On a chilly winter evening, the Millvale Borough Democratic machine held its annual convention for local bigwigs. The party faithful, including elderly residents leaning on walkers, gathered at the local recreational center for a night of party boosting, glad-handing and socializing.

	The entertainment complex is built in an old church in the borough of Millvale. It includes a concert venue and a recording studio. (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette)

Next door, hundreds of punk rockers from Pittsburgh and beyond packed into a desanctified former Roman Catholic church for another political rally of sorts, a record release party for a rabidly politically active punk band. As the rage against the machine ensued, some of the rock crowd drifted into the rec center.

Millvale Borough council president Jim Porter, for 15 years the municipality's police chief, tells the story this way:

"They were kind of weird-looking. Some of them had mohawks standing way up colored red and blue, and they were dressed in ways that we weren't used to seeing. But I gotta tell you, those kids were always polite. They laughed at the way we were dancing, but we laughed at them, too."

Mike Speranzo, the young entrepreneur who rechristened the church as a concert venue, tells a surprisingly similar story:

"It was the second night of the sold-out A-F Records show with Anti-Flag. Six hundred and fifty kids. After a while, some of them went into the convention and slow-danced with each other and interacted with the people there. I don't know what everyone thought was going to happen, but there was no problem."

One of the exits commuters pass in a blur as they speed out of the city on Route 28, Millvale was once the home of a thriving saw blade manufacturing business. Now it's just another small borough struggling outside the Pittsburgh city line. For the past several years, locals have watched a nightly influx of young outsiders and wondered what's really going on at their former St. Ann's Catholic Church.

Members of the Pittsburgh music scene are equally curious about the new performance space and have begun trickling across the 40th Street Bridge to see for themselves.

The truth is more than most people could have imagined.

About eight years ago, Rusted Root's Liz Berlin and her husband Speranzo invested $35,000 of her share from Root's hit single "Send Me on My Way" into recording equipment. They opened a small studio on Millvale's Grant Street with plans to grow it into a larger recording facility.

While Speranzo and his former partner contemplated how and where to grow, Millvale Borough Council was trying to buy the former church's Lincoln Avenue rec center from the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh. The diocese, however, wanted to sell off the whole property.

	Mike Speranzo in the concert venue of his Millvale entertainment complex.(Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette)

Speranzo, a former semi-pro skateboarder whose band Out of the Blue ran away with the 1993 Graffiti Rock Challenge, convinced the borough to help him convince stiff-collar lending institutions to loan him the money to buy all of the church grounds that the borough didn't want for itself.

At about the same time, the roof of their recording studio collapsed, nearly sinking Berlin's investment. They moved the operation into the church. With little more than big ideas, a Rusted Root nest egg and a puritanical work ethic, Speranzo and Berlin turned the former church and an acre of Millvale waterfront into a small business enterprise that now houses five interrelated companies:

Together Holding Inc. is a property ownership and management firm that oversees the physical plant and runs a comfortable bed and breakfast for touring bands.

Mr. Small's Funhouse is an audio and DVD recording facility that includes two digital and tape-based recording studios.

Funhouse Theater holds some 650 people in a beautiful 3,000-square-foot church cathedral and showcases local and national rock, metal, punk and reggae bands.

Mr. Small's Skatepark, an indoor/outdoor recreation center on the Allegheny riverfront, includes a huge vertical ramp and street course and has been voted Pittsburgh's best place to ride a skateboard.

Creative Life Support is a community-based youth organization and non-profit record label dedicated to teaching recording and music marketing skills to Pittsburgh youth and helping local bands to release albums.

While Millvale locals warm up to the place and the Pittsburgh music scene finds it, the national music community is beginning to take Mr. Small's seriously. Booking agents have been sending bands to Millvale for over a year to take equal advantage of the altar-turned-stage, a sound system that once serviced Graffiti Showcase, and cheap overnight room and board. A positive buzz has made its way back to the labels. Last summer, Ryan Adams holed up for a month at Mr. Small's rehearsing with his band before jumping onto the Rolling Stones tour in Pittsburgh. Platinum-selling hip-hopper 50 Cent and rockers Black Eyed Peas have recorded there, and MTV2 taped a concert in the theater by minimalist band Low.

