Joseph “Joe” Tito was a bootlegger, numbers banker, and brewery executive. He was close friends with William A. “Gus” Greenlee. During Prohibition, the pair dominated illegal rackets throughout the city. They also made Negro Leagues baseball history as owners of the Pittsburgh Crawfords and Greenlee Field. After Prohibition ended, Tito and his brothers introduced one of Pennsylvania’s most iconic brands, Rolling Rock beer.
Joe Tito (standing, rear right) in an undated family photo. Tito’s parents are seated in the middle row: Rosa (second from the left) and Raphael (second from the Right). Photo courtesy of Richard Tito.
Born in 1890, Tito was the oldest of eight children Raphael and Rosa Tito had after arriving in Pittsburgh from their native Italy. The Titos lived in an extended family enclave on Gazzam Hill near the intersection of Kirkpatrick Street and Fifth Avenue.
Gazzam Hill as seen from Pittsburgh’s South Side, 2024.
One year ago I began receiving messages about yet another attempt by the City of Decatur to erase its Black history. The city had moved the annual Decatur Day celebration from one site where Black history has been erased, the gentrified Oakhurst neighborhood, to a downtown site where the city systematically destroyed the Jim Crow ghetto it had created in the previous century.
Last week, a new Decatur resident reached out to me via Instagram.
Though I appreciate the sentiment and the acknowledgment of my work, I really wonder how much of my “voice” there is “in the local conversation.” Probably not much at all.
At any rate, Decatur Day is back next week, not in Oakhurst but in the former Beacon Community.
Stanley Williams was a restaurateur and nightclub owner who left an indelible imprint in the Hill District and in Pittsburgh history. He and his two brothers, Alexander and Charles, had emigrated from Barbados. Stanley and Alexander Williams owned and operated the city’s first Black-owned professional sports stadium, the Central Amusement Park.
Stanley, born in 1900, was the youngest Williams brother, and arrived in Pittsburgh at age 13. According to one 1955 Pittsburgh Courier profile, he came to Pittsburgh to study dentistry at the University of Pittsburgh. Instead, he entered the entertainment and hospitality industry. Before striking out on his own, Stanley went to work with his older brothers running a pool hall in the basement of Burke’s Hall (later, the Rhumba Theater).
Between 1926 and 1933 Stanley worked as a waiter and he tried his hand running several businesses with his brother Charles and other Hill District entrepreneurs. These included a Wylie Avenue confectionary and pool hall.
In 1933, he opened Stanley’s Inn, located in rented space at 1506 Wylie Ave. Ads in the Courier touted the new cabaret as “The classiest early dawnin’ place in town” with “hot-cha music” and “delicious food.” Alvin Austin, a dentist by day and nightclub crooner by night, provided the soundtrack. “Plenty of zip and bang and rhythm,” the Courier reported “… the kind of music that goes with 3.2 [beer].”
Original Stanley’s Tavern location at 1506 Wylie Ave. Gus Greenlee had bought a pool hall in the M.J. Farrell Building basement in the early 1920s. Stanley acquired the business from Greenlee about five years later and he operated the pool hall until opening the nightclub in 1933. Photo courtesy Pittsburgh City Archives.
Last month we signed up for a walking tour of Schenley Farms, a historic subdivision in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood. A local historic preservation group organized the tour and charged participants $20 per ticket; a Schenley Farms resident led the tour. Full disclosure: I’m a veteran walking tour consumer and I design and lead tours professionally. We had low expectations going into the tour and 90 minutes after it began and we walked away in disbelief that it was much worse than we anticipated.
This isn’t the place to pile onto an amateur tour guide or the tone-deaf and obsolete historic preservation organization behind the tour. Instead, it’s where I want to reflect on what was in the tour and what was missing.
What the tour had was lots of celebratory history about the wonderful white real estate developers, architects, and homeowners whose names are indelibly attached to the neighborhood. These included former university presidents, food company executives, and a popular amusement park founder.
