The Atlanta Bug

Introduction

Sometime in the late 1920s or even as late as 1930, numbers gambling arrived in Atlanta. Who brought the street lottery to the city or how appear to have been forgotten or erased. It could have been a Pullman porter or a baseball player or a musician or an itinerant laborer who taught Atlantans how to run a numbers racket. Or, it might have been a white gambler taking advantage of fertile new territory. However and whenever numbers made its way to Atlanta, it became an integral part of Black life and the white underworld just like it had in most every other city and town in the United States by 1940. This post shines a little light into a dark corner in Atlanta’s past to reveal the city’s bug men (and women).

Atlanta Constitution headline, October 21, 1968.

In Atlanta, the players and the men and women in the sporting life — the backers, writers, and runners — called the numbers racket “the bug.” It’s a catchy name that stuck and by 1932, when newspapers began reporting on Atlanta police officers arresting numbers runners and writers, that’s what reporters called it.[1]  Within a decade, numbers gambling employed hundreds of Atlantans and was a profitable business that historians won’t find discussed in any of the city’s boosterist literature. Continue reading

Zapped! Pittsburgh microwave sites

Last Fall I was driving around taking pictures of mobster graves and sites associated with organized crime history in Pittsburgh when I spotted an old microwave tower on a hilltop. It was breaking the horizon in an otherwise ordinary suburban landscape. Nearby, as is common with many first- and second-generation microwave towers building in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were radio and television broadcast towers and cellphone towers.

Former AT&T microwave tower site, December 2020. It is flanked by a television broadcast tower (Sinclair Broadcasting) and a monopole (cellphone).

I have long had an interest in the history of telecommunications history infrastructure: towers and antenna sites. The old microwave tower in Pittsburgh’s North Hills was easily recognizable from a distance as a type built by AT&T during the company’s first microwave network buildout. Towers like these were built on hilltops and mountainsides throughout the United States to create a line-of-sight antenna network carrying voice, television, and data at the speed of light. Continue reading

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

 

Silver Spring Civil Rights Museum

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

Protestors deface Silver Spring “monument”

There are 53 public art installations in Silver Spring, Maryland. Only two depict historical figures. One is a mural showing President Harry Truman during a visit to the suburban community. The other is a bronze bust of Norman Lane. Earlier this week, during protests stemming from Minneapolis resident George Floyd’s murder by police, vandals twice defaced the Norman Lane “monument.”

JUTP-Norman Lane

Just Up The Pike, Facebook, June 2020.

Lots of folks know who Harry Truman was. But Norman Lane?

Lane (1911-1987) was an indigent who wandered throughout downtown Silver Spring for much of the 20th century. He was affectionately dubbed the “Mayor of Silver Spring.” In 1991 a local artist dedicated a bronze bust depicting Lane in an alley dubbed the “Mayor’s Promenade” near 8221 Georgia Avenue.

norman-lane-2017

Norman Lane bust, 2017.

Lane was a well-known figure and stories of his exploits are part of Silver Spring’s oral tradition. He was able to walk into many Silver Spring restaurants, get a seat, and eat compliments of the establishment. These same places declined to serve African Americans. Or, if they did, required African Americans to go to back doors for take-out service.

The Norman Lane bust was one of 19 stops along the Silver Spring Black History tours that I gave between 2016 and 2018. I intentionally included Lane’s monument to underscore how effectively Silver Spring has whitewashed its history. While the community celebrates the memory of a colorful character in downtown art and commemorative spaces, there are no similar artworks and spaces dedicated to the community’s notable people of color (African Americans) who contributed to Silver Spring’s history.

2012RoscoeNix

Roscoe Nix. Source: Montgomery County Volunteer Center.

At the Norman Lane site, I talked about Roscoe Nix (1911-2012), the Alabama native and World War II veteran who worked in the U.S. departments of Labor and Justice. Nix frequently is credited with being a pioneer in Montgomery County civil rights history.

Nix served on the Maryland Human Rights Commission as its executive secretary in the 1960s; he was the first African American elected to the Montgomery County School Board (1974); and, he was the Montgomery County NAACP chapter president from 1980 to 1990.

