With apologies to “Field of Dreams,” I like to think that here in Happy Valley, “The one constant through all the years has been pizza. State College has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But pizza has marked the time.”
As a baby boomer kid growing up in a town 70 miles northeast of State College, I ate all the things we average boomer children ate. Lots of meat and potatoes. And plenty of grain products in a whole number of different incarnations. Rolls, bread, pasta, buns, noodles, stuffing, saltines and oyster crackers were just a few of the ways I got my daily intake of bleached flour.
For the meat and potatoes, mom would make a trip to the “Meat Man” every week or so and come home with ground beef and roasts. The ground beef usually became meatloaf or meatballs—always with bread crumbs, spices and onions mixed in. The roasts mostly became pot roasts or beef stew.
The potatoes, however, were delivered to the house in 50-pound sacks, and then became mostly mashed potatoes or French fries. The mashed potatoes were made with butter, salt and milk. The French fries were cut with crinkle cutters and fried in Crisco shortening, which when it cooled went back to its solid white form. But for both the mashed potatoes and French fries, the potatoes had to be peeled first. Which means I learned at an early age to become an expert potato peeler.
As I said, the grain products we ate took many different forms. Grilled cheese sandwiches, chicken pot pie with bow-tie noodles, macaroni, soup and crackers, and hot dogs with buns to name just a few. But our favorite way to ingest grain products, and my always favorite dinner, was when we made our own homemade pizzas. Pizza night was the best!
Like everyone else I knew growing up who made their own homemade pizzas, we did not make the pizza dough ourselves (“Homemade” is a relative term!). The nearby Lycoming Bakery made pizza shells that could be bought in multi-shell packages – because you were never going to just make one pizza. Heck, one pizza per kid was more the norm.
To make our homemade pizzas, we first pre-heated the oven to 375 degrees. Then we put a little vegetable oil on the bottom of the pizza shell and placed it on a baking sheet. Next we poured Ragu over the top of the shell and spread it around with a spoon, sprinkled on a little oregano, added mozzarella cheese that we grated ourselves, put it in the oven, and 15 minutes later you had your own hot-from-the-oven pizza.
I came to Penn State in the fall of 1977 and brought my love of pizzas with me, as did many of the other first-year students new to college life. And for the first two summers I went back home, I took that love of pizzas to a new level and worked in a pizza shop perfecting my pizza-making, and eating, skills.
However, living in North Halls in 1977 made it a bit harder than normal to feed that pizza craving when you got it. We heard stories of other dorm areas whose union buildings had places that made hot food – including pizzas – into the evening hours. In Warnock union building, a hot pretzel was the only cooked food I remember.
Plus, being on the other side of campus from College Avenue made it a serious commitment both in time and energy to walk to a pizza place downtown. Luckily, at some point, we discovered Bell’s Greek Pizza at College Avenue and High Street delivered pizzas to the dorms – even those of us in the hinterlands by the woods.
As dorm dwellers we did occasionally find pizza on our dining hall menu, meaning you made it a point to get there early and spend as long as needed to fill your craving, even though it wasn’t what you would describe as quality pizza. But if individual squares cut from a huge rectangular sheet baked in an industrial oven is the best you can get, well, you make your peace with it and be glad you have anything.
Which brings us all these years later to the present day of pizza marking time here in Happy Valley.
This past week my wife and I were meandering around downtown State College – she was walking and I was hobbling in my orthopedic boot – while enjoying the weather, and we noticed two new pizza places. One that recently opened, and one under construction. And we thought back to all the downtown pizza places of yesteryear, and wondered exactly how many pizza places there were these days. Turns out there are nine, and one on the way.
Ten dedicated pizza places in downtown State College. The furthest two being a bit more than eight blocks from each other, and eight of them being within four blocks of each other. Now, I worked for a few years in midtown Manhattan, which has a lot of pizza places, and I’d say downtown State College is right there, if not better, with an outstanding density of pizza joints.
And, that doesn’t even include restaurants downtown like Federal Taphouse, Primanti Bros. and Champs, who make pizzas as well as plenty of other food. We are sitting on a veritable gold mine of pizza joy in downtown State College.
Now, I’d be remiss to talk of all this pizza without mentioning what I think is the best. Although a number of places downtown make a great pizza, and there are a variety of styles available, Margarita’s Pizzeria is my personal favorite – downtown or anywhere in Happy Valley.
So, whether Margarita’s or one of the other pizza joints, if you grew up eating plenty of pizza, and enjoy it still, downtown State College is your constant. Names may have changed, places may have moved, but here in Happy Valley, pizza has marked the time. Go get yourself a slice!
