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).
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.
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.
The fireworks have started over my recent NEXTpittsburgh op-ed about the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation’s National Register of Historic Places nomination for a house historic preservationists have dubbed the “National Negro Opera Company House.”
One local historic preservation group complained that my op-ed didn’t give them enough credit. Another hurled threats.
While the preservationists have been circling their wagons and firing their defensive shotguns, none of them has bothered to ask me a few basic questions. One no-brainer is, “What other factual errors in the NRHP nomination are there besides the ones laid out in my article?” I first suggested to PHLF that there were issues with the NRHP nomination as early as the first week in January. Another is, “Why does it matter?”
PHLF is doubling down on its position that the NRHP nomination was defensible and accurate work. A PHLF spokesperson told me in the interview I did with him for the article, “We absolutely stand by it.”
PHLF reiterated its stance in communications with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, the state agency that reviews National Register nominations before forwarding them to the National Park Service for a final determination and listing. “We stand behind [the PHLF consultant’s] work 100%,” wrote PHLF’s education coordinator in a February email to the state.
And yet, no one among the preservation crowd is curious about what led me to read the NRHP nomination and to the Hill District living room where I interviewed the 95-year-old woman quoted in my lede: Mrs. Dolores Slater. Nor are they interested in why I made such a fuss about the lack of oral history in the NRHP nomination. It’s not like PHLF didn’t have the money to do oral history — the National Park Service awarded the organization $41,378 to do oral history and the NRHP nomination.
“She died in that house,” Dolores Slater told me in a January 2023 interview. I had asked her about Ada B. Harris, beloved Pittsburgh numbers banker William “Woogie” Harris’s widow, and the house at 7101 Apple St. that historic preservationists have dubbed the “National Negro Opera Company House.”
There’s no doubt that the Apple Street house is one of Pittsburgh’s most important Black history landmarks. What is in question, however, is how (and by whom) that story is being told.
Where Ada Harris died is important for lots of reasons. In a new NEXTpittsburgh op-ed, I laid out some of those reasons. I also illustrate some significant issues with the high profile National Register of Historic Places nomination where a consultant to the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation wrote that Ada Harris had moved out of the home five years before her death.
In my op-ed, I offered some primary documentary sources where PHLF’s consultant might have gotten more accurate information about Ada Harris, etc. Of course, the PHLF consultant who researched and wrote the nomination didn’t have to go to all the trouble tracking down legal records, etc. to learn where Ada Harris died. She could have read Ada Harris’s front-page obituary published Nov. 18, 1972, in the New Pittsburgh Courier: “Mrs. Harris, whose husband amassed great wealth as a business man in the Hill District … died at their home, 7101 Apple St.”
The New Pittsburgh Courier, Nov. 18, 1972.
Of course, my op-ed is about much more than bad facts and omissions. It’s also about exclusion and an obsolete approach to historic preservation (and public history). As one of my collaborators told me, “That’s part of my family history … It affects people I know.” Perhaps that’s something that preservationists should keep in mind when writing about real people.
The Fern Hollow Bridge collapsed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the pre-dawn hours of Friday January 28, 2022. The structure had carried Forbes Avenue across a steeply sloped stream valley on the eastern edge of Frick Park. Constructed in 1901 and replaced in 1973, the Fern Hollow Bridge and Forbes Avenue comprised a large segment of the Pittsburgh eruv’s northern boundary. Stone walls, some laid by masons and another the sheer face of a steep hill, carried the boundary to the bridge’s approaches. Then, using metal poles and then light poles along the bridge’s spans, the eruv boundary crossed from west to east. When the bridge fell that cold winter morning, Pittsburgh residents lost critical transportation and spiritual infrastructure.
Forbes Avenue entrance to Frick Park and approach to the Fern Hollow Bridge, December 2022. Photo by David S. Rotenstein.
