While researching African American communities in Montgomery County, Maryland, I visited several historic Black cemeteries and photographed the cultural landscapes and grave markers. This slideshow is a sample from that research.
© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein
Moses Order logo, c. 1887.
Peter Paul Brown must be turning in his grave if he knows about the kerfuffle over one of the cemeteries owned by the Black benevolent organization he founded in 1867. The Philadelphia physician who lived between c. 1822 and 1882 established the Ancient United Order of Sons and Daughters, Brothers and Sisters of Moses — the Moses Order — to provide death benefits, healthcare, and other social welfare services for African Americans in a deeply segregated Reconstruction era America. Brown was a skilled entrepreneur and he held tight to his intellectual property and the organization’s name. That name is now the center of a fight over land in suburban Maryland just across the border with Washington, D.C., where activists claim hundreds of bodies are buried beneath a parking lot and construction site.
The site is one of many abandoned and desecrated African American burial grounds throughout the United States for which activists are seeking recognition, protection, and commemoration. One of the best known examples is the cemetery where the African Burial Ground National Monument was established in Manhattan. Massive protests and congressional hearings brought the issue to headlines in newspapers around the nation in the early 1990s.
African Burial Ground Way, New York, New York, 2018.
In 2015, the Montgomery County, Maryland, Planning Department began holding public hearings for a new sector plan in a mostly commercial area in unincorporated Bethesda. Planners disclosed that their research had uncovered the likely site of a historic African American cemetery in their study area. It had been documented in old maps and in a local history book but had been mostly forgotten since the 1960s when heavy equipment excavated much of the site to construct a high-rise apartment building and grade a surface parking lot. None of the graves was professionally excavated to relocate the bodies buried there. Continue reading
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar — attributed to Sigmund Freud
Sometimes a cigar store isn’t a cigar store — #Mobsburgh
In our last #Mobsburgh outing we visited with the Mattes family and got to know Israel Mattes,
The Morning Herald, Monessen, Pa. march 6, 1948.
a former Pittsburgh police officer who became a bootlegger and gambler. Here, we are going to get to know his older brother, Nathan.
In this visit, we also are going to look at an important institution found in organized crime: the front business. Nathan Mattes’s story is an ideal window into how racketeers used “legitimate” businesses to hide or facilitate their illegal enterprises. You see, for a few years, he ran his numbers racket out of a downtown Pittsburgh cigar store. Law enforcement’s efforts in the 1940s to end his operation spanned several years and generated sensational headlines in the city’s newspapers. Continue reading
I recently participated in a Society for Industrial Archeology online program featuring projects with a social justice element. The SIA program titled, “Infrastructure and Social Justice” included a presentation on a Tennessee bridge used during the Trail of Tears and a viaduct in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Infrastructure and racial segregation have a long and fraught history. Railroads and highways frequently created firm boundaries separating racialized spaces. Many cities throughout North America have their “other side of the tracks” or interstate highways that were built to separate Black neighborhoods from white ones. In some places, like Detroit, Michigan; Decatur, Georgia; and, North Brentwood, Maryland, walls and other barricades divided Black space from white space.
Railroad tracks, Decatur, Georgia.
Crivella’s Wayside Inn. Tucked away in the 1000-block of East West Highway near downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, this former restaurant was the scene of non-violent civil rights protests between 1962 and 1965. Montgomery County in 2006 bought the former Crivella’s Wayside Inn. After holding listening sessions with members of Silver Spring’s historic Black community, county leaders worked with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History to collect stories, artifacts, and design exhibits to tell the story of Silver Spring’s Black communities, from colonial plantations and enslavement through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement.
That’s what a journalist writing about a new Silver Spring Civil Rights Museum might have written had there been a museum developed in the former Crivella’s space. Instead, Montgomery County officials demolished the former restaurant and erased its history. This post explores a lost opportunity for Montgomery County to confront its segregationist history and seek reconciliation with its African American residents, past and present. Continue reading
Last week the Pittsburgh Planning Commission agreed with a recommendation forwarded to it by the city’s Historic Review Commission that an 1840s house in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood is eligible for designation as a city historic landmark.
