The old White Swan looks new again
With the temperature outside close to zero, the partygoers inside warmed themselves to the tunes of Palo’s Orchestra. It was late January 1934. The occasion was a birthday party and a charity fundraiser for the president of the United States. The place was the ballroom of the White Swan Hotel in Uniontown.
Built in 1925, converted to a senior high rise in the 1960s, the White Swan is looking new again thanks to a multi-million dollar refurbishing by the Fayette County Housing Authority.
Authority boss Mark Yauger recently told the 蘑菇视频’s Mike Tony that without the renovations the building would not have been “viable.” The White Swan was on the verge of collapse – both literally and figuratively.
But thanks to Yauger’s vision and some deft financing — the $13 million facelift was accomplished by the skillful use of tax credits — the White Swan has renewed life.
Back on Jan. 25, 1925, as the hotel neared completion, an ad appeared in the Morning Herald, accompanied by a drawing of the back, or South Street side, of the building. It declared:
“Extending out in two large bay windows and fronting on a small park plot” the design would transform “the drab locality”, raising the neighborhood “to a new standard.”
What is past is prologue. Today’s renovated White Swan, bay windows and all, sparkles.
The president’s White Swan birthday bash – Franklin Roosevelt was celebrated with thousands of such parties across the country in 1934 — raised cash for the chief executive’s favorite charity, the polio rehabilitation facility at Warm Springs, Georgia.
Between 250 and 300 couples braving icy roads to attend the evening festivities swayed to the music of the Palo Orchestra and listened to FDR’s national radio address of thanks, piped into the ballroom “through specially arranged amplifiers” by Guyton & Rafferty of Uniontown. The radio itself was paid for by Monarch Auto Supply.
Only days earlier, the White Swan had played host to the Speaker of the U.S. House, Henry T. Rainey of Illinois, brought to town by freshman Democratic congressman J. Buell Snyder.
Relaxing in his room — the White Swan contained 150 rooms- Rainey told reporters he was no stranger to Uniontown, passing through on his way back and forth to Washington several times a year.
The reporters noted that Rainey was “intensely interested in the coal situation” in Fayette County, then, as always in those day, on a knife’s edge with nationwide repercussions. They noted the Speaker had reported directly to FDR on a coal mine strike in Illinois only months earlier.
At a banquet in the White Swan ballroom that evening, held to boost Snyder’s reelection chances, Rainey turned on the charm. “When God made the world,” the Speaker said, “he took … his best mud, mixed it with coal, threw it down, and said that is Fayette County.”
On a serious note, the House Speaker said the political parties, in the furnace of the Great Depression, were shedding their old identities. “We don’t know what they will” become, Rainey said. “I do know that the old ones are gone forever.”
The White Swan was Uniontown’s hotel of choice for the New Dealers and others who were in and out of Fayette County in the 1930s.
Dispatched by the Roosevelt administration to oversee labor elections in the soft coal fields of western Pennsylvania , a quartet of New Deal mediators set up shop at the hotel. Threading their way between the United Mine Workers and various company unions, they faced a difficult if not impossible task.
The hotel was occupied by swarms of big city reporters covering the 1933 coal strike.
In the spring of 1934, a state hearing board took testimony in the hotel ballroom on the use of private police in industrial disputes. Board chairman Shippen Lewis ate a hasty hotel breakfast after returning from Smock in the wake of a strike-related riot there.
Lewis told those gathered for the hearing, “If an archangel could come down and patrol your various plants, the situation would be ideal.”
On a sweltering July day in 1935, a committee appointed by Gov. George Earle heard from company officials about the difficulties of miners in hock to company stores. Frozen in the ice of his indifference, Frick Coal president Thomas Moses told the White Swan gathering that he could see no way to relieve the suffering of miners whose pay was one or two dollars a week after store deductions. Some miners, he said, had to be treated like children.
By the middle of the decade, the focus of attention had shifted somewhat. In January 1936, the Uniontown branch of the Council of Jewish Women, in order to gather donations, held a card party at the White Swan. Hundreds of German Jewish children, having slipped the noose of their Nazi tormentors, required succor as they settled into life with American families.
“It is our hope as Jewish mothers to raise as large a sum as possible for … these unfortunate Jewish children … in their miserable plight,” wrote branch president Jewel Bortz.
In September 1939, Uniontown-born Army chief of staff George Marshall told a White Swan banquet that the U.S. was preparing for war without “hysteria.” Officials knew what had to be done, he said. The American people “must not be misled” or succumb to “emotionalism.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.