Historic Preservation Contributes to Black Trauma

Buried deep inside my recent Pittsburgh City Paper cover story is a little bit about historic preservation:

In his 1984 memoir Brothers and Keepers, John Edgar Wideman, the award-winning Pittsburgh-born author, made the prison the setting for his brother’s incarceration and a central character.

“Western Penitentiary sprouts like a giant wart from the bare, flat stretches of concrete surrounding it,” Wideman wrote. To Wideman, Western Penitentiary punished its inmates and their loved ones by dehumanizing them.

Wideman’s take on the prison captures the sentiments held by Black Pittsburghers: revulsion, not nostalgia. Compare that to the efforts by white historic preservationists who sought to protect the landmark which in 2022 was listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

The conflicting views of the impending demolition underscore the need to better understand history holistically and equitably. They also speak to how Pittsburgh preserves its Black history landmarks: the jail at one end of Wylie Ave. is a tourist attraction with a brass plaque, and the church at the other end is condemned.

Former Western Penitentiary (2023).
Condemnation notice affixed to the John Wesley AME Church (2020).

The Pittsburgh preservationist who was pushing to save the former Western Penitentiary is the same one who fought to preserve the Civic Arena. Constructed in the Lower Hill District, the Civic Arena and its sprawling parking lots replaced hundreds of mostly Black owned and occupied homes, businesses, churches, and recreational spaces.

The Pittsburgh Civic Arena and the Lower Hill District. “The Changing City: Report of the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh.” Pittsburgh City Archives.

Wait, what? Yep, the same white preservationist dude who 15 years ago wanted to force the city to preserve one of the most painful reminders of urban renewal and displacement wanted to keep the hulking reminder of mass incarceration. At best, it’s tone deaf. At worst, it’s a reminder of the white supremacy and classism that continues to dominate historic preservation.

© 2024 D.S. Rotenstein

Black History Month 2024

NEXTpittsburgh screen capture, Feb. 26, 2024.

Throughout February, NEXTpittsburgh has been featuring my articles about Black history in Pittsburgh. NEXT originally published most of them in 2023:

That’s a lot of Black history content published throughout the year. Let’s see if I can boost those numbers in 2024.

So Long John Hamilton

Our 10-year-old basset hound decided that we were getting up this morning at a little before five. I opened Facebook on my phone while moving between the bedroom and giving our 17-year-old cat her morning medicine. The first post that I saw was one from Hannah, a woman we met 10 years ago while we were living in Georgia. Back then, she had recently lost another dog and had come to one of my programs on gentrification in the city where she lived to look for answers about why her neighbors acted the way they did.

Hannah’s post referred to her dog John Hamilton in the past tense.

Our pets are our family and sometimes our friends’ pets become important, too. I cried this morning when I learned that the dog Hannah adopted a decade ago had died. I know that it won’t be nearly as much as how Hannah will miss John Hamilton, but I will miss her posts about him and her photos of him accompanying her on her many adventures.

Hannah is one of the best things that happened to us in the aftermath of moving to Decatur, Ga. She is one of the few good people in a city of more than 20 thousand. It’s tempting to think that most people are “good” everywhere, but there are some places on this planet where a majority of the people are bad because of their actions or their inaction: silence in the midst of evil is complicity and betrayal. Decatur is such a place filled with bad people, brightened in spots by people like Hannah.

At the program Hannah attended in March 2014, she recounted the recent loss of her dog Heidi. Hannah told me in an interview the following week:

People haven’t noticed that Heidi died. Like why doesn’t anybody ask about my dog? When the two gay guys walk with their three dogs and somebody’s missing, I ask. Uh oh, where’s the other one?

Nothing.

Then a couple of times I’ve noticed that like – now I’m a aware of it and so I say something extra nice and they’re surprised.

Hit by the loss of her dog and the sense of disconnection from her neighbors, Hannah embarked on a mission to create connections, community.

I decided that I was just going to kill them with kindness and say “Hi.” Usually I don’t like the “How are you?” I say, “Hey there.” They’ll either say nothing or “How are you?”

And then I decided that I know and I feel guilty about neighbors that are very close that I have not met and so I don’t bake cookies anymore because I’m a vegan so I’ve made my own homemade deodorants, a lavender scent and tangerine scent, to pass out to those neighbors. And I have a little recipe card with my name and my phone number – not my email – and the ingredients of the deodorant and I’m introducing myself to people. And I get super nervous but I still do it. It’s really fun, though.

She joked about what she should call her project: “It’s really just meet the neighbors but maybe the, ‘Hi, hey there club.’ It’s just me in it.”