Roscoe Nix Elementary School, 2017.

Though Montgomery County named an elementary school (several miles outside of downtown Silver Spring) for Nix in 2006, there are no monuments, markers, etc. commemorating the events in 1962 that launched Nix’s civil rights career. Nix’s contributions are invisible and the site where he cut his civil rights activism was demolished more than a decade ago.

In early 1962, shortly after Montgomery County enacted a public accommodations law, Nix and several of his white and African American coworkers went to a local restaurant in downtown Silver Spring for lunch. Nix was one of more than 600 Department of Labor employees whose offices had moved to Silver Spring the year before.

Silver Spring at the time was a “sundown suburb” and about 150 to 200 African Americans were among the agency employees relocated to Silver Spring in October 1961.

labor-dept-shifts

The Washington Post, October 17, 1961.

The Washington Post in October 1961 noted,

Silver Spring has a very small Negro population and a recent study by the Montgomery County Human Relations Commission showed that some eating establishments will accept Negro patronage and some will not.

The same Post article noted,

While a few of the Negro employes [sic.] are on the professional level a majority hold clerical jobs.

That 1961 move set the stage for civil rights actions over the next five years that helped remove many of the remaining Jim Crow barriers in downtown Silver Spring.

Between April and August 1962, at least four episodes of racial discrimination were documented at Crivella’s Wayside Inn on East-West Highway. Roscoe Nix was the first to file a complaint filed under the county’s public accommodation law.

1962 protest photo

Baltimore Afro-American, May 5, 1962.

The restaurant was the site of several sit-ins and street demonstrations in 1962. Over the next four years, additional complaints and litigation were filed against Crivella’s alleging

CORE team served

Chicago Defender, February 18, 1963.

civil rights violations. The demonstrations were widely covered by Black and white newspapers and they attracted such notables as Washington-based Julius Hobson, a leader in the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE).

Roscoe Nix’s activism got it all started.

Meanwhile, as Nix was trying to get a meal in one of Silver Spring’s restaurants, Lane was able to get seated in most establishments he entered and he was served — the food was complimentary. In segregated Silver Spring, most businesses wouldn’t take Roscoe Nix’s money and he was unwelcome in their establishments. Lane, who had no money, found comfort and nourishment throughout the community.

A Silver Spring alley was renamed to commemorate Norman Lane’s life.

I can only speculate at this point why Norman Lane’s monument is being vandalized during this period of protest and unrest over white supremacy. I hope it’s because some folks in Silver Spring recognize the irony in the community’s commemoration of a homeless white man instead of a Black civil rights leader.

Lane-Nix Slide

Slide from “Silver Spring: A Sundown Suburb in the Capital Beltway” by David Rotenstein.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

Guyasuta Gangsters

Independence Day fell on a Friday in 1930. That day Pittsburgh newspapers reported that a new greyhound racing track would open in the evening with a slate of nine races planned. The Guyasuta Kennel Club had rented a portion of the National Amusement Park Company’s leased property (known as National Park) between Aspinwall and Blawnox and built a dirt track and grandstands. Over the next 24 hours, the track, which was backed by Pittsburgh numbers racketeers, would find itself featured in newspaper articles across the region for a series of opening day mishaps and the betting taking place out in the open.

In May I will be doing a virtual program about the Guyasuta Kennel Club and its place in Pittsburgh History. The program will take place on two successive Wednesday evenings, May 13 and May 20:

Participants must register to receive the Zoom link and login instructions. Continue reading

Remembering things that brought people together

Between 1996 and 1999, I spent many hours inside the Pittsburgh Wool plant taking photos and talking with the company’s owners, Jeff Kumer and his father, Roy (1908-2004). I pored over the company’s voluminous business records, looked at photographs, and recorded several hours of audio interviews with the Kumers and several of their workers.

Pittsburgh Wool Company as seen from Pennsylvania Route 28, 1997.

The company occupied a four-story former tannery building. The interior had been divided into specialized spaces related to the work done there. For example, the second floor dedicated to wool pulling, drying, and baling. The upper floors were used to store pelts (in later years).

