213–215 North Centre Street

213 and 215 North Centre Street were two buildings. Fire destroyed both on the night of April 8, 1930, and what replaced them was a single two-story brick block carrying two storefronts — which went on holding two separate businesses for the next sixty years. At 215 was The Coney Island, the hot-weiner counter that opened in 1918 and served until 2012. At 213, after a cleaner and a paint dealer, was the Oasis Bar, a tavern that ran through the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s and ended in 1990 when its liquor license was carried across town. The wall between the two rooms came out only shortly before Pilger Ruh Brewing opened in the combined space in 2021. The ground beneath had drawn a crowd far longer than either: reporting the fire, the Pottsville Republican recalled that this had been, “beyond Civil War days,” the beer garden of a Centre Street saloon.

The ground before — a beer garden and a saloon

The buildings that burned in 1930 stood on ground the town already thought of as historic. When the Pottsville Republican covered the fire, it ran a sidebar headed “…of Fire Has Interesting History” that placed the site and reached back into its past. The location, it wrote, was on Centre Street “between the old Exchange Hotel and the Grammar School Bldg., opposite the former Centennial Hall location.” Then the key sentence: “for going back beyond [Civil] War days it was the highly attractive beer garden of the … Boehmer saloon,” and “later on it was occupied … by George … O’Neill.” A beer garden before the Civil War, a saloon after it — the block had been a place people came to drink and gather for two generations before the first hot weiner was served.

The same article carries the site into the twentieth century in a single line: “Later it was purchased by Samuel Palles who operated the Coney Island restaurant and upon his death about a year ago his widow continued to run the establishment.”

Two storefronts, 1917–1930

The restaurant that would define 215 began, on the documentary record, with a shoeshine. Boyd’s Directory of Pottsville compiled in 1917 lists “Palles Sam, bootblack” — a young Greek immigrant who had reached Pennsylvania the year before; the directory compiled just before it carries no Palles at all. Established 1917 — the year the business would later print — begins with that entry.

A year on, the storefront announced itself. On November 8, 1918, a notice in the Pottsville Republican read: “Grand Opening To-night — At 215 N. Centre St. the place to get the famous Coney Island Hot Weiners, known and cherished by every visitor of that noted place. Soft drinks etc., also served” — and it ran again the next evening. The counter was a partnership: Sam Palles’s uncle Anastasios Sarantakos, who appears in the record under both his Greek name and the American form Thomas, was his partner. A printed business roster of June 1919 already carries “Palles & Sarantokas,” paired with the trade name “Pottsville Pure Food Store”; on February 14, 1922 the two men registered the fictitious name “Coney Island Hot Wieners” with the Commonwealth.

It is the city directories of the 1920s that state the arrangement plainly, and they are the first clear evidence that this address was two addresses: bootblacks at 213 North Centre, the restaurant at 215. The 1920 census taker, standing in 215 North Centre on January 2, 1920, wrote Sam Palles down as head of household, trade “Restauranter,” industry “Lunch Room,” with Thomas Sarantakos entered as “Uncle.”

Sarantos “Sam” Palles died on May 6, 1928, two days after an operation for appendicitis. His funeral notice named him “proprietor of the Coney Island Hot Weiner Restaurant on N. Centre St.”; his death certificate records his occupation as “Restauranteur,” his industry as “Hot Weiners.” His widow, Antonia Palles, carried the restaurant — “Palles Antoinette (wid Saml) h215 N Centre,” the 1928–29 directory records — and the Sarantakos family kept the counter beside her.

Next door, 213 had gone over to a different trade. Twice in the weeks before the fire — on February 26 and again on March 29, 1930 — the Republican carried an advertisement for the Pottsville Dollar Cleaners, “cleaning, pressing, tailoring,” at 213 North Centre Street.

April 1930 — the fire, and one building out of two

On the night of Tuesday, April 8, 1930, fire swept the block. The front page of the Pottsville Republican three days later recorded that the blaze “destroyed the buildings at 213 and 215 N. Centre St., owned by Mrs. Sam Palles, and occupied by the Coney Island Restaurant and the Dollar Cleaning Co.,” and traced its likely cause to a carelessly tossed cigarette in a pile of waste paper at the rear of the restaurant. The two occupants the paper names are the two the advertisements place at the two addresses — the restaurant at 215, the cleaners at 213.

The fire “threatened to make its way under the cornices of the Majestic Theatre and the White properties” — the W. A. White block two doors north — and it was Paul Schultz of the Paul Schultz Candy Co., “who occupy a store in the same block,” who turned in the first alarm. The census enumerator, passing weeks later, found the west-side sheet running from 203 to 217 with no entry at 213–215: nothing stood there to enumerate.

