In 2003, Decatur, Ga., playwright Valetta Anderson, her partner Cotis Weaver, and several neighbors sued the City of Decatur to prevent the redevelopment of an apartment building into high-end townhomes. The lawsuit and conversation it started could have been a turning point for Decatur to preserve affordable housing and diversity. Instead, the city went in a different direction.
Now, 20 years later, the home Anderson and Weaver lived in, along with hundreds of other affordable single- and multi-family homes have been demolished and sent to landfills. Earlier this year, the City of Decatur was forced to confront more than 20 years of policy missteps by amending its zoning ordinance to allow for so-called “missing middle housing.” The problem is, the city had lots of missing middle housing (and diversity).
Last year the Pittsburgh City Council voted to designate a former bootlegger-turned-brewery executive’s home as a historic landmark. Joe Tito became a booze and gambling kingpin during Prohibition. He built an empire from his 1817 Fifth Avenue home and a brick garage. Both buildings comprise the city-designated historic site. At a January 17, 2023, development activities meeting, Uptown Partners of Pittsburgh, the community development corporation that sponsored the historic landmarking, announced that it supported demolishing the garage. It would be replaced by one of two buildings in a $70 million redevelopment project.
Site plan shared during the Jan. 17, 2023, Development Activities Meeting. The blue rectangle denotes the 2022 historic site boundary.
Located at 1818 Colwell Street, Tito built the garage in 1922 to house his family’s fleet of trucks used to move bootleg whiskey and beer throughout the region. After Prohibition ended, Tito and his brothers bought the Latrobe Brewing Company. They converted the garage into the brewery’s first Pittsburgh beer distributorship. It’s where they first sold Rolling Rock beer in 1935.
Louis A.S. Bellinger (1891-1946) was Pittsburgh’s only licensed and practicing Black architect for the entire time that he practiced in the Steel City. My recent NEXTpittsburgh article digs deeper into Bellinger’s biography than the laundry lists of his jobs and buildings penned by historic preservationists. It’s hard to construct a biography of a consequential historical figure who left behind few traces beyond documents in public records and newspaper articles reporting on his work. There is lots more to the Bellinger story and it took some creative sleuthing to patch it together. There are also sidebars to the Bellinger story. This post is about one those: a draftsman who briefly worked for Louis Bellinger in the early 1920s.
The Pittsburgh Courier, Nov. 22, 1924.
My first entry in the Bellinger arc was my 2022 NEXTpittsburgh article about the architect’s younger brother, Walter Bellinger. Walter, along with other family members, followed Louis to Pittsburgh in the early 1920s. Walter went into the family business: the building trades. As a carpenter, he worked on buildings throughout the region before moving to California in the 1950s. Walter’s greatest contribution, however, was helping to build Pittsburgh’s Muslim community. After taking the name Saeed Akmal, he became a founder of Pittsburgh’s First Moslem Mosque.
My second entries in the Bellinger family narrative arc deal with one of Louis’s earliest commissions as a professional architect. In 1920, he designed and built the Central Amusement Park, a Black-owned sports stadium in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. I wrote about the brothers who hired Bellinger, their family’s efforts to get recognition for their achievements, and 21st century erasures by the historic preservation community.
During the 1920s, Bellinger built his small architectural practice and social capital among Pittsburgh’s growing Black entrepreneurial elite. City directories and newspaper articles show that he employed at least one draftsman in his office.
