Much has been written about McKeesport Candy Co., the wholesale company behind CandyFavorites.com, and our distinction as the nation’s OLDEST independently owned wholesale candy company.
But not nearly enough has been written about the city, and especially the street, where so many multigenerational businesses call "home."
For nearly 100 years, that home has been 1101 Fifth Avenue in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, about 20 minutes outside Pittsburgh.
Ernest Prince, the Founder of our company, moved into this building in 1927, the year my father, Jerry Prince, and the second generation of McKeesport Candy Co. was born, and this January, we’ll celebrate our 100th birthday here.
Few, if any, other companies can make such a claim....
But our story has never just been about candy. It’s also about a remarkable stretch of Fifth Avenue and the families, characters, storefronts, bakeries, shops, and businesses that made this part of McKeesport unlike almost anywhere else.
There was a time when this block seemed to have more second- and third-generation family businesses than you could count.
People didn’t just own businesses here. They inherited responsibilities, relationships and reputations.
Customers knew the owners, owners knew the customers, and chances were good that somebody remembered your parents — and probably your grandparents, too. We often joke that almost anybody who lived in the "Mon Valley" had a family member who worked for our company, and this even includes one of Andy Warhol's relatives!
Business was personal because everything was personal.
Over the years, those businesses disappeared, one by one.
This year was especially difficult.
Tube City Novelty closed following the death of its owner, Murray Siegal, one of our dearest friends - and dear friends of both my grandfather and father - and a fellow member of the Fifth Avenue business family.
Our relationship with the Siegal family stretches back many, many years, so it's wonderfully fitting that Murray’s daughter, Denise, is now part of our team at the candy company.
And now another chapter has ended.
In September 2028, 2026, Minerva Bakery has officially closed after a 103-year run.
For generations in McKeesport and throughout the Mon Valley, Minerva Bakery was more than a place to buy a cake.
It was the familiar smell when you walked through the door, the cake or raisin bread somebody insisted had to come from Minerva, and the kind of business whose name became part of the community's vocabulary.
You didn’t always say you were getting a cake.
You said you were getting a Minerva cake.
That is what happens when a business survives for more than a century. Eventually, it stops being just a business and becomes part of a place's history.
We understand that feeling.
Minerva Bakery, McKeesport Candy Co., and the other businesses mentioned traveled remarkably similar roads.
We all survived world wars, depressions, pandemics. recessions, changing neighborhoods, changing tastes, big-box stores, shopping malls, national chains, just about every other challenge a family business could encounter.
Longevity doesn’t happen because nothing changes.
It happens because you learn how to change without forgetting who you are.
That has been our philosophy since my grandfather, Ernest Prince, founded our company nearly ten decades ago.
Today, CandyFavorites.com allows us to sell candy to customers throughout the country, something my grandfather could never have imagined when trucks were being hand-loaded on Fifth Avenue and Lysle Boulevard in the 1920s.
Technology has changed.
The way people shop has changed.
The candy business has certainly changed and doesn't seem to ever stop changing.
But our address hasn’t.
1101 Fifth Avenue. McKeesport, Pennsylvania.
And neither have the values behind the business.
We have always believed that "candy is what we deliver, but service is what we sell."
It is both our motto and the value structure that we adhere to.
That philosophy may sound old-fashioned in a world of algorithms, automated customer service, and companies whose owners are thousands of miles away.
We’re perfectly comfortable with old-fashioned, but with that all-important twist of staying cutting-edge. The Future of Candy has always been rooted in our past!
Few people know that we were among the first online stores, and we were certainly the first online candy store and the only one remaining that is privately owned by the original owners.
Yes, right here, at 1101 Avenue...
McKeesport itself knows something about perseverance.
This was once a booming industrial city whose mills helped build America. Generations of families came here looking for opportunity. Downtown streets were crowded, stores were busy, and Fifth Avenue was alive with independent merchants.
The city has changed enormously since then, and anyone who loves McKeesport knows that it has endured its share of difficult years.
But places are more than buildings and statistics.
They are people.
They are memories.
They are families who decide to stay.
They are businesses like Minerva Bakery that kept the ovens going for 103 years.
They are people like Murray Siegal and his wife and offspring, who devoted their lives to a family business.
They are people like Stanley and Sam Lichtenstein who owned Licht Paper, which closed a few years ago in its third generation.
We would be lying if we said there isn't some sadness in looking down Fifth Avenue today and remembering what once surrounded us.
Sometimes we feel like the proverbial last man standing on a block that once represented the very best of American small business.
But perhaps there is another way to look at it.
Maybe we're not simply the last ones here.
Maybe we're the keepers of the flame.
So today we tip our hats to our friends at Minerva Bakery.
One hundred and three years is an extraordinary accomplishment.
Thousands upon thousands of birthdays, weddings, graduations, anniversaries, holidays, and ordinary Friday morning sales meetings were made a little sweeter because Minerva Bakery was part of McKeesport.
That is a legacy worth celebrating.
As for us?
Our candy shelves are full.
The phones are ringing.
The trucks are still pulling up to Fifth Avenue.
We are shipping candy to 50 states and beyond.
And as we approach our own century mark, we remain exactly where three and a half generations before us planted their flag.
1101 Fifth Avenue.
Still independent.
Still family-owned.
Still proud to call McKeesport home.
And, after nearly 100 years, still making life a little sweeter here and throughout the nation!
