Historic preservation is about people

Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission member Karen Loysen must not have gotten the memo: historic preservation is no longer just about pretty old buildings built by rich (white) men. Over the past 20 years, the field has sought to become more inclusive and people-centered. Loysen, a Pittsburgh architect, seems to be out of touch with current best practices in historic preservation.

Loysen’s unsophisticated and narrow perspective on historic preservation was on display in her statements about Pittsburgh’s Tito-Mecca-Zizza House as it worked its way through the HRC hearing cycle on its way to historic site designation. Though Loysen and her HRC colleagues declined to recommend landmarking the site, on June 7, 2022, the Pittsburgh City Council voted 6-2 to make the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House Pittsburgh’s newest historic site.

Children in the Tito-mecca-Zizza House side yard.

The landmark nomination that I prepared in 2021, in collaboration with Tito, Mecca, and Zizza family members, included many historical family photos. These pictures show the Victorian home over the span of several decades, lovingly used by the families. The photos also provide invaluable snapshots in time that show how some elements of the historic home have remained unchanged and how other elements were altered or replaced in the late 20th century. They are an invaluable asset any historian or architectural historian would be eager to have to make the case for a property’s historical significance.

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Lost Lloyds: A Pittsburgh Gambling Site Is Erased

If only Pittsburgh had a functioning historic preservation law and a more sophisticated historic preservation advocacy community. A few weeks ago I was in the city’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood to plan for my upcoming Squirrel Hill by the Numbers walking tour dates and I noticed that the facade of 1926 Murray Avenue was missing. It had been there last winter.

Former Beacon Club (1928 1/2 Murray Ave., left) above “H&R Block” and former Squirrel Hill Veteran’s Club (right, 1926 Murray Ave.) in 2019.

I had first encountered the block where the building is located in 2019. I had begun doing interviews for my research into the social history of numbers gambling in Pittsburgh. The Beacon Club, one of Pittsburgh’s most iconic and infamous twentieth century gambling clubs, had been located next door at 1928 1/2 Murray Avenue. Many of the people I interviewed early on and later described the club’s significant roles in Pittsburgh’s underworld history, Jewish history, and Black history.

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Pittsburgh City Council Testimony: Tito-Mecca-Zizza House

Today, the Pittsburgh City Council heard testimony related to the nomination of the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House as a City of Pittsburgh historic site. My written testimony (below) supplemented the 2021 nomination report I prepared and my oral testimony delivered during the hearing.

Tito House Historic Site Nomination
Bill No. 2022-0190
Pittsburgh City County Hearing
April 20, 2022

Testimony of Dr. David Rotenstein

For the record, my name is David Rotenstein and I am writing as the author of the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House historic site nomination report.

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DAM it all to Hell: Pittsburgh Historic Preservation’s Rube Goldberg Machine

In 2018, the City of Pittsburgh passed a law recognizing community organizations and implementing a process to improve stakeholder participation in development activities. The new law added to an already complicated bureaucracy for such municipal boards and commissions as the Zoning Board of Adjustment, Planning Commission, and the Historic Review Commission. These quasi-judicial boards hold public hearings where members of the public and City officials “are allowed to give testimony concerning issues under consideration.” The new Registered Community Organization Law requires all people living in a neighborhood with a registered community organization (RCO) to hold a public meeting called a development activities meeting or DAM before they can have a case heard before one of the city’s quasi-judicial boards.

Gina and Steve Super got sucked into the new DAM system soon after it launched. In1996, they bought a historic building on Pittsburgh’s Southside. For almost 50 years prior to their purchase, the two-and-a-half-story brick building at 2106 East Carson Street had housed Gerson Brothers, a tailoring and dry cleaning business. After buying the building, Gina Super opened The Laundry Basket in the storefront space.