Hannah now lives thousands of miles away from Decatur and the city’s social pathologies. I wrote about how we met and her experiences for the History News Network in a 2015 article titled, “Doing Public History: This Is What Success Can Look Like.” Back then, I had to use a pseudonym to protect her from retaliation by her neighbors, the bad people, and in the article I called her “Susan.”

In a way, our pets sparked a friendship. Had it not been for Heidi, I never would have met John Hamilton in Hannah’s small apartment and I never would have met Hannah and learned her touching story.

I hope that John Hamilton was greeted at the Rainbow Bridge by our own Hannah (1998-2012), Emily, Zeke, Ziggy, Emerson, Rufus, Clyde, and Flagler.

Hertz Rotenstein (1939-2023)

“Hitman Kills Local Developer.” That should have been the headline in April 1977 after Hertz Rotenstein’s business partners conspired to kill him. They hired a self-described “apartment building owner” who then offered to pay someone who turned out to be a professional FBI informant $6,500 to kill Rotenstein.

Continue reading

Polluted History

I began writing about the history of numbers gambling in Pittsburgh in 2020. My earliest articles relied on decades of historical research and writing, much of it focused on the city’s Hill District. After several months of research and doing interviews with community members it became clear that much of that earlier work that I relied upon was incomplete and in some cases just plain wrong.

Unfortunately, some of my work published between 2020 and 2022 also repeats long-held beliefs about chapters in Pittsburgh’s history. One of the most problematic mistakes I made was writing that Pittsburgh gambling entrepreneur William “Woogie” Harris was a barber and that he opened the Hill District’s iconic Crystal Barber Shop. Historians and journalists for decades have written about Harris as a barber and the individual who founded the Crystal Barber Shop.

Crystal Barber Shop, 1950s. Photo courtesy Pittsburgh City Archives.

It turns out that Harris didn’t actually “open” the Crystal Barber Shop; he bought it in the mid-1920s from a master barber named Frank Belt. Belt was a Maryland transplant whose family included an ex-wife, Bessie Simms, and daughter, Madeline Belt. The Belt women were among the best known stage stars during the Harlem Renaissance and I told some of their story in an article published earlier this year.

Recently historians have begun citing my work in their writing on Hill District history. Earlier this week, a new Hill District Digital History Project launched. The essay on the Crystal Barber Shop was more legend than history. It recycled more of the same stories about Harris and his various business enterprises. And, it repeated the error that Harris founded the barber shop.

Crystal Barber Shop entry, Hill District Digital History Project website. Screen capture Nov. 16, 2023.

You really can’t fault the essay’s author or the project’s leaders. Correcting decades of incomplete and incorrect history is a heavy lift. So is owning up to making mistakes that make their way into new historical research and writing. Mistakes like my first work on Hill District history, including the Crystal Barber Shop.

I emailed the history professor leading the new digital history effort with specific concerns about the accuracy of the Crystal Barber Shop entry. He replied,

I went back and looked at the Crystal Barber Shop story with your critiques in mind.  In your original email yesterday morning, you wrote, “Woogie Harris didn’t open and operate the shop; he owned the business as a front for his numbers business.”  So I went to the original written narrative which includes all citations;  ironically, the student used your article in Very Local, which reads, “Harris might have been Pittsburgh’s best-known barber...[he] opened the Crystal Barbershop on Wylie Avenue in the Hill District in the 1920s.”

Guilty as charged. The tainted history that I used found its way into downstream work, from respected local university professors, journalists, and book authors, to my first forays into Pittsburgh numbers history. And now, the new Hill District Digital History Project.

In subsequent emails with the project historian I laid out how I ended up repeating bogus historical facts that had worked their way into established local oral tradition and academic histories. And then I asked him to remove the link to my 2022 article about the Crystal Barber Shop. I suggested linking to later work that reflects my recent research that more correctly recount’s the shop’s history.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is veryLocal-screenshot-copy.jpg

I then emailed one of the online news outlets that published one of my articles about the Crystal Barber Shop. I asked, “Please make a correction to my 2022 article.”

“New research shows that Woogie Harris didn’t ‘open’ the Crystal Barber Shop,” I wrote to a Very Local editor. “He bought the business from barber Frank Belt. He also wasn’t a ‘barber.’ My article was based on the decades of writing about Harris.”

The two mistakes that I pointed out in my request for a correction don’t invalidate the entire article. But, they do diminish its capacity as a teaching tool and as a piece of journalism. I have not yet received a reply from the editor and I will update this post once/if I do.

Update (Nov. 21, 2023): I never received a response from Verylocal.com.