Pittsburgh Wool Company, HAER No. PA-572, Sheet 5.

In the company’s later years, all of the raw materials entered and left the plant via the first floor. Lamb pelts entered and pickled lamb skins and baled wool left. The first floor included washing vats for the pelts and metal tables where depilatory was painted on the skins to loosen the wool for pulling.

Jeff Kumer (left) and Keith White (right) painting and folding pelts, February 2000.

Once the wool was removed on the second floor, the skins were dropped through holes in the floor into large rotating drums on the first floor where they were pickled before being sent to tanneries.

Lamb skins after pulling being dropped into a hatch in the second floor above a rotating pickling drum on the first floor. The people observing include a documentary film crew and Heinz History Center staff. February 2000.

Pickle drum, first floor, Pittsburgh Wool Company.

Most of these spaces were documented in detail in 2000 for the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER). The measured drawings and my narrative report are archived at the Library of Congress. If you want to learn about the technology and material culture of wool pulling, those are the places to get your fix.

Pittsburgh Wool Company, HAER No. PA-572, cover sheet.

But if you want to learn about the people who kept the company going for more than half a century after the Kumer family bought it, you’ll be left feeling unfulfilled by the HAER documentation. I had always intended to write something more detailed about the business and its people but real life kept getting in the way.

Pittsburgh Wool Company office (highlighted), Pittsburgh Wool Company, HAER No. PA-572.

The office was one of the undocumented spaces inside the Pittsburgh Wool Company building. In the HAER drawings it’s simply represented as a box along the River Avenue facade. Yet, inside that box there were two offices: an outer office that served as a reception area and an inner office where the Kumers had their desks. They both worked in view of a portrait of the company’s founder, W.P. Lange.

Roy (seated) and Jeff Kumer inside the Pittsburgh Wool Company office, 1997.

Off to the side was another room that the Kumers used as a kitchen. The HAER architects didn’t draw plans for these spaces and I never took any pictures of them. Now, more than 20 years later, it’s one of the fieldwork mistakes that I will always regret.

Pittsburgh Wool Company, HAER No. PA-572, Sheet 5. The office is in the lower right.

Inside those spaces Roy Kumer worked his magical calculations to determine precisely how many pelts the company needed to buy from particular meatpackers around the nation. “I give credit to my dad for this,” Jeff Kumer told me in 1997. “He worked out his own book keeping process that he would be able to predict from year to year, when that month’s production came along from that particular plant.”

The telephones inside the offices connected the Kumers to a global network of meatpackers, textile mills, and leather tanners. Their files documented more than a century of institutional knowledge.

The business spaces seem like the most obvious to have mapped and more fully documented and they should have been. But so too was the kitchen. That’s where each day Jeff and Roy would adjourn mid-day to eat lunch together. I fondly recall the days when I was doing research in the plant when Jeff would invite me into the kitchen for some soup and a sandwich.

On August 5, 1999 I did my fourth interview with the Kumers inside the building. By that time a deal had been hammered out for the neighboring Heinz Company to acquire the Pittsburgh Wool Company property after a contentious battle that included a threat by the City of Pittsburgh to use eminent domain to seize the property. Sometime in the next year, the old tannery building was to be demolished to be replaced by a new Heinz warehouse.

Jeff Kumer and I sat in the kitchen where I asked my questions with a tape recorder sitting on the table between us. I returned to the plant two other times. The first was in February 2000 to witness a final run of pelts through the plant for a documentary produced by the Heinz History Center as part of the mitigation package agreed upon the year before. The second time was in the summer of 2000 when I drove from Charleston, West Virginia, to Pittsburgh to collect a few artifacts that Kumer wanted to give me before they were to vacate it prior to its demolition.

Pittsburgh Wool Company demolition.

One of the artifacts Kumer gave me was completely unrelated to the pulling of wool or processing of skins. It was a cream-colored ceramic soup bowl from the company’s kitchen. It’s an ordinary earthenware bowl with no maker’s marks or other markings. I have kept it on a shelf in all of the home offices I have had since then.

Soup bowl, Pittsburgh Wool Company.

