Remembering Wright’s: Members of same family owned Heidelberg business for 106 years

Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part story. Read the first part.

During its 106-year run as a Heidelberg family business, Wright’s Seafood Inn doubled as home for its owners, starting with W.C. and Mary Wright with the opening of the Valley Hotel in 1898.

Great-grandson Dave Davis continued the tradition three generations later, with Jan, his wife, and their children, Jill and Paul, living in an apartment above the restaurant. Dave’s mother, Alice, had her own space upstairs, as well.

“It ended up being like the perfect situation. On the one hand, it was like you never stopped working. But then, on the other, we had a chance to be with the family a lot,” Jan said.

Plus it was a good deal for the kids:

“They would come down those steps and get the waitresses to get them ice cream or an order of french fries.”

Nearby relatives included the family of Dave’s sister, Mary Alice Norcik. She, husband Bill and children Cheri, Tammy and Bill lived at the next address on Washington Street, a short walk across Wright’s parking lot.

“I’d be at the kitchen table, and I’d get a phone call: ‘Can you come up and give us a hand for a little while?’ ” Mary Alice said. “Then I started working 8 to 4, and I’d go home. And they’d call me back up in the night. It was crazy.

“But it was family, and when you were needed, you dropped everything and you went. That’s the way it was.”

She’d done so since childhood.

“I was in third grade, and I can remember being sat in the back kitchen. They would put an apron on me, and I would shell shrimp,” she said. “We made our own french fries, and we got paid 50 cents a sack to peel all those potatoes.”

Other recollections include trips with grandmother Verne — her husband was Dave Wright, son of W.C. and Mary — to a fish market in the Hill District, bumping along cobblestone roads to reach the city.

And she certainly remembers Dave and Verne’s pet monkey, Judy.

“One time my grandmother got up, and the monkey had gotten loose. And they kept cracker meal and eggs,” Mary Alice said. “She got the bag of cracker meal and sprinkled it all over the kitchen floor, then got the eggs and cracked them, and put them all on top of the cracker meal.”

Then there were the crowds at the restaurant following Thursday night events at the Heidelberg Raceway, which opened in 1948 by a group headed by Dave Wright.

“Thursdays would begin the weekend, and the help really didn’t like it because it was a lot of pressure on the kitchen,” Dave Davis said.

The raceway — which actually was just outside of Heidelberg, in Scott — served as the site of the final “Big Top” performance under a canvas tent for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, which was accompanied by quite the spectacle in the summer of 1956.

“They brought the elephants down through Glendale, and they marched them up Carothers (Avenue) and down through Heidelberg to the track,” Mary Alice said. “They had these huge elephants just walking up the street.”

That Aug. 1, she and Bill Norcik, both Bridgeville High School graduates, had their wedding at Wright’s. They celebrated their 60th anniversary a few weeks before Bill’s death in 2016.

By that time, Wright’s already was just a memory.

The Davises closed the restaurant after Chartiers Creek flooded in 2004. Joseph DeCarlo subsequently purchased the building, renovated it and reopened it three years later, retaining the Wright’s Seafood Inn moniker.

But despite his continuing to offer quality meals and implementing such measures as a beach-themed outside dining area, where musicians performed — and Larry Thomas, the “soup Nazi” from “Seinfeld,” once was the special guest — the property ended up being auctioned at sheriff’s sale in 2011.

W.C. Wright Valley Hotel’s 125th anniversary would have been in 2023, and Alice Davis was born 100 years ago this month. Plus it’s been 75 years since the Heidelberg Raceway opened and, for that matter, 50 years since it closed.

Today, the former site of Wright’s Seafood Inn is a parking lot. But you can’t pave over that much history.