The documented history of Pottsville’s Coney Island

Pottsville at the height of the anthracite era was a gateway town — Centre Street carried Schuylkill County's miners, merchants, and railroad men past one another all day and most of the night. A counter that fed working people fast, cheap, and well could count on a town that never quite stopped moving.

The decade's Greek immigrants built exactly those counters, across Pennsylvania and the country — candy kitchens, fruit stores, lunch rooms, hot wiener stands. The Coney Island belongs to that tradition and says so plainly; what sets its story apart is not the genre but the record it left behind.

The earliest record is four words and an address. Boyd's Directory of Pottsville, compiled in 1917, lists "Palles Sam, bootblack, h 412 N 2d" — a young Greek immigrant from a Spartan village, shining shoes, rooming on North Second Street. The edition before it, checked page by page, has no Palles at all.

That is the shoeshine beginning the restaurant has always described, on the documentary record. He was eighteen. Established 1917 — the year the business itself would later put in print — begins here.

A year on from the directory listing, the storefront announced itself in the Pottsville Republican: "At 215 N. Centre St. the place to get the famous Coney Island Hot Weiners, known and cherished by every visitor of that noted place." Famous — by the storefront's own announcement. The name was on the building from day one, and the notice ran again the next evening.

The grand opening is a milestone within the established-1917 story: the counter's move into its long-time Centre Street home. Weeks earlier, the same newspaper had printed the young proprietor's name in the city's list of draft registrants — the war was still on as the weiners went famous.

The institution was bigger than one man almost from the start. By June 1919 a printed business roster carries the partnership — Palles & Sarantakos — and through the 1920s the directories spell it out in full: bootblacks at 213 N. Centre, restaurant at 215, with both families living at the address. Thomas Sarantakos had been a Tamaqua candy-and-fruit man since 1911; the partnership put two coal-region Greek households behind one counter.

The record keeps a little music, too: the 1928 directory's piano classifieds list a Steinway at 215 N. Centre — a lunch room with a good piano, which says something about what the place meant to its block.

Sarantos Palles died on May 6, 1928. He was twenty-nine. The funeral notice names him "proprietor of the Coney Island Hot Weiner Restaurant on N. Centre St."; the burial was at Charles Baber Cemetery, a few blocks up the hill, where the stone still stands.

Antonia Palles was twenty-five, with sons of about four and two. She carried the restaurant — not as remembered decades later, but as printed at the time. The 1928–29 directory lists the widow at 215 N. Centre; when fire damaged the block in April 1930, the front page recorded the buildings "owned by Mrs. Sam Palles, and occupied by the Coney Island Restaurant." The Sarantakos family kept the counter beside her, and the town kept coming.

The institution was sustained by its people — by a widow who would not let it close, by partners, by staff, by the customers of a town that needed a counter that never quit. That has been the working arrangement ever since.

On August 12, 1936, the restaurant placed a four-line advertisement in the Pottsville Republican: "Coney Island Hot Weiners — With Real Chili Sauce — Established 1917 — 215 N. Centre Street, Pottsville." It is the only contemporaneous founding-date statement in the entire record — printed by the business itself, while the founding generation was alive to contradict it. Nobody did.

The family account of the sauce — owner-confirmed, and told in the Republican's 1990 feature — is that the idea arrived with a Texas friend who came to visit, chili sauce in hand. It is family lore, labeled as such; what the record adds is that the restaurant was advertising "real chili sauce" by 1936, while the earliest known "chili dog" newspaper advertisement anywhere in America did not appear until 1940.

Peter and Gus Palles grew up behind the counter their mother kept. Both went to the war — Peter by way of a 1942 Penn State admission, then the Army; Gus wounded in Germany at eighteen — and both came home to the restaurant. By 1948 Peter was in the paper defending nickel coffee and fifteen-cent weiners; Antonia, the story goes, forbade her sons from adding a single location and told them to stay behind the counter. She lived to 1989, long enough to watch her grandsons run it.

The grandsons widened the map she had held narrow: Fairlane Village in 1975, the Yorkville line on West Market Street in 1979 — today's home — then Schuylkill Mall, Renninger's, a Morgantown outlet beyond the county line, and the Mr. Coney franchises, their chili controlled by the recipe's own spice packets. The founder, the 1990 feature records, had himself helped other Greeks open hot dog counters in Shamokin, Mahanoy City, and Tamaqua — the expansion era ran in the grain.

In August 1990 the Republican put the question on a full page — "The great chili dog debate" — and Mickey and Randy Palles took the origin story public. The paper's own headline claim is quoted below, as what the local press has long said; the restaurant's claim is the documented one, and the next chapter states it exactly. Four generations have now kept the counter, and the credit belongs where it has always belonged: to the staff who work it and the patrons who keep coming.