

A new type of huckster plied the streets in the Hill District\u2019s public housing communities. \u201cThey had the store buses, and those were relegated to the projects,\u201d Aldrich says. \u201cThe projects were built as a landing place for African American families, and there was nothing near them. They would have to walk into Oakland to the grocery store, walk to South Side or get a jitney.\u201d<\/p>\n

People could buy vegetables, milk, ice cream, candy and cigarettes. Aldrich, who lived in Uptown, bought candy and snacks from the mobile groceries while visiting friends who lived on Bentley Street in Allequippa Terrace.<\/p>\n

\u201cI loved going to the store bus. I do remember that,\u201d she says. \u201cI looked at it as an exciting adventure.\u201d<\/p>\n

While a few of the mobile grocery operators were white, most of the ones Aldrich remembers were Black men.<\/p>\n

Edwin Lee Winfield was one of the Black men who operated a mobile grocery in Allequippa Terrace during the 1950s. He owned a Wylie Avenue grocery store and lived in Shadyside.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Winfield parked his truck in the 200 block of Burrows Street between 1951 and 1953. The mobile grocery was an easy target for thieves, and frequent robberies might have compelled Winfield to sell his truck and stick to brick-and-mortar locations.<\/p>\n

\"\"Joe Pirollo in 1959 in one of the family\u2019s mobile grocery trucks. Photo courtesy of Chris Pirollo.<\/p>\n

In 1958, brothers Joseph (Joe), Adolfo and Ubaldo Pirollo went into the ice cream business. They had separately come to Pittsburgh from Italy between 1951 and 1956 and moved to Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar. Their father, Crescenzo, had been living and working in Pittsburgh on and off since the 1910s.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Joe worked nights for the Pittsburgh Railways Co. Days, he began selling snow cones from a three-wheeled cart. \u201cIn the morning, he\u2019d go home, get a little rest and get out there in the streets in the afternoon in the heat of the day and sell snow cones,\u201d says Chris Pirollo. \u201cHe loved the idea of making all that change on the side \u2026 so he bought a dairy store on Lang Avenue in Homewood called the Penguin Dairy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The three brothers created two companies in 1958: Joe\u2019s Ice Cream Service in February and Joe\u2019s Penguin Dairy in November. Within a decade, they owned two markets, one at 1213 N.\u00a0Lang and another one at the corner of Lincoln Avenue and Joshua Street.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Brothers Joe, Adolfo and Ubaldo Pirollo operated a market at the corner of Lincoln Avenue and Joshua Street in Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar between the 1950s and early 1970s. The site is now a vacant lot, and the ruins of a concrete foundation are all that remain. Photo by David Rotenstein.<\/p>\n

The brothers also bought a lot on Larimer Avenue in East Liberty with plans to build a new market. \u201cI still have the blueprints,\u201d Chris Pirollo says of the project that never materialized.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey put together the partnership to work together and they bought used bread trucks,\u201d says Chris Pirollo. \u201cI asked around in the family here, but nobody is positive about what sparked the idea of going up into Terrace Village [and Allequippa Terrace].\u201d<\/p>\n

The Pirollos first used retrofitted bread trucks and then school buses to carry their goods into the Hill District from their eastside markets. The mobile grocery parked near the intersection of Wadsworth and Burrows every day but Sundays. \u201cWe had a routine, we had a specific routine. People could count on us and being there at certain times,\u201d Chris Pirollo remembers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe store bus came and they\u2019d be parked, and people could count on the store bus for pretty much everything,\u201d says Aldrich. \u201cThese store buses, they were regular.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aldrich didn\u2019t remember the Pirollos. \u201cThe one we knew was named Otto,\u201d she told NEXTpittsburgh.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople knew that Joe\u2019s bringing the bus up here at 1 o\u2019clock, 1 o\u2019clock to 3 o\u2019clock was their shopping time,\u201d says Chris Pirollo.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Pirollo mobile grocery was such a welcome sight that the residents would spread the word when the truck or bus arrived. \u201cOne of the customers, they coined this phrase, \u2018here come a Joe,\u2019\u201d says Chris Pirollo. \u201cThey were imitating the Italian accent.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe pretty much confined ourselves to the center of the projects,\u201d says Pirollo, who was a child when they were in operation. \u201cAnd then the north or the southern edge of the projects \u2014 the buses and the trucks would move around. So we would make it convenient for everybody to get to us.\u201d<\/p>\n

His father went with the flow and had \u201cHere Comma Joe\u201d painted on the front of the buses and \u201cThere Goa Joe\u201d on the back.<\/p>\n

\"\"Pirollo family mobile grocery parked in the Hill District in 1964. The photo shows a Canada Dry soda logo and the Pirollo tag line, \u201cThere Goa Joe.\u201d Photo courtesy of Chris Pirollo.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo this day, if I ever run into anybody who was a kid and remembers that or any Italians, anybody who remembers this, that\u2019s the first [thing they say],\u201d Chris Pirollo says.<\/p>\n