2016 East Carson Street (Lucy’s Handmade Clothing Shop). Photo December 2021.

About two years ago, the Supers decided to make some changes. They closed the laundry business and converted the space into a retail store. At the same time, the Supers painted the building’s exterior. “All we wanted to do was freshen up the paint on the front and we replaced it with the same exact colors,” Gina Super told me in a January 2022 interview. “It wasn’t like we were changing or altering the front of the building. We repainted the identical colors.”

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Something stinks in Pittsburgh’s Strip District

A historic building in Pittsburgh’s Strip District is being demolished. There’s no question that demolition was the only economically viable alternative for the former Federal Cold Storage Company building. I had known about the building for decades: its giant illuminated fish had been a familiar sight that I fondly recalled from living in the city during the 1990s. In 2020, a developer found the right combination of plans and financing to convert the property from an abandoned industrial warehouse into a new mixed-use development. But first, the historic building had to be demolished.

Like me, lots of Pittsburgh residents had loved the fish sign. My attachments to the building went deeper, though. I found its industrial design and history interesting and that history dovetailed with my research interests. I have written on the history of Pittsburgh’s food-related industries and the industrial architectural and landscapes associated with it. Additionally,  I had written a history of an Alexandria, Virginia, ice plant  — a related historic property type. In 2020, I learned more about the building’s history and its roles in Pittsburgh labor and organized crime history. Continue reading

The Highland Park pool

Visitors to Pittsburgh’s Highland Park can read interpretive panels placed throughout the property to learn about the park’s early history; natural history; engineering; and, redevelopment activities over time.

Interpretive signage, Highland Park, October 2021.

There’s even a plaque explaining a plaque.

What they won’t find is a single sign, word, or photo that tells the story of more than 20 years of racial violence and civil rights protests that made the park’s swimming pool a national flashpoint in the struggle to desegregate public accommodations.

The first of many Pittsburgh Courier headlines for articles written over several decades detailing the Highland Park pool’s civil rights struggle. August 8, 1931.

Men protesting swimming pool segregation with signs reading ‘We want democracy at Highland Park Pool, Mayor Lawrence, what do you want?’ and ‘We fought together, why can’t we swim together,’ Grant Street, Downtown, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, circa 1949. (Photo by Charles ‘Teenie’ Harris/Carnegie Museum of Art/Getty Images)

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Decatur’s Genocide Cannon

In 1906, the United Daughters of the Confederacy donated a cannon to DeKalb County, Georgia. According to the story attached to the cannon, it had been used in an 1836 campaign against Native Americans. Two years later, the UDC added to the collection in Decatur’s courthouse square by donating a Confederate monument. Activists succeeded in getting the monument removed in 2020 and they set their sights on getting rid of the cannon dedicated to commemorating the “Indian War of 1836.” But the cannon’s story goes much deeper than the displacement and murder of indigenous people in 1836. One question the Decatur activists don’t appear to have asked is why the UDC sought to commemorate a war that took place 25 years before the Civil War.

Cannon in Decatur courthouse square, June, 2021.

The so-called “Indian War of 1836” was a military campaign waged by the United States against the Muskogee (Creek) people who had lived in Georgia for more than a thousand years. It was authorized under the 1830 “Indian Removal Act.” Decatur’s activists got that part of the history right. What they missed is the 1836 Georgia military action’s connections to another campaign of displacement and murder happening at the same time: the Second Seminole War.

Fought in Florida’s swamps and prairies between 1835 and 1842, the Second Seminole War isn’t part of most history curricula. I grew up in coastal Florida among the war’s traces: the ruins of sugar plantations destroyed in the fighting and place names commemorating the Native Americans and United States soldiers who died in the battles. My first exposure to historical archaeology occurred in these places and we were taught a version of the Second Seminole War in the schools. It was unavoidable: one of the schools I attended in Daytona Beach was named Osceola Elementary School. Osceola (1804-1838) was a Seminole leader captured and imprisoned during the war. More about him later.

