Last week I highlighted some of my work writing about racism and real estate in 2024. I’ll wrap up this look back on 2024 with a spin through Pittsburgh’s organized crime history and the arts. But first, I want to go a little further back in time to 1991. I was freelancing for an Atlanta alt-weekly, covering blues music, and I kept landing interviews with bigger and bigger acts for the small, new, little known, and short-lived FOOTNOTES. I leveraged my contacts in the academic world to use their connections in the entertainment industry.

On February 27, 1991, I drove from Atlanta to Chattanooga, Tennessee, to interview ZZ Top. The band was touring to support its new blues-heavy Recycler album. The album hit in all the right places and I wanted to interview the band before its March Atlanta gig. One big roadblock stood in my way: ZZ Top wasn’t giving interviews while touring. I reached out to Bill Ferris, who was then at the University of Mississippi, and Bill reached out to a few people he knew. Within a couple of weeks, I had an all-access pass, a photo pass, and 30 minutes with the band after the show.

I returned to Atlanta with a taped interview and a roll of color slides from the concert. A veteran news photographer had taught me how to “push” film to shoot concert photos without flash — a skill that’s now obsolete thanks to digital photography.

A couple of weeks after I got the interview, FOOTNOTES went out of print. I was sitting on a killer interview and I had nowhere to publish it. I had only broken into journalism 6 months earlier and I still had a lot to learn. Digging into the same toolbox that got me the interview, the Charlotte Observer, Biloxi Sun-Herald, and a few other Knight-Ridder newspapers published the interview and a brief piece I wrote about The Black Crowes getting fired from the tour. And, my photos also made their way into print, including a one published as a spread in the Biloxi Sun-Herald’s weekend magazine.

The contacts I made shopping the ZZ Top interview led to my biggest break yet: a freelance gig covering folk music and writing features for the Philadelphia Inquirer. It had been less than a year since I had gotten my first paid byline.

Between 1990 and 1994, I wrote a lot of stories about music for newspapers and magazines. I moved to Pittsburgh from Philadelphia to take an archaeology job while writing my University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. dissertation. It didn’t take long for me to land a freelance gig with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: I had an inside track because I had interviewed the paper’s managing editor for a an Inquirer story I wrote about the Pittsburgh newspaper’s long-running strike (a thing that keeps happening).

For the Post-Gazette, I stuck to familiar territory: music and features. To make a little extra money, I agreed to work as a municipal stringer covering suburban governments. My assignment: Penn Hills.

Thirty years later, I returned to Penn Hills. The suburban municipality dominated much of my 2024 reporting on race and housing. Though Penn Hills subdivisions were a key part of my work on redlining and racially restrictive deed covenants, one book took me deeper inside the suburb: Benjamin Herold’s Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs (Penguin Press). The Heinz History Center invited me to review the book for its magazine, Western Pennsylvania History. Herold had grown up in Penn Hills and the book turns on the stories of families there and in four other suburbs around the country, including the Atlanta area.

I liked the book and there was lots to think about, considering much of my work on gentrification and erasure has been in the Atlanta suburbs. After I finished reading Disillusioned and writing the review, I wanted to learn more about Herold’s work. An email exchange led to an interview for a feature on him and his book that NEXTpittsburgh published in April.

While digging into Herold’s story, I stumbled upon the crazy tale of Stanley and Gloria Karstadt, the family who sold the Herolds their Penn Hills home. The couple had moved to Pittsburgh from New York City in the early 1950s. By that point, Gloria had had Stanley locked up in New York’s infamous Riker’s Island jail for failing to pay their bills.

“The Karstadts’ marriage was already on the skids when they bought their [Penn Hills] home,” I wrote in the NEXTpittsburgh article. Stanley had problems with monogamy and by the time their divorce case was working its way through Allegheny County civil courts, Stanley was being prosecuted in Allegheny criminal courts for possessing stolen property and writing bad checks.

I couldn’t have made up that story if I had tried. As I wrote in my NEXTpittsburgh piece, “The Karstadts certainly were not the Cleavers.”