The mobile groceries mimicked their brick-and-mortar counterparts. They had cold cases for milk, meats, soda and ice cream. And, they carried bread, breakfast cereal, canned goods and cigarettes.<\/p>\n

People approached the trucks and buses and placed their orders at a counter in the front or on the side, depending on the vehicle. The cold items were stored up front, along with the cigarettes and a cash box. Shelves in the back held everything else.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey would step up one at a time and either give you a list or tell you what they needed,\u201d Chris Pirollo explains. \u201cWe were like a rolling convenience store.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Chris Pirollo (left) and Tony Stagno at the Spigno Saturnia Italo-American Society of Pittsburgh annual Good Friday fish fry in 2025. Photo by David Rotenstein.<\/p>\n

Though Pirollos was a family business, it employed Hill District residents. Chris Pirollo remembers his family hired them to help with cleaning and unloading the vehicles at the end of the day. After the last customer, the employees would ride back to stores with the Pirollos.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe drove them back in the car every night,\u201d says Chris Pirollo. \u201cThey were the manpower and it was not a big deal to drive back up there and back again to East Liberty.\u201d<\/p>\n

There were other mobile groceries in Pittsburgh\u2019s public housing communities operating at the same time as the Pirollos. The Tannenbaum family, which worked in St. Clair Village, was one.<\/p>\n

Chris Pirollo remembers some of his family\u2019s Hill District competitors, but not the Tannenbaums. \u201cHis name was Smitty,\u201d Chris Pirollo recalls.<\/p>\n

The Smitty that Pirollo remembers was Luther Von Smith Sr. \u201cHe already had two brick and mortar stores and decided to get into the mobile store act too,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

According to a 2016 Post-Gazette obituary for Luther Von Smith Jr., the family also operated a mobile grocery in St. Clair Village. Newspaper articles published between the 1950s and early 1970s show the Smith mobile grocery overlapping and going beyond the Pirollos\u2019 time in the Hill District. As late as 1973, Luther Von Smith Sr. was still operating a mobile grocery in Terrace Village in the 300 block of Burrows Street.<\/p>\n

\"\"Chris Pirollo\u2019s mother Rose Pirollo exits a Joe\u2019s Ice Cream Service bus in a family photo taken in 1964. Photo courtesy of Chris Pirollo.\"\"Groceries stocked in the rear of one of the Pirollo family mobile groceries. Photo courtesy of Chris Pirollo.<\/p>\n

Changing neighborhoods<\/p>\n

By the 1970s, Pittsburgh\u2019s neighborhoods began to change. White flight transformed the city\u2019s older Little Italys<\/a> in East Liberty and Larimer as residents moved away to outlying neighborhoods like Brookline and suburbs like Penn Hills.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Pirollos ended up in Penn Hills. They bought an old White Tower in Turtle Creek in 1970 and called it Pirollo\u2019s Giant Burger. Strategically located near the gate to Westinghouse, the property was acquired by the Allegheny County Redevelopment Authority, and in 1976 the authority auctioned off the fixtures ahead of an urban renewal project.<\/p>\n

The Pirollos also bought a Turtle Creek market and called it Pirollo\u2019s Giant Market. The family brushed aside concerns about having a name similar to an established regional supermarket chain, Giant Eagle.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe previous owner, he called it Giant Market, so we went ahead and tagged our name onto the front of that,\u201d Chris Pirollo explains.<\/p>\n

He doesn\u2019t remember when his family discontinued the mobile groceries. His father Joe was out of the mobile business by the end of 1970 and his Uncle Ubaldo briefly continued operating the buses. By 1973, all of the Pirollo brothers had relocated and the original markets closed.<\/p>\n

A lot has changed in the neighborhoods where the Pirollos once did business. The city began redeveloping Allequippa Terrace in the 1990s under the federal HOPE VI program, which was designed to replace distressed and disinvested public housing projects. Over the span of a decade, the city and private developers erased Allequippa Terrace and created the new Oak Hill development.<\/p>\n

\"\"The Oak Hill Market in what used to be the Allequippa Village public housing community. Photo by David Rotenstein.<\/p>\n

The intersection of Wadsworth and Burrows no longer exists, but nearby there\u2019s a new market.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cResidents demanded a convenience market and the city found someone to establish this store,\u201d Chris Spirollo says. \u201cThe whole neighborhood is rebuilt. Hard to believe it took all that time to address this problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

Parts of the Pirollo family story ultimately came to resemble the stories of the people they once served through the windows in their mobile groceries. The sites where their homes and markets were located either ended up overtaken by urban renewal or became abandoned and overgrown vacant lots, like the former Pirollo market at the corner of Lincoln Avenue and Joshua Street.<\/p>\n

\u201cI shake my head and say to myself, you know, my entire past is obliterated by time and decay, if you want to judge it by landmarks,\u201d says Chris Pirollo. \u201cThe landmarks have all disappeared.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Between 1940 and 1955, the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh built nine public housing communities. These…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":215590,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[9731,73,75,9609,74],"class_list":["post-215589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-hill-district","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-history","tag-pittsburgh-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215589\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}