The Ewalt Mansion is a two-story brick Greek Revival home built by an early Pittsburgh resident, Samuel Ewalt. According to historic preservationists, the building is historically significant for its architecture and for its association with important people and events in Pittsburgh’s history.
Ewalt Mansion, March 2020.
Lawrenceville is one of Pittsburgh’s most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. Change and displacement are happening so quickly in the neighborhood that in 2019 the City of Pittsburgh passed a new inclusive zoning law. The law is an experiment and temporary — it expires 18 months from its enactment — and it only covers large developers building at least 20 rental units. The pilot program’s goal is to preserve affordable housing. Affordable housing advocates hailed the new law, which only applies to Lawrenceville. Continue reading
Like most other places in North America, historic preservation in Pittsburgh has (at least) two separate and unequal tracks: one for places associated with white history and another for buildings, structures, and sites associated with Black history.
Last week I visited several buildings associated with Black history that are designated under Pittsburgh’s historic preservation law. There are no African-American-themed historic districts in Pittsburgh. A 2006 Young Preservationists Association of Pittsburgh report, “Unprotected Pittsburgh,” identified only three locally-designated properties: The Centre Avenue YMCA, John Wesley A.M.E. Zion Church, and the New Granada Theater.
The Centre Avenue YMCA is a city-designated property. It is being rehabilitated for use as affordable housing. March 2020 photo.
Most Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, residents recognize the building on the northwest corner of Wylie Avenue and Elmore Street as the Crawford Grill No. 2. That’s the name that the most visible business in the building went by for half a century and that’s the name that historic preservationists used in 2019 to nominate the property to the National Register of Historic Places.[1]
2141 Wylie Avenue, Pittsburgh. October 2019.
The Crawford Grill No. 2 isn’t a bad name for the building. It fits, considering how long the nightclub occupied the space. But because historic preservationists have focused on the building’s time as the Crawford Grill No. 2 and the people who owned it between 1945 and 2003, there’s a lot missing from the building’s story. The historic preservation narrative, which closely hews to previously published texts documenting the building’s colorful time as an internationally renowned jazz club, conforms to what the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the danger of a single story.”
The “single story,” according to Adichie, flattens experience and they encourage stereotypes: “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
This post offers some additional storylines to the three-story brick building at 2141 Wylie Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. I need to be up front about how I ended up reading the draft National Register nomination for the property. In August 2019 I began a research project stemming from my work on a book about erasure and gentrification in an Atlanta suburb. I had been studying numbers gambling in urban and suburban areas since 2015.
[A quick primer on numbers gambling offsite source]
Numbers slips confiscated in 1930 by Pittsburgh police in the city’s North Side. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 29, 1930.
Histories of the Hill District became essential reading and I took advantage of local archival resources after moving back to Pittsburgh in 2019. While reading some of the Hill District work I went down a research rabbit hole pursuing questions around the intersection of history and folklore in Hill District vice. The light on the other end of the rabbit hole led me to begin conversations with a university press about a book on the history of Pittsburgh numbers gambling rackets. But that’s a story for another place and another time. The remainder of this post focuses on 2141 Wylie Avenue and some of its other stories.
Sometime in 2019 the City of Decatur, Georgia, deleted from the municipal website its 2009 citywide historic resources survey and all of the study’s supporting materials: a comprehensive narrative report, maps, and forms for all of the properties surveyed. Visitors to the city’s website can read and download the 1982 Decatur Town Center Plan, a 2004 Greenway Plan, a 2002 MARTA Station Study, city council meeting agendas and summaries, and lots of colorful publications touting everything that makes “Decatur Greater.”
What visitors to the city’s website can no longer read and download is the costly study completed in 2009 that fully erased the city’s Black experience along with every single historic property important to Decatur’s African American community.
It may be that Decatur city officials are embarrassed by the racist survey. I doubt that’s the reason — city officials have vigorously defended it since 2012 when I began writing about the survey’s shortcomings.