Yesterday evening I took home two Pittsburgh Black Media Federation Robert L. Van awards of excellence in journalism. One was for my February 2023 feature on Pittsburgh’s Central Amusement Park, the first Black professional sports stadium in Pittsburgh (and maybe the United States). The other was for my June 2023 profile of historian Ralph Proctor Jr.
The awards are not mine alone. The article documenting Proctor’s life is his, too. I simply added a few hundred words to his already rich story. Proctor died earlier this year at age 85.
Dr. McDonald Williams was a literature professor and accomplished educator. He died in 2019 at age 101 after lobbying to have his father and uncles’ contributions to sports history recognized by the Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office. There is still no historical marker commemorating the Williams family’s achievements.
Thank you professors Proctor and Williams (and Dr. Williams’ family) for your collaboration. These awards belong to you, too.
And, I couldn’t have won these awards without the support of my NEXTpittsburgh editor, Brian Hyslop. He makes my work better and he nominated me for these awards.
Tip for Journalists and Historians: When You Don’t See Blacks in a Community Ask Why — James Loewen, 2016.
My wife likes to say that we failed Fox Chapel. We moved to the Pittsburgh suburb in 2019 and we always knew it was a temporary stop. Our move back to Pittsburgh after leaving exactly 20 years earlier allowed us just one day to find housing. Fox Chapel was a familiar suburb, in many ways like Silver Spring, Maryland, and Decatur, Georgia. Just a few miles away from our 1990s home, its housing stock includes more modest brick Cape Cods, Colonial Revivals, and ranch houses with spacious yards and lots of trees. Not all of the homes there are manorial estates with brick and stone mansions.
And, like Decatur and Silver Spring, Fox Chapel was a sundown suburb, a place with a history defined by exclusion.
Fox Chapel was the whitest place I think I’ve ever lived. Unlike Silver Spring and Decatur, there wasn’t any collective effort to hide behind false white progressive liberal cloaks. We knew that our tax dollars wouldn’t be going to any municipally-sponsored racial reconciliation projects. We didn’t expect any Decatur Dinners or Community Conversations (Decatur flavor) or Community Conversations (Montgomery County flavor). Efforts like those do little to repair communities. They are, as I wrote for Next City in 2017, taxpayer-funded cosmetic efforts.
I’m on today’s City Cast Pittsburgh talking about racism and real estate. One of the takeaways from my PublicSource reporting was that unlike other places, so far the only racial and ethnic exclusions that I have identified in Pittsburgh area deeds exclude Black people from buying and renting homes. All of the deeds with racially restrictive deed covenants that I sampled for the PublicSource investigation were limited to people of African descent.
Racially restrictive deed covenant filed in 1940 for a Sewickley subdivision.
Racially restrictive deed covenant filed in 1929 for a McCandless Township subdivision.
These examples from Erie, Pennsylvania, and the DC suburbs show a laundry list of racist, anti-semitic, and xenophobic exclusions.
Deed filed in Erie County, Pennsylvania, in 1924 with racial and ethnic exclusions.
Deed filed in Montgomery County, Maryland, in 1947 with racial and ethnic exclusions.
I make the point in the City Cast podcast that Pittsburgh’s racially restrictive deed covenants underscore the metropolitan area’s historical and contemporary racism that led to Southern Black migrants dubbing Pittsburgh the “Mississippi of the North.”
One example I’ve been sitting on for a while is the Montgomery County, Maryland, Planning Department’s study of racially restrictive deed covenants and housing discrimination. This screenshot from the agency’s 2023 report shows a discussion of a Black physician’s efforts to buy a home in Silver Spring in the early 1960s.
Screenshot, “Working Draft of the Mapping Segregation Report,” pp. 27-28.
The report’s authors didn’t bother to learn that this home described in their report was still owned by the family and that the doctor’s daughter was married to the son of a Tulsa race massacre survivor and leading voice in Black history: John Hope Franklin.
There’s lots more missing from the report, but that’s a story for another day.