Daytona Beach is located in Volusia County. An east-west transect cutting through the county would begin at the Atlantic Ocean on the “World’s Most Famous Beach” and continue inland across the heart of the county’s tourism landscape into the pinewoods and swamps of Volusia’s rural interior. In 1836, there were no speedways and tourists. The economy then depended on farms, ranches, and agricultural processing facilities worked by enslaved Africans.

Thomas Sidney Jesup. Source: Wikipedia.

The link between Volusia County in 1836 and the “genocide cannon” in 2021 isn’t immediately evident. Unless you’ve heard of General Thomas Jesup (1788-1860). Jesup was Quartermaster General of the United States Army in the spring of 1836 when President Andrew Jackson sent him to command the federal response to Georgia and Alabama’s request for military support.  That short-lived action became known as the “Creek War of 1836” or the “Second Creek War.”

Instead of returning to Washington and his duties as Quartermaster General, Jesup went south to Florida to take command of U.S. troops in what became known as the Second Seminole War. He had developed a reputation as a ruthless commander, using tactics that some of his brutal attacks on Native American towns. He used those skills well in Florida, where he and his troops waged a merciless campaign.

One of Jesup’s most infamous exploits in Florida was deceiving Seminole leader Osceola into believing that the general wanted to begin truce talks. Osceola approached Jesup’s troops under a white flag and was immediately captured. Imprisoned at Fort Moultrie in Charleston, South Carolina, Osceola died in 1838.

Jesup’s exploits, first in Georgia and then Florida, are what bring us back to the Decatur cannon. Strategically and policy-wise, the campaign against the Creeks/Muskogee in Georgia and the Seminoles in Florida, were indistinguishable. Though on the surface, it’s easy to connect the displacements and slaughter of Native Americans to so-called “Indian removal,” there’s a deeper history that might explain the UDC’s zeal to celebrate the 1836 events. 

Not long after arriving in Florida, Jesup found himself in Volusia County. There, on December 9, 1836, Jesup wrote to U.S. Secretary of War Benjamin F. Butler acknowledging his arrival and offering his initial take on the “war.” Historians credit this document as the most cogent analysis for why Andrew Jackson, who commanded U.S. troops in the First Seminole War (1817-1818), went to war again in 1835. Jesup wrote,

This, you may be assured, is a negro, not an Indian war; and if it be not speedily put down, the South will feel the effects of it on their slave population before the end of the next season.

This …. is a negro, not an Indian war.” The Southeastern campaigns against indigenous peoples were as much about protecting the enslavers’ “property” as stealing Native American land. Enslaved Africans in Georgia and North Florida found refuge among some of the Native Americans we call Creeks/Muskogee and Seminole. This refuge included the opportunity to take up arms against the whites who had enslaved them.

Atlanta Constitution, April 25, 1906.

So yes, the 1906 reports that the Agnes Lee UDC chapter had acquired and placed the cannon to commemorate the actions of Col. James Calhoun, a military commander in 1836 and who later became Atlanta’s mayor during the Civil War. They also may be seen as celebrating the violent response to the resistance mounted by enslaved Africans fighting side-by-side with Native Americans. 

© 2021 D.S. Rotenstein

 

The Pittsburgh mob’s Miami resort

The Ankara was a popular Pittsburgh nightclub and restaurant. Located just outside the city limits on Route 51 in Pleasant Hills, it opened in 1946. For more than 20 years, the Ankara fed and entertained Pittsburgh residents. Its floor shows, dancing, and ice revues were part of the city’s nightlife golden era. The Ankara, though, was mob owned and operated.

Ankara nightclub souvenir photo cover.

Charles Jamal was a Turkish immigrant who bounced around North America in the years before World War II. He named his new Pittsburgh nightclub for the city in his homeland. Jamal’s organized crime ties beyond the club remain opaque. In 1952, muckraking journalists Jack Lait and Mortimer Lee described Jamal, “a Turk who runs the swank Ankara nightclub” as one of Pittsburgh’s “big boys” in the county outside the city limits, in their survey of American organized crime, U.S.A. Confidential.