© 2023 D.S. Rotenstein

This story has been updated

On Wednesday Sept. 6, my article about an African American community event’s displacement appeared in an academic blog. By the end of the day, Decatur, Ga., blogger Dan Whisenhunt’s Decaturish.com website published two updates to a feature about the previous weekend’s Decatur Day celebration that appeared one day earlier. Those two updates included reporting about the allegations by Decatur Day participants of racism by Decatur city officials in the decision to relocate Decatur Day from a city park in the Oakhurst neighborhood to a downtown greenspace.

I wonder where Mr. Whisenhunt and his colleagues might have learned about those allegations of racism? The two blog staff persons who attended the event, writer Zoe Seiler and photographer Dean Hesse, didn’t include any reporting about it in the original post-event feature. Neither did Seiler’s tweet the day after Decatur Day.

Seriously, how could Seiler have spent any time at the event and not heard the widespread talk about the perceived racist intent behind the move? She tweeted that she “heard some powerful stories,” yet she apparently missed the most powerful story of them all. And, how could she have spent any time reporting in that community in the weeks and months before the event and not heard about it? Decatur (pop. 24,338) isn’t exactly a sprawling metropolis like its neighbor, Atlanta (pop. 499,127).

One week before Decatur Day, I queried one of the people I interviewed why I, a writer sitting at a desk in Pittsburgh, Pa., could be asking questions about Decatur Day and racism while none of the local press seemed to be. One of the people I interviewed for my article said, “They don’t want us to talk about it. But it’s got to be addressed and it’s got to be known.”

Could the information that led to the Decaturish.com updates have originated with my article? Probably. In fact, I’d bet on it. I could have made a boatload of money betting on the prediction that none of this would appear in local media accounts either in advance of Decatur Day or afterwards. I even anticipated it in my article. Go figure.

Yet, Mr. Whisenhunt — a former newspaper journalist who as a blogger has spent a decade haranguing and harassing metro Atlanta news outlets and national newspapers for failing to give him the credit he thinks that he’s due — didn’t see fit to credit my article in his updates.

It’s not that I want to be mentioned in his blog; I don’t. It’s more about Mr. Whisenhunt’s role as Decatur’s news gatekeeper and his site’s apparent lack of transparency and accountability, two key tenets from the Society for Professional Journalists four-part code of ethics.

It’s almost as if by magic the site decided to add interviews with city officials and Decatur Day planners about the allegations of racism.

For Mr. Whisenhunt, it appears to be ethics for thee but not for me.

Decatur Day 2023

The email that I received 11 days before this year’s annual reunion of Black residents in Decatur, Ga. was troubling: “I just wanted to let you know that the City is trying to get rid of Decatur Day.” I have gotten many similar emails, texts, and phone calls since 2011 when I began documenting gentrification, racism, and erasure in the Atlanta suburb.

Past Decatur Day photo courtesy of a resident who prefers to remain anonymous.

I replied to the email asking for additional information. I also reached out to earlier collaborators in my work, current and former Black Decaturites that I have interviewed. They, in turn, connected me with others who had deep attachments to Decatur Day. Their belief was crystal clear. “People in the neighborhood saying the whites don’t want blacks at the park,” one told me.

The park that my collaborator mentioned is Decatur’s McKoy Park. It is located in the city’s Oakhurst neighborhood, the site of Decatur’s latest displacement phase — one of many stretching back more than a century.

I did multiple telephone interviews in the four days after receiving the initial email. Decatur Day participants sent me photos from past years. The digital editors for the Urban History Association agreed to consider an article on serial displacement, Decatur Day, and contemporary public policy. I completed a 3,500-word draft in two days. One day after submitting it, I received an email from the editors: “Looking forward to running the piece.”

The article, “Decatur Day and the History of Serial Displacement in an Atlanta Suburb,” is now out in The Metropole.

An amusing postscript to the reporting that I did for the UHA article appeared yesterday in a heavily illustrated puff piece published in the Decaturish.com blog. Two people from the blog’s staff attended the Sept. 2 event.

The article’s featured photo shows a man studying a poster mounted on an easel. The poster reads, “Displaced But Not Erased.” It includes three images: two historic newspaper clippings and a photo of a street sign juxtaposed against the Decatur High School football stadium wall.

Decaturish.com screen capture, September 6, 2023.

All of the images originated from my 2020 National Council on Public History virtual walking tour of Decatur’s former ghetto, the Beacon Community: Displaced and Erased: Decatur Walking Tour. Even the language that organizers used in the poster to resist Decatur’s tendencies to erase Black people and Black history derived from the 2020 tour.

Zoe Seiler, who wrote the article, also tweeted a different photo showing the poster. The content in the tweet is more legible than the photo published in the blog, especially the street sign photo.

