The Pottsville Club

The building at 201 South 26th Street, on the flank of Sharp Mountain at the west end of Pottsville, has carried three identities in about sixty years. It was built in 1964 as the lodge of the Sharp Mountain Ski Area, a roughly $350,000 winter-sports complex in the city’s Yorkville section, operated by Sayre Operations, Inc. of Ashland. Contemporary reporting describes the lodge as designed with four glass walls so the whole ski slope would be visible from inside — a dining room, cafeteria, and snack bar with a large fireplace. The ski area’s fatal flaw was snow: drawing on the municipal water supply, its snowmaking crews never had reliably cold water, and the hill closed for good around 1974. The slope is gone, but the city’s Winter Carnival, created around the ski area, has outlived it.

The Pottsville Club and the “Gibbsville Club”

The Pottsville Club was organized in 1888, first at 100 South Centre Street, and in 1910 moved to a clubhouse at 314 Mahantongo Street on the city’s grand residential avenue. Its fame rests largely on one member: the novelist John O’Hara (1905–1970), who grew up in Pottsville and turned it into the fictional “Gibbsville” of his work. The Pottsville Club appears, lightly disguised, as the “Gibbsville Club” in Appointment in Samarra and Ten North Frederick — the kind of institution where, as O’Hara wrote, “almost any sufficiently solvent Christian man… could be reasonably sure of election to the Gibbsville Club within two years of proposal and seconding.”

The Mahantongo Street clubhouse stood for sixty-four years; then, on October 15, 1974, the downtown building burned — later accounts describe it as an arson fire. The fire left a long-established institution suddenly homeless, and set up an unlikely merger of two stories: in 1975 the Pottsville Club bought the former Sharp Mountain Ski Lodge to replace its burned-out home, a purchase documented on the front page of the Pottsville Republican that February. From then the 1888 social club and the 1964 ski building were one address.

Closure and after (2013–present)

The club marked its centennial in 1988. After 125 years, the Pottsville Club closed on October 31, 2013, and the property passed to its mortgagee bank and then to the city’s redevelopment authority. In 2016 it was bought by a private LLC and reopened as a restaurant and events venue, “The Lodge at Sharp Mountain”; that venture closed by early 2020. The building — its brick entrance piers still bearing engraved “Pottsville Club” plaques — stands closed and vacant today.