I found Decatur, Ga.’s “missing middle” housing. It turns out that it wasn’t missing after all. Most of it — affordable apartments, duplexes, etc. — ended up in Atlanta area landfills. A snapshot from 2011-2014 appears in the Ruined Decatur blog.
Ann Crichton was elected to the Decatur, Ga., City Commission in 1971. Her colleagues in 1977 selected her as mayor of the municipality that is organized under the “council-mayor” form in which the mayor is a ceremonial position. Individuals are “elected” by their peers to chair city commission meetings and to perform other symbolic functions.
Crichton, an Agnes Scott College graduate, became a nationally recognized expert in municipal government, community development, and affordable housing. After being ousted from office in 1979, Crichton went on to serve as President Jimmy Carter’s Atlanta-based regional director of the Economic Development Administration. After that, Crichton briefly moved to the United Kingdom before returning to Atlanta and founding her own economic development consulting business.
How can a self-styled publisher/editor/reporter have “One Of The Oldest Women In The World” living in his community of only 20,000 people and not know it?
Or, how did the Washington Post and suburban news outlets miss what the residents in a historically Black community were telling them for years about an old bridge?
I am looking for sources who can speak to the role journalism plays in gentrification and erasure. Have a story? Let’s talk.
Yesterday’s Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission discussion of the National Register of Historic Places nomination of the William A. “Woogie” and Ada Harris House was billed as an opportunity for public comment.
With no public notice (beyond listing on the HRC agenda posted on the city’s website) and no notification by the city’s historic preservation community, community groups, and other stakeholders, the 10-minute discussion was a master class in public participation minus the public and minus participation.
This is rich: the local historical society responsible for whitewashing Silver Spring, Maryland’s history and creating decades of monochromatic celebratory products is angry about a property owner erasing the color from his vintage Googie building.
Ever wonder what the smallest unit a 7-story concrete cold warehouse can be reduced to? Crumbs, apparently. Crews have gone from carting away boulder-sized concrete debris from the former Federal Cold Storage Co. site to running it through a milling machine and creating massive mounds of historic building crumbs. It looks like they’re reaching the end of the demolition phase. Demolition began in early November 2021 ….
For a complete rundown on this spectacular demolition operation and the building’s history, check out this November 2022 virtual program hosted by the Society for Industrial Archeology:
©2023 D.S. Rotenstein
The late playwright August Wilson had some pointed opinions about the statue of St. Benedict the Moor mounted atop a church in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District. In 1968, a crane hoisted the 18-foot statue onto the church located at the gateway to the Hill District at an intersection long known as “Freedom Corner.”
Wilson told interviewer Dinah Livingston in 1987:
… all the white people are gone, so it’s all Black. And they name the church Old Holy Trinity St. Bridget St. Benedict the Moor. After much discussion about the matter, they decided to just name it St. Benedict the Moor. And they put up this stature of St. Benedict. The church sits on the dividing line between the downtown and the Hill District—and they had the statue with its back turned to the Blacks and its arms opened to the downtown. Every single person in the neighborhood … noticed that and felt insulted that we got a Black saint and he’s turned his back on us and opened his arms up to the white folks downtown.
Livingston, Dinah. “Cool August: Mr. Wilson’s Red Hot Blues.” In Conversations with August Wilson, edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Mary C. Hartig, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006, p. 46
© 2023 D.S. Rotenstein
In the summer of 2011, I watched as multiple residents of Decatur, Ga., duked it out over the city’s spatial boundaries in cyberspace. The exchanges spurred me to explore the city’s media ecosystem and how its residents and government officials create and reinforce Decatur’s identity online in the news and in social media. The city’s privileged white residents displayed considerable angst when reporters lumped the great expanse of unincorporated DeKalb County, which shares Zip Codes with the incorporated city of Decatur, into a singular monolithic “Decatur.” One now-defunct account admonished a prolific Decatur tweeter by writing, “[Decatur] is much more than 4 lily white blocks.”
I mothballed the posts that I wrote about Decatur’s online identity when I pulled the plug on the short-lived local news site that I created. As I write about the ways Decatur residents weaponize cyberspace and engage in online redlining, I am revisiting a lot of this material from 2011.
The 2011 posts included video clips from interviews done with municipal officials and residents with big online footprints. Here are a couple of the videos originally published at Dateline:Decatur in the summer of 2011. In them, a resident describes the physical and virtual Decaturs.
I can remember seeing this book, Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir, on bookstore shelves while living in Atlanta in the 1980s and 1990s. For whatever reason I never bought it or read it. That all changed a few months ago after I began researching a “forgotten” Pittsburgh Negro Leagues ballpark and the people involved in its development, etc. It turns out that Louis Bellinger (1891-1946), the only licensed and practicing Black architect in Pittsburgh between 1919 and his death in 1946, designed and built the stadium in 1920. And, he built Greenlee Field a dozen years later. This book is a memoir of the extended Bellinger family and their lives in South Carolina. Louis left Charleston in the teens and ended up in Pittsburgh in 1919. His father and brothers joined him by 1926. But it’s not just a window into the architect’s life. It also offers a glimpse into the life of Walter Bellinger (1901-1965), Louis’s younger brother.
Continue readingYesterday, we said goodbye to our friend Lillian Cooper Wiggins. The memorial was held at Arlington National Cemetery and the hall was filled to capacity with family and friends. I was honored and humbled to be among the many people Lil invited into her life and to be there to help celebrate that life.
Lil’s daughter asked me to draw on my many interviews with her mom to help write the obituaries published in The Washington Post and The Washington Informer. My words were unmistakable in the beautiful program Karen compiled to celebrate her mom’s life. I was fortunate to have so many of Lil’s own words to share in my tribute to her. Words like these: “My principle was to be the best I could to write as truthful as I could.” Good advice for a historian and writer.
Lil was a force of nature and one of the best people I have had the honor to know and befriend. She had a front row seat to history as Washington transformed from a Jim Crow Southern town into an iconic Chocolate City. As she transformed herself from a midwestern transplant into a centerpiece of Washington’s social, political, and economic life, Lil moved from that front seat onto center stage. Lil went from writing history’s first draft as an influential journalist to becoming part of history because of her writing and so much more.
Thank you Lil for everything.