You can read more about the Ankara and Jamal in this August 2020 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article. This post digs into the crime family that was closely associated with Jamal and the Ankara from the time the club opened until the early 1960s: Nathan Mattes, et al. MobsBurgh previously featured Nate Mattes and his brother, Irwin, a..k.a., Pittsburgh’s “Big Six” of Gambling. This time around we’re going to highlight the nightclub’s Miami Beach, Florida, namesake, the Ankara Motel.

The American Jewish Outlook, September 1, 1950.

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White Fragility: Historic Preservation Edition

It’s difficult to heal trauma without truth-telling. You have to uncover and acknowledge what has been done wrong before you can fully move forward. — Rev. Mark Sills, NPR, October 11, 2020.

Starting in 2016 members of the Silver Spring Historical Society (Silver Spring, Maryland) began attending my public programs (lectures, walking tours). They regularly monopolized discussion times with long-winded and disruptive comments about how their organization wasn’t racist.

In early 2018, I was invited to speak in Takoma Park, Maryland. Almost on cue, the Silver Spring Historical Society’s Marcie Stickle and Mary Reardon launched into their speeches during the Q&A. The City of Takoma Park recorded the program and posted it on YouTube. The recording captures the embodiment of white fragility in the Silver Spring Historical Society members. The clip below is from that recording.

What’s the problem with being “not racist”? It is a claim that signifies neutrality: “I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.” But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. — Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019).

In my measured opinion, Silver Spring and other places like it will never heal, never move forward without community truth-telling and without abandoning the safe places where folks declare that they are not racists.

 

Field trips

In 2019 I began teaching a seminar on ethnography and community engagement for historic preservation in Goucher College’s graduate historic preservation program. Goucher’s summer residency program has a tradition: field trips to Baltimore area historic sites and museums. I took my inaugural class to Baltimore’s Otterbein neighborhood. That had been my plan for 2020 and then the pandemic hit. All bets were off: Goucher’s classes moved online to Zoom and my students wouldn’t be traveling to Baltimore from New Mexico, Maine, and elsewhere. The only way I was going to have a field trip was if I did something virtually. Otterbein was my first choice as a “destination.”

Baltimore resident tells Goucher students about her neighborhood’s history, July 2019.

By June I was already reaching out to Baltimore colleagues to help assemble video footage and photos to fill in my Otterbein gaps. I would try to recreate the 2019 field trip in which we walked through the historic district and discussed issues of regulatory control over aesthetics, gentrification, affordable housing, and which histories are privileged in places we recognize as “historic.”

Homesteader Park, Otterbein neighborhood, Baltimore, 2015.

My virtual tour script was taking shape and I was just about to send emails with requests for specific video footage and photos when I got an email from a Decatur, Georgia, resident. He had seen social media posts about a virtual walking tour I had done for the 2020 National Council on Public History’s March conference that had moved online.

Atlanta Daily World urban homesteading ad. June 10, 1979.

After a few email exchanges and Zoom chats, we moved forward with a plan to revive the NCPH virtual tour for my class and for Decatur residents. It was going to be a remote community engagement exercise that brought my graduate students into the same virtual space and Zoom grid as more than 30 Decatur residents interested in learning about the city’s erased Black history sites.

In a way, it was a perfect idea. My interest in in Baltimore’s Otterbein neighborhood originated in my Decatur research. The first Decatur teardown that I documented in October 2011 belonged to an urban homesteader. Urban homesteading was an innovative affordable housing program introduced in the early 1970s and Decatur was one of 21 pilot cities [PDF] for the federal program. Baltimore also was one of the earliest urban homesteading cities.

My article about the Decatur virtual tour appears in History@Work post, “A Virtual Walking Tour in Decatur, Georgia: Linking Race, History, Community.”

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein