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PG STORE
When you live beside what may be the world's steepest public street, as Joe Bonadio has for his 87 years, you stay in pretty good shape.
Make that tremendous shape.
He shrugs off any compliments on his physique. His father, Santo, lived on the side of a mountain in Calabria in southern Italy, and decided to do the same in America. He built this house on Canton Avenue in Beechview in 1903, where he and his wife, Angelina, raised four boys and six girls.
It was a dirt road for most of the past century, but nowadays it's asphalt and part Belgian block. Folks can go online and find YouTube videos of bicyclists madly pedaling up the 37 percent grade of Canton, some of them falling over halfway up.
The city doesn't do much to keep up this little slice of fame. Weeds sprout high through the blocks on Canton's western half. Mr. Bonadio, a life member of the Professional Golfers Association, uses a sickle to practice his golf swing there.
He also took it upon himself to fix the street when he saw blocks coming loose. He told me that if I see the head of the city Public Works Department, "You tell him he owes me two sacks of cement."
He obviously enjoys working with his hands. He showed off a sprawling garden behind the house. The Bonadio spread stretches across seven city lots, and he grows figs, butternut squash, eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and grapes. He still uses a rusted, hand-powered Rototiller he inherited from his father to ready the soil each spring, and he fences off most of the garden to keep deer and wild turkeys away.
PG STOREIf all that weren't enough to keep him busy, he also plays flute for the Community Band South, rehearsing at Upper St. Clair High School one night a week. That's not his only instrument; during 50 winters spent as a golf pro in Florida, he played string bass with the Sarasota Pops Orchestra.
As a youth, he'd make the 45-minute walk to Connelley Trade School in the Hill District, back in the days when it was common for schoolboys to walk through the Liberty Tubes. He also would take music lessons with Max Adkins, pit band conductor at the Stanley Theater, who was giving lessons at the same time to a kid from West Aliquippa named Henry Mancini.
Mr. Mancini, who grew up to be the prolific composer of "The Pink Panther," "Moon River" and so many others, became a lifelong friend. Mr. Bonadio showed me an inscribed copy of the late Mr. Mancini's autobiography, "Did They Mention the Music?"
Mr. Bonadio says he also once gave a golf lesson to Dizzy Gillespie.
"Yeah, I didn't miss too much," he said.
Canton might still be a dirt road had not Mr. Bonadio's older sister, Catherine, come home one day after work and stepped through the street's wooden staircase.
She walked right into Mayor Pete Flaherty's office and asked him to do something about that. Mr. Flaherty checked out the street himself and decided Canton not only needed concrete steps, it needed to be paved.
Catherine still lives at the house, too. She's 97 and can still walk the steps, albeit a bit slower than she once did.
As for living along the world's steepest public street, that title is not a sure one. Wikipedia has Canton Avenue tied with Prentiss Street in San Francisco as the steepest streets in the country, and Baldwin Street in Dunedin, New Zealand, is a rival for the world title. (And who's to say every street in Tibet or Nepal has been checked?)
The Bonadios never tire of watching cyclists try to conquer their hill. Three more came Sunday. One made it. One quit. One fell down and went boom.
"We've got continuous entertainment," Mr. Bonadio said. "We don't have to leave the house."
I asked who lived next door, and the Bonadios said five or six families have lived there over the past century. Catherine bought that house about 20 years ago and Mr. Bonadio, with the help of some nephews, replaced all the plumbing and wiring -- he'd learned welding and architectural drafting at Connelly, as well as becoming a certified electrician -- and they sold that 16 years ago.
No, he hasn't missed too much, even if he's still in the house in which he was born.