February 22, 2012 email from then-Decatur Historic Preservation Planner Regina Brewer to David Rotenstein.
City officials may be embarrassed that the survey failed to meet even the most basic requirements for such surveys established by the Georgia Historic Preservation Division, the state historic preservation office. Though city officials never informed residents and taxpayers, the 2009 citywide historic resources survey couldn’t even be entered into the state’s master survey files because the city’s consultant completed, and the then-historic preservation planner approved, a deficient product.
January 2019 memorandum requesting that the Decatur City Commission approve an application for federal grant funds to complete a new historic resources survey.
Details about the deficient 2009 survey were revealed earlier this year when the city’s new historic preservation planner requested approval to seek federal grant money to fund a new citywide historic resources survey. The Decatur City Commission on January 22, 2019, voted unanimously to submit the grant application.
Buried deep inside the grant application that the City of Decatur submitted to the state, which administers the federal grant program for the National Park Service, is the admission that a new survey is needed to correct the deficiencies in the 2009 study: “The City of Decatur’s previous historic resources survey in 2009 did not use Georgia Historic Resources Survey Forms, so HPD does not have copies of the collected data. At that time, HPD requested that the correct forms be used in order to integrate the information into their inventories. That is the City’s intent with the updated survey.”
City of Decatur’s 2019 Historic Preservation Fund CLG Survey & Planning Grant Application. Copy received from the City of Decatur under Georgia’s Open Records Act.
The City of Decatur didn’t get the $15,000 it requested in its application. According to the same document, city officials expect to spend $55,000 on the new survey.
In September, I wrote to the city’s new historic preservation planner after I received a copy of the grant application. I asked, “Can you tell me if HPD approved the application?”
“They did not,” she replied.
Curious about updates to Decatur’s historic preservation planning documents, I visited the City’s website. Previously, the complete 2009 historic resource survey documents had been posted in the Historic Preservation Commission’s “Historic Decatur” page. I wrote to City Manager Andrea Arnold asking why they had been deleted. I received no response.
City of Decatur website screen capture, “Historic Resources Survey.”
Perhaps some Decatur residents or local journalists might have better luck getting answers from city officials regarding the deletion of the 2009 historic resources survey.
UPDATE:
More than a year after first emailing the Decatur city manager about the survey I tried again. Here is her reply:
Here we are rolling up on three years since the survey disappeared and two years after the city manager wrote that the survey would be restored to the city website and it’s still MIA.
Canal boat mural by Laurie Lundquist, Pennsylvania Route 28 retaining wall, Pittsburgh. Photo by David Rotenstein.
I recently met a man who looked at a hillside in a highway corridor and he saw canal boats instead of concrete retaining walls. The man is Jack Schmitt and we met during a walking tour in the Pennsylvania Route 28 highway corridor along the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh. Schmitt is a historic preservation activist who was a catalyst the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) decision to explore alternative approaches to mitigating the impacts of destroying an entire neighborhood along Route 28.
My article on Schmitt and how his work fits into emerging national trends in historic preservation has just been published in the National Council on Public History’s History@Work site. This post digs a little deeper into Schmitt’s advocacy with PennDOT.
My first conversation with Schmitt took place during an Allegheny City Society walking tour in May 2019. We met again in June at a Pittsburgh sandwich shop and I ran an audio recorder during our 90-minute chat. I also had a long history with Route 28 and the historic resources there. The former tannery buildings and the derelict industrial landscape comprised the core of the 1997 Pittsburgh History cover article that I wrote about Pittsburgh’s leather industry. The walking tour, my recent move back to Pittsburgh, and the conversation with Schmitt brought me back to a consequential episode in my professional history.
I wanted to revisit some of my understandings about the Route 28 project with the benefit of the subsequent 20 years of complicated regulatory compliance consulting and my research into how history and historic preservation are produced. This blog post and my History@Work essay are my first steps in this process.