I wish that I had asked questions about the kitchen and the Kumers’ attachment to it. I also wish that I had done a more complete job documenting the non-industrial spaces inside the plant. Over the years since I first set foot inside the Pittsburgh Wool Company building in 1996, I have learned a lot about space and its many uses. Those spaces were integral to the company’s history and they represented a critical social part of the Pittsburgh Wool Company’s story that isn’t preserved in documents, photographs, or the interviews with the people who worked there.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

 

Where are the pictures?

I recently took a group of public history students to the Black history exhibits in the redeveloped Beacon municipal center in Decatur, Georgia. Ever since the space opened in 2015, I have described it in conference papers and articles as “Black history under glass.”

It is a sanitized, flattened version of the city’s Black history that does great violence to the city’s history and the people who made it happen. Much of the single story told in the Beacon exhibits derives from the experiences of one person: a tokenized African American woman who made significant civil rights contributions to the city and who became a controversial figure after serving in city government.

The students who accompanied me on the visit earlier this month have been working with a church congregation that was founded in Decatur in the 1860s. It was the oldest Black church congregation in the city before it was displaced in the 1990s. Though their grant-funded project has been widely reported by multiple Atlanta media outlets, it has received no coverage in Decatur-based media (blogs or city publications).

Antioch A.M.E. Church digital history project screen capture. The website is a rich archive of textual, visual, and oral history primary materials.

Their work, and the stories of the multiple generations of church members with whom they have been working, are some of the notable erasures in the Beacon exhibits. They are erasures first brought to my attention in calls and emails I began receiving after the exhibits opened. Many lifelong Decatur residents who grew up in the razed and erased Beacon community contacted me to tell me that the exhibits didn’t tell the their community’s entire story. They were angry that it privileged the story of a single individual, whose experiences didn’t match their own.

Beacon Community story map. Beacon Municipal Center, November 2019.

In the discussion with the public history students, I asked them what they thought was missing from the exhibits. One woman pointed to a graphic illustration of the erased community (a map with historic photos and text panels) and she asked where all the pictures were. Through her work with the historic Black congregation, she and her colleagues knew that there were photos of sites indicated in the map, yet they weren’t represented.

Detail from the Beacon Community story map. The exhibits were completed after the former Antioch A.M.E. church building was demolished. The map doesn’t include a photo of that building or its pre-urban renewal predecessors and it incorrectly tells visitors that the church “is now located on Atlanta Avenue.”

The City of Decatur boasts that the Beacon exhibits, “Preserve the history of the Beacon community and … honor its spirit.” Hardly. The exhibits are another act of racial violence in a city with a long history of racism and anti-Semitism. If the erasures are so evident to undergraduate history students, I wonder what a public forum comprised of former Beacon residents that fully represents the community’s long and rich past might tell city leaders about its cosmetic effort to erase decades of racism.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

The Crawford Grill No. 2 and the danger of a single story [updated]

Introduction

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.

Continue reading

Welcome to “Mobsburgh”: Morris Kauffman’s last ride

Last summer I inadvertently stumbled upon a story about organized crime in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Since August, I have been poring through archival records, historical newspapers, and interviewing the descendants and extended kin of people involved in Pittsburgh’s gambling and bootlegging rackets between 1920 and 1980. As I work my way through this research I will be posting stories in this space: #Mobsburgh.

The first #Mobsburgh story begins far away from Pittsburgh in the U.S. 301 and U.S. 1 highway corridors between Richmond, Virginia, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1933 and 1934, a loosely organized crew committed a string of robberies and murders. They were called the “Tri-State Gang” for the territory (Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia) where they operated.

Pittsburgh was a bit far afield for the gang, best known for hijacking cigarette trucks out of North Carolina and for robbing postal facilities in Washington, D.C., and Richmond. Yet, their crime spree extended to Pittsburgh in 1934 when the body of one of the gang members was found behind an apartment building in the city’s emerging Jewish neighborhood, Squirrel Hill.

Wendover Apartments, Squirrel Hill, December 2019.

The Baltimore evening Sun, May 23, 1934. Source: newspapers.com

Continue reading