Zoe Seiler tweet screen capture, Sept. 3, 2023. The photo in the upper right frame shows the Decatur Day poster, “Displaced but not Erased.”
Photo tweeted by Zoe Seiler, Sept. 3, 2023. https://twitter.com/zoemseiler/status/1698400495721669007/photo/2.

I photographed the Robin Street sign on June 11, 2018. The framing was intentional: to tell the story of how Decatur city officials used the high school stadium wall to prevent residents in the adjacent Allen Wilson Terrace apartments from watching the football games. But that context seems to be missing from the story published in the blog.

Robin Street sign and Decatur High School football stadium, June 11, 2018. Photo by David S. Rotenstein.
Displaced and Erased: Decatur Walking Tour screenshot.

I am honored that my work continues to influence people in Decatur. The local blog’s coverage of the event reinforces my assertions that the city and its white residents silence, erase, and whitewash history and current events.

© 2023 D.S. Rotenstein

A landfill is no place for “missing middle housing”

In 2003, Decatur, Ga., playwright Valetta Anderson, her partner Cotis Weaver, and several neighbors sued the City of Decatur to prevent the redevelopment of an apartment building into high-end townhomes. The lawsuit and conversation it started could have been a turning point for Decatur to preserve affordable housing and diversity. Instead, the city went in a different direction.

Now, 20 years later, the home Anderson and Weaver lived in, along with hundreds of other affordable single- and multi-family homes have been demolished and sent to landfills. Earlier this year, the City of Decatur was forced to confront more than 20 years of policy missteps by amending its zoning ordinance to allow for so-called “missing middle housing.” The problem is, the city had lots of missing middle housing (and diversity).

Continue reading

Is It Time To Tear Down A Bootlegger’s Home and Garage? [UPDATED]

Last year the Pittsburgh City Council voted to designate a former bootlegger-turned-brewery executive’s home as a historic landmark. Joe Tito became a booze and gambling kingpin during Prohibition. He built an empire from his 1817 Fifth Avenue home and a brick garage. Both buildings comprise the city-designated historic site. At a January 17, 2023, development activities meeting, Uptown Partners of Pittsburgh, the community development corporation that sponsored the historic landmarking, announced that it supported demolishing the garage. It would be replaced by one of two buildings in a $70 million redevelopment project.

Site plan shared during the Jan. 17, 2023, Development Activities Meeting. The blue rectangle denotes the 2022 historic site boundary.

Located at 1818 Colwell Street, Tito built the garage in 1922 to house his family’s fleet of trucks used to move bootleg whiskey and beer throughout the region. After Prohibition ended, Tito and his brothers bought the Latrobe Brewing Company. They converted the garage into the brewery’s first Pittsburgh beer distributorship. It’s where they first sold Rolling Rock beer in 1935.

Continue reading

The draftsman

Louis A.S. Bellinger (1891-1946) was Pittsburgh’s only licensed and practicing Black architect for the entire time that he practiced in the Steel City. My recent NEXTpittsburgh article digs deeper into Bellinger’s biography than the laundry lists of his jobs and buildings penned by historic preservationists. It’s hard to construct a biography of a consequential historical figure who left behind few traces beyond documents in public records and newspaper articles reporting on his work. There is lots more to the Bellinger story and it took some creative sleuthing to patch it together. There are also sidebars to the Bellinger story. This post is about one those: a draftsman who briefly worked for Louis Bellinger in the early 1920s.

The Pittsburgh Courier, Nov. 22, 1924.

My first entry in the Bellinger arc was my 2022 NEXTpittsburgh article about the architect’s younger brother, Walter Bellinger. Walter, along with other family members, followed Louis to Pittsburgh in the early 1920s. Walter went into the family business: the building trades. As a carpenter, he worked on buildings throughout the region before moving to California in the 1950s. Walter’s greatest contribution, however, was helping to build Pittsburgh’s Muslim community. After taking the name Saeed Akmal, he became a founder of Pittsburgh’s First Moslem Mosque.

My second entries in the Bellinger family narrative arc deal with one of Louis’s earliest commissions as a professional architect. In 1920, he designed and built the Central Amusement Park, a Black-owned sports stadium in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. I wrote about the brothers who hired Bellinger, their family’s efforts to get recognition for their achievements, and 21st century erasures by the historic preservation community.

During the 1920s, Bellinger built his small architectural practice and social capital among Pittsburgh’s growing Black entrepreneurial elite. City directories and newspaper articles show that he employed at least one draftsman in his office.

NEXTPittsburgh, April 5, 2023
Continue reading