Editor’s note: In an effort to support local businesses that are being threatened by the devastating effects of the coronavirus, The Athletic is publishing an ongoing series of stories to highlight our treasured communities. #supportlocal

If you bought 600 pizzas for hospital workers, would you want anyone to know? Joe Haden didn’t.

If Joe Haden bought 600 pizzas — from you — for hospital workers, would you want everyone to know? Eutimio “Tim” Sciulli does. So on Friday, in between making seven car loads of personal, 10-inch pies for the staff at UPMC Presbyterian, including their COVID-19 response team, Sciulli made a point to thank the Steelers cornerback.

“Of course I want to,” he said, “because (Haden) did a nice thing.”

“Joe deserves recognition for doing something nice for me, and for the 600 people up there.”

As he spoke, Sciulli nodded his head to the northeast. In 1980, his father, Antonio, with brothers Oriente and Gabriele, opened Sciulli’s Pizza near the corner of Fifth Avenue and Halket Street. The shop, directly across from Carlow College and a few hundred feet from the Oakland hospitals, is a go-to spot for staff at both, and has been for nearly 40 years. It just hadn’t ever seen an order quite like this one. This wasn’t one pizza feeding four people; it was 600 feeding 600. Our lives have changed, and the way we eat pizza — part of it, at least — has, too. Sounds corny until you think about it.

At Sciulli’s, day-to-day operations now are on Tim, 33, and his younger brother, Luciano; Uncle Oriente is still around, as are a couple of other part-time employees. Imagine a movie set in Pittsburgh, and then imagine the pizza place the main character grabs lunch, and that’s what you’ve got. Wood-paneled walls, analog menu boards, orange formica seats. It’s classic. It’s perfect.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by @sciullispizza on Sep 11, 2019 at 11:32am PDT

It’s also empty. Sciulli’s, like all restaurants in Allegheny County, has been take-out only since March 16, and it hasn’t been ideal. For a few hours, though, the extra space was helpful.

“Not like you can eat in here,” Sciulli said.

You might think you know what 600 empty pizza boxes looks like. You probably do not.

Initially, it was supposed to be simpler. Sciulli, on April 3, got a call from Steelers security manager Jack Kearney asking if the shop could handle a big request from an anonymous Steeler: 300 larges for Presbyterian seven days later on Good Friday. No problem, he said.

“Every Friday (pre-social distancing regulations), we would pump out 200 large to the hospitals for our catering business,” Sciulli said. “So when Jack called, he was like, ‘Listen, if it’s too much to handle, we’ll split it up with someone else,’ and I was like, ‘Forget about it. I’ll take care of you guys. You come to me and we’ll make a deal, y’know? I’ll make it happen for you.'”

By the next day, Presbyterian had nixed the original plan because of cross-contamination concerns, so the math changed, as did Sciulli’s weekly box order and dough plan. Typically, the only raw dough they outsource is for their Sicilian pizza — which comes, along with their hoagie rolls, from Stagno’s bakery in East Liberty. Why not just order more dough from Stagno’s?

“We sell more hoagies now than ever with Stagno’s, and the Sicilian was flying off the shelf,” Sciulli said, “so I figured, ‘Fuck it.'”

“I mean, if it was something else, 100 pizzas, we’d use our own, but this worked out too nice.”

So, by Saturday it was squared away; instead of 300 larges, it’d be 600 “juniors.” Five days later, Sciulli’s was cranking them out in batches of 20-30, every 5-7 minutes. They started cooking around 10 a.m. for the first wave of drop-offs. That was supposed to be 100 pies.

“The first batch, as soon as they were coming out, I’d leave ’em on top of the oven to stay hot,” Sciulli said. “And then when it was time to go, the first load was 98 pizzas. That’s all we could fit in the bags.” Fourteen hot bags at seven pies per bag went out the door and up the street.

The relay process — Eutimo, Luciano and Oriente to drivers Donnie and Trevor — didn’t stop until 400 pizzas made it through Presbyterian’s revolving doors, all by about 1:15. Naturally, Sciulli said, Friday’s lunch rush was heavier than the new normal.

“We got fuckin’ hit today. Bad. We didn’t expect that,” he said. His guess was that a decent chunk of the people who saw his shout-out to Haden on Instagram and Facebook had the bug planted.

“We got hit. We got hit. And I think we’re gonna get hit again tonight.”

Five hours later, they’d be making 200 night-shift pizzas. Earlier in the week, Sciulli got Kearney to spill the identity of the man responsible — and the OK to talk himself.

“First time (Kearney) calls, he’s like, ‘It’s an anonymous Steeler.’ I said, ‘OK, no problem.’ Then when he called back, I said, ‘Can you just tell me who it is?’ He’s like, ‘Joe Haden.’

“So I was like, ‘Do me a favor. This means a lot to us. Ask him if we can give him a shout-out or a thank you, because he’s doing a good thing at a tough time.'”

If nothing else, Sciulli would’ve figured out Haden’s identity himself; he placed the order through Slice, a website/app that provides online ordering and delivery solutions for independent shops like Sciulli’s. Not a ton of guys named “Joe Haden” are out there ordering 600 10-inch pizzas at a time. Coincidentally, the shop is relying more on Slice since the outbreak; they’ve increased their delivery area, too, and are getting used to requests that, a month ago, would’ve seemed insane — like leaving pizzas on front porches.

Everyone is wearing gloves now, too, and that’s not a small ask when you’re standing over a steam-pumping pizza oven. “My hands look like a kid’s getting out of a bathtub,” Sciulli said. He was on his fourth pair of the day. What he won’t do is extend their closing time; Sciulli’s is currently permitted to stay open until 8 p.m., which is a moot point for a shop that typically closes at 7.

“I was thinking about staying open,” he said. “But I wanna see my kids, man. You’re not gonna make $1,000 in that extra hour.”

They’re all the sort of changes you’d expect from a business that made its bones on catering, office lunch orders and college kids. All of those moneymakers have, essentially, evaporated, Sciulli said.

“Every day, you expected catering orders to go out the door starting at 10 a.m., finishing at 1 p.m., So you had three hours every day, solid — Shadyside, Downtown, U.S. Steel, Presby, Montefiore, the (Petersen Event Center),” Sciulli said. “Now there’s nobody to eat because there’s nobody working in the buildings. And then, with foot traffic, you could play football on Fifth Avenue at rush hour.”

So, for sure, an unexpected 2-3 grand’s worth of revenue on a Friday — which in four weeks went from their biggest night to what Sciulli called “horrible horrible” — was nice. Still, Sciulli is confident that the shop will survive. He said the last month has gone “better than I thought,” and feels good about the changes, forced or not. Mondays are busier now, though he’s not sure why. They were selling more personal pizzas even before the Haden order, and Sciulli wonders if that’ll continue into the fall.

Eventually, more people will buy normal-sized pies again. Eventually, college kids will return, and offices will fill back up. Eventually, our most communal food will be eaten communally. When we share pizzas with friends and coworkers — that’ll be when we’re close. It might be when we’re back. Sounds corny until you think about it.

In the meantime? A nice guy did a nice thing for people who needed it, and Sciulli wanted to return the favor. By 8:30, he was headed home to his wife and daughters, and another shift of workers at Presbyterian were getting fed.

“It’s a class act by Haden,” Sciulli said. “And it’s a good gesture to the people that are working hard on the front line. They’re putting their own lives at risk.

“I mean, Big Ben helped out Juliano’s. So if he gets recognition, Joe should get recognition, too.”

(Photos: Sean Gentille / The Athletic)