Towards Better Mitigation
Jack Schmitt didn’t think much of PennDOT’s approach to mitigating the Route 28 impacts to historic properties. In fact, he questioned if the agency even had a mitigation plan. And what is mitigation? Mitigation represents the steps a government agency must take to compensate a community for destroying or polluting its natural or cultural resources. Most often mitigation comes in the form of reports and photographs that no one will ever read or see and archaeological excavations. Other times, it’s a flat-out bribe: An agency throws some money for historical research or a museum exhibit and calls it square.
The archaeologist and prolific regulatory compliance critic Tom King knows mitigation and how it is misunderstood and abused. In one of our many exchanges on the subject, King wrote to me in 2018, “Mitigation is widely and incorrectly understood to mean shitty compensation.” Yet, that’s frequently what results from poorly executed historic preservation research work done in coordination with a project that will destroy someplace or something people in some community value.
As a resident of one such community, Schmitt wanted better from PennDOT. Schmitt saw the steep hillside in the corridor as an opportunity. “There was going to be walls on the north side of the road and we tried to get them looking better,” he told me. “They were just going to be poured concrete walls like all the other bypasses.”
Pennsylvania Route 28 retaining wall in Etna, north of Pittsburgh.
Schmitt’s solution was to reach out to the American Canal Society to get the rights to use an image of a canal boat. Schmitt envisioned creating a visual history lesson using the new retaining walls. “As you drove along the highway, you would be passing canal boats with mules and you would get the feeling of what was happening there at one time in history,” he explained.
Canal boat image Schmitt proposed using in Pennsylvania Route 28 retaining walls.
PennDOT balked. What ended up being built were retaining walls using concrete shaped and treated to appear like stones used in Pennsylvania Canal locks. And, one of the five murals depicting images drawn from the corridor’s history did include a canal boat being drawn by mules — it is twice the size of the other murals (see the first photo in this post). Read the History@Work post to learn more about the murals and the artist who designed and executed them.
In the remainder of this post, I’d like to spend a little more time on the concept of mitigation and how folks in the real world (i.e., those who don’t work for state and federal agencies or people who aren’t cultural resource management consultants) see mitigation.
I asked Schmitt if he thought that PennDOT had fulfilled its obligations to comply with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. “I think they tried very hard and they did a lot. I have to give them credit for that,” said. Schmitt concedes that his opinion might be more positive if the historic St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church had not been demolished. The reasons why the church, which was located in the corridor, was demolished are complicated and not fully tied to the road project.
St. Nicholas church demolition, 2013. Pittsburgh Tribune-Review photo.
With the church gone and all of the homes, businesses, and industrial sites along with it, I asked Schmitt how people will learn about the community’s history. Schmitt replied, “The people learn about the community through their living memory and their oral traditions. They’re talking about that even now.” The murals, historical markers, and commemorative features at the demolished church site will help.
Former St. Nicholas church site with reproduced grotto, bronze tower base outline, and historical markers, June 2019.
Towards the end of our conversation in the restaurant, Schmitt recounted something he told an individual whose first involvement with the Route 28 project was as a volunteer in the effort to save St. Nicholas. That individual later went to work for an engineering company that does Section 106 work. Schmitt said,
I used to kid him. I said, “You were in historic preservation and now you’re in historic destruction cover-up.” I said, “You make the case for these historic things and then you mitigate them by saying we said this.” I said, “You can’t just say this, put it in a book in the library on the shelf and it doesn’t help the neighborhood to mitigate that terrible loss.”
I think that the murals and other treatments in the Route 28 corridor make great strides towards mitigating the loss of the buildings and the community. Like Schmitt, I have issues with the final results. There’s a lot missing and much of the historical knowledge that informed PennDOT’s decision-making was flawed. I only wonder what might have happened in the corridor had the agency understood what made the place special to the people who valued it. If the agency had understood and fulfilled its obligations under the National Historic Preservation Act, completing the project might have been a whole lot smoother, less expensive, and the mitigation might have been more collaborative, memorable, and meaningful.
Read the complete History@Work post on the murals and creative mitigation: https://ncph.org/history-at-work/community-driven-mitigation/.
© 2019 D.S. Rotenstein