What rose in place of the two buildings was one building. The Schuylkill County assessor dates it to 1930 — a build year that, unlike the round “1900” placeholders on some neighboring parcels, is corroborated by the fire it rose from; a two-story rear section with a garage was added in 1949. The 1982 National Register nomination agrees on the era, listing the result among the district’s non-contributing “intrusions” — a “Post 1930 Colonial Revival commercial building.” But the new block was one structure with two storefronts, and for sixty years that is how it was used: two doors, two businesses, two histories running side by side behind a single wall.

215 — the Coney Island counter

On the rebuilt ground the counter reopened, and within a few years it was advertising under a settled name. On August 12, 1936, a four-line advertisement in the Pottsville Republican read: “Coney Island Hot Weiners — With Real Chili Sauce — Established 1917 — 215 N. Centre Street, Pottsville.” The building was six years old; the business dated itself to 1917 — the year Sam Palles first appears in the record — and kept that founding year long after the fire had replaced the walls around it.

Antonia Palles kept the counter at 215 through the middle of the century. She died in 1989, at eighty-seven, at 215 North Centre Street; her obituary said she had “started Coney Island,” and that the business “officially started in 1917.” The downtown counter ran on for another two decades, closing at last in August 2012, nearly a century after Sam Palles first appeared on the block. The restaurant continues on West Market Street.

213 — paint, then the Oasis Bar

The other door took longer to settle. The rebuilt 213 opened as a wallpaper and paint dealer: through 1931 and 1932 Jaffe’s Wall Paper & Paint Store advertised at 213 North Centre Street; the 1932 advertisement located it for readers as “Opposite Capitol Theatre” — the Capitol then standing across the street.

Jaffe’s is the last trace at 213 until the 1960s, when the storefront is a bar. The Republican’s sports pages of 1964 carry a team entered as the Oasis Bar: it wins in the YMCA senior league that February, and that March Muscara’s Atlantic eliminated the Oasis Bar from the post-season playoffs. The Oasis is printed at 213 North Centre from 1977.

It is tied there by a broken window. “Brick Thrown Through,” the Republican reported on February 28, 1977: a brick had been thrown through the window of the Oasis Bar at 213 North Centre Street, damaging the window and a neon sign. By then the bar was in the hands of Alfred J. “Butch” Cross, who died on March 28, 1987, at sixty-eight, at his home on North Second Street. The obituary two days later called him “owner of the Oasis Bar, 213 N. Centre St.” — a Shenandoah man who had kept a Pottsville bar.

The Oasis outlived him. A team entered under its name took part in a United Cerebral Palsy tug-of-war in September 1989, the latest located sign of it in operation. Then, in 1990, it ended — not by closing so much as by moving. Clem Buckley opened Hucklebucks on East Norwegian Street that year; he and his late brother Ned are described by the Republican & Herald as “owners of the former Oasis Bar on Centre Street,” and the Oasis’s license went with them. “We transferred the liquor license down (from the Oasis Bar) because there was no license here at that point,” Clem Buckley told the paper in 2025. A license is what makes a bar a bar; when it left 213 North Centre, the Oasis was over. Two signs hang above the Hucklebucks bar today, one of them carrying the Oasis Bar’s name.

The storefronts come together

The Coney Island took the room next. The counter that had kept to 215 since 1918 spread into 213, and held both storefronts until it closed in August 2012.

A contractor took down the facade at 213 on May 1, 2015. By July 2020 the room held the arts organization Block of Art, reported to be moving out as Anthony Deppen and Tyler Budwash announced plans to open a brewery in “the former Coney Island at 213 N. Centre St.” — 2,400 square feet of it.

Before the brewery opened, the wall between the two storefronts was taken out and the storefront rebuilt to match its historical appearance. The division that had outlived the 1930 fire — 213 on one side, 215 on the other — went with it, and the two addresses became a single room.

Pilger Ruh Brewing held its grand opening on Saturday, July 24, 2021. The founders, a Pottsville homebrewing group, renovated the building while keeping its bones: “We wanted to keep originality to everything,” one of them told WNEP. “A lot of people when they visit, they either knew it as the Coney Island or as the Oasis Bar, and we still have the original flooring that was here from there.” The brewery’s name — Pilger Ruh — is German for “Pilgrim’s Rest.” The next day’s Republican & Herald, quoting Budwash from behind the bar, gave the address as “213-215 N. Centre St.” — the two storefronts written, at last, as one.

So the lots that were a beer garden before the Civil War and a saloon after it, that burned together in a night and were rebuilt as two doors under one roof, are finally what the block first knew them as: one room where downtown Pottsville comes to gather over a drink.