Editor, News-Register:

TJ’s Sports Garden closed this past week. It’s sad to lose another establishment that occupied a niche of Wheeling’s personality.

Since childhood, I loved to pass by TJ’s mural and marvel at the sports legends that have come from the Ohio Valley. My parents would point out some of the names and tell me their stories. Bill Mazeroski, Lou “The Toe” Groza, Bobby Douglas, The Wheeling Ironmen — they all became part of my personal history because we shared the same birthplace and because someone had found a creative way to remember them to the city.

Like TJ’s, The Alpha was one of the iconic restaurants of Wheeling. It was dark and filled with taxidermy, and although I often heard people grumbling about its uncleanliness, it was nevertheless the place where everyone ate, and you always ran into people you knew. Now, as The Alpha Tavern, it has been renovated into something else.

I’m worried that Wheeling is losing its edge when it comes to eating establishments that do so much to bring its personality to the fore. Some of the relatively new businesses have adequate food, but lack character and individuality. These establishments are marked by an aesthetic emptiness; they have nothing truly particular that will stand as a landmark in a haze of memories decades into the future.

When you look at some of the most loved eateries in Wheeling — Later Alligator, Figaretti’s or Waterfront Hall — you feel that, in the place itself as well as the food, you are getting to know the people behind the operation, that you have been invited into an aspect of those persons’ lives by way of the things they love. Whether it’s the Waterfront Hall’s beautiful restoration of a historic building, or Susan Haddad’s Wheeling Steel collection teaching us about Wheeling with some alligators thrown in, or generations of the Figaretti family surrounding us, we feel that if these restaurants were people, we would want to be their friends.

Why?

Because in every aspect, these people incorporate themselves into their restaurants, granting us the privilege to enter into their personal and creative worlds.

And importantly, Wheeling itself is organically bound up in that world.

As Wheelingites, that should matter to us.

I don’t write any of this to drive new businesses away from Wheeling (we all want new businesses!) So a word to new restauranteurs in Wheeling: show us who you are. Give us the gift of your personality but remember where you are — don’t try to white-wash or sterilize our city. Work with a mind to the Wheeling culture and history that we share. And to the new owner of TJ’s: understand that in the mural on the side of your building you are inheriting a piece of Wheeling’s legacy.

Don’t mistake “instagram-chic” for better than what TJ’s mural has already given us: a testimony to the wonderful particularity of Wheeling.

Annemarie Krall

Wheeling