A few blocks away, on the Allegheny River side of the highway overpass, the nearly 6,000-square-foot skate park gives kids from across the Pittsburgh region a place to work on their airs, grinds and lip tricks. Local kids who sign up for a community service project and clean Millvale's streets skate for a week for free. Skateboard instruction courses will return when the park reopens in the spring, and a local music concert series is being planned for this summer on the site.

Berlin is the point person for the non-profit side of the business. In one Creative Life Support program, she teaches recording techniques to kids from Peabody High School and helps them record hip-hop and R&B demos. Another program bankrolls album projects for local bands, asking members to chip in on the front-end costs and repay the company in increments as they sell their CDs.

Hosting this year's Graffiti Rock Challenge, which ends Saturday, has helped encourage local rock fans to explore the hinterlands across the river. It's been a sentimental experience for Speranzo and Berlin.

"I met her at Graffiti," he says, Berlin blushing beside him. "For me, getting into the Rock Challenge [with Out of the Blue] was a way to get Liz. All of a sudden I was on her radar, and by winning it, it was a shoo-in that she'd pay attention to me. So, there's a lot of history. Having the Rock Challenge here is important to me."

Speranzo says he puts as many as 100 hours a week into a business that has become a labor of love.

"I don't want to say this is all making money yet, because it's not," says the 35-year-old entrepreneur. "Fortunately, we're able to live on what Liz made with Rusted Root, so I haven't had to actually make any money for seven years. This is a business and we treat it as such, but from the beginning we've been in it for the long haul, not for our personal short-term gain. I wanted to be in an artistic-based, community-based business. Working with the kids and the bands is great, but you can't be in this business without working with the community."

Millvale is a place where free parking spaces directly in front of city-style homes have been seen as sacrosanct. A place where older residents turn in at 9 and expect to be able to hear themselves dream. A place where the only new faces have been behind steering wheels, speeding through town in a shortcut to the North Hills.

"Things change," says council president Porter. "There are some who have resisted some of the changes happening up there. But look, they're bringing people into Millvale. Some come in and go out, but you'll see some of these kids walking around or getting something to eat before concerts, spending their money in Millvale. As for the parking, well, everything's a parking problem here. But we're working on solving that. Council and the mayor [James Burn] are backing what they're doing up there. It brings in the kind of notoriety that counteracts the bad publicity, all this distressed-area baloney."

Two years ago, the borough purchased a former bank parking lot to help mitigate some of the parking crunch, and this summer, says Porter, they'll pave a new lot off of nearby Butler Street. Mr. Small's is helping by staging a benefit concert once a month for the Millvale Business Development Corporation. The concerts are programmed for older or mainstream audiences who may not respond to the otherwise progressive concert schedule. The benefit series started with a '50s rock show by Johnny Angel & the Halos. Next month, Speranzo is bringing in a country band.

"Part of the proceeds go for the nuts and bolts things that the borough needs, so taxpayers' dollars won't have to buy them," he says.

In the year that Mr. Small's has been booking concerts, several out-of-towners have been arrested for various infractions, a number Porter says "should be expected." When neighbors complained about noise, Speranzo covered the sanctuary's stained glass windows with Plexiglas sound barriers and built an enclosed box office to buffer the noise that escapes when the church doors are opened. Porter says that partially because of Speranzo's quick and positive response to community complaints and concerns, borough council and the mayor are supporting Mr. Small's application for a liquor license.

"It's all about working with the community instead of at cross-purposes to it," says Speranzo. "As a musician in Pittsburgh, I know that belief in what you're doing is a big part of it. This is all really personal to me. This isn't a calling to make me rich. My kid's going to school here, my life is here. I want a place I can believe in."