Pittsburgh has had an eruv since 1986. The Pittsburgh eruv originally wrapped around the city’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood, an area with many synagogues, Jewish day schools, and stores catering to Pittsburgh’s large Jewish community. Later expansions added several nearby neighborhoods and institutions serving Jews, including universities (Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, Carlow University, and Chatham College) and several hospitals. The Fern Hollow Bridge is located in an expansion area added in the early 1990s. Currently, the Pittsburgh eruv covers 6.7 square miles with an approximate 16-mile perimeter.
Eruv Map.jpg: Maps showing the Pittsburgh eruv boundary prior to a 2022 expansion and the Fern Hollow Bridge location. Adapted from https://www.pittsburgheruv.org/eruv-map.
A city marked by three rivers, many stream valleys, and steep topography, Pittsburgh has 446 bridges in its city limits. Though the investigation into the cause of the Fern Hollow Bridge collapse is ongoing, preliminary assessments point to deferred maintenance and a significantly deteriorated substructure. A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigation in the months after the collapse revealed that the Fern Hollow Bridge was one of many in the city and region rated poor and potentially dangerous.
It took less than a year for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation to design and rebuild the Fern Hollow Bridge. Just before it reopened, I reported on the eruv and the bridge collapse for NEXTpittsburgh, a local online news outlet. This post expands on that reporting.
Earlier this week a Silver Spring, MD, community group hosted a virtual talk on historic preservation in Montgomery County. Eileen McGuckian (a former Historic Preservation Commission chair and president of a countywide preservation organization, Montgomery Preservation) spoke for about an hour and then took questions.
One Silver Spring resident asked McGuckian if there were any Black history sites in downtown Silver Spring. This video clip captures the exchange.
(Video clip is from the Zoom recording posted by Silver Spring Town Center, Inc.)
Spoiler alert: contrary to McGuckian’s answer, there are many Black history sites in the area covered by the question. In fact, the Montgomery County Planning Department recently released a short video about a new marker commemorating one of them:
Pittsburgh’s Black-owned barber shops are an important part of the city’s history. They are the quintessential African American third spaces: places where business is transacted, information is exchanged, and social ties are maintained. They are places where the built environment meets intangible cultural heritage and they are ripe for a closer examination before the buildings and the people that make them special disappear forever.
Big Tom’s Barber Shop, Centre Ave.
Pittsburgh Planning Director Karen Abrams, at the February 2023 Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission meeting, observed that the city may be filled with sites planners and preservationists don’t know about or have historically ignored. “How we can bring light to some things that have just been not on our radars in the city, that are in predominantly Black neighborhoods,” Abrams said in a discussion of the National Register nomination for a house in Homewood once owned by Pittsburgh barber and gambling entrepreneur William “Woogie” Harris and his wife, Ada.
I have an assignment to write an article on affordable housing in Decatur, Ga. It’s been a while since I surfed through Zillow to see what things are selling for in the city’s Oakhurst neighborhood. I nearly fell out of my seat when I saw this map.
I can recall that in 2014, Oakhurst’s first million-dollar house went on the market. I can’t imagine a house on Maxwell Street selling for 2.75 million or another one a block away from where we once lived selling for 1.28 million.
For a taste of what Oakhurst’s Maxwell Street looked like a little over a decade ago, here’s a video I cobbled together documenting the transformation of one lot, one of the first teardown-mansionization conversions. Many of the houses pictured in the driving scene at the end are now gone. So, too, are the people who once lived in them.
I made the Maxwell Street video two years before a different builder transformed another one of the lots into a spectacle by tearing down a small home built in the 1940s and building what he dubbed a “1,000 Year House.” The builder live-tweeted and blogged about the project, from start to finish. The real farce was how city officials and others bought into the hype that the new brick manor was somehow affordable and sustainable.
The “1,000 Year House” site. 2009 photo is from the Decatur citywide historic resources survey.
There are many more examples over on the Ruined Decatur site.
