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.

Fox Chapel, though located (barely) above the Mason-Dixon Line, was the South, Malcolm X’s South, and we knew it. But as I wrote earlier, it was only supposed to be a short-term stay. The Covid pandemic wrecked those plans and we ended up living there for a little over four years.

There was no danger of Fox Chapel ever gentrifying like Decatur and Silver Spring. At least we didn’t have to live among teardowns, incessant construction activity, and the wreckage of a disintegrating community. One historian in 1987 awkwardly described Fox Chapel’s founding as a type of gentrification (it wasn’t):

The development of Fox Chapel was the opposite of the “gentrification” process of the 1980s. Today, relatively rich people buy and refurbish elegant but run down houses in the city, driving up rents beyond the ability of the poor to pay. In the 1920s and 1930s, on the other hand, the rich unwittingly caused most farmers to sell their farms because it made economic sense to do so. This was rural “gentrification.”

Though we could have used “Fox Chapel” as our mailing address, we always said that we lived in Pittsburgh. This worked because we had a Pittsburgh Zip Code. For me, admitting that I lived in Fox Chapel was a little embarrassing, especially when I was doing interviews about race and segregation and I had to answer when my sources/informants asked me, “Where do you live?” I always followed it up with the explanation, almost apologetically, about our rushed 2019 relocation.

Last year, we moved out of Fox Chapel and into Pittsburgh. Though our new neighborhood has undergone several gentrification episodes since the 1980s and it is poised to experience more change, we were certain that our arrival wasn’t colonization. We were not, we hoped, part of the problem.

Just before we moved away from Fox Chapel, I got a chance to write an article about the history of redlining in Pittsburgh for the Mapping Inequality project. The assignment got me thinking about racially restrictive deed covenants in Pittsburgh and the many segregated suburbs along the city’s margins.

After I completed the redlining project, I turned to deed covenants. Last month, PublicSource, a non-profit news organization, published my multi-month investigation into racially restrictive deed covenants. Fox Chapel didn’t make the package that included a long-form article and an illustrated storymap. But I did end up writing about Fox Chapel as a sundown town for Pittsburgh City Paper, in an article also published last month.

For both pieces, I examined hundreds of deeds and dozens of subdivision plat maps. And, I pored over real estate stories and advertisements published in Pittsburgh newspapers between the 1920s and 1950s. I dug into legal cases and I interviewed residents, historians, and reparations advocates. I even found what might have been the most elusive racially restrictive deed covenants in metropolitan Pittsburgh: ones filed for homes in Mt. Lebanon. Historians and journalists looked for them for decades with no success.

Planned exclusion that persists

Pittsburgh’s 1937 Residential Security Map (a.k.a. its “redlining map”) covered the entire city and several suburban boroughs, including part of Fox Chapel. Real estate appraiser W.A. Stoehr submitted the report for Fox Chapel, which he called “Aspinwall” (it actually was part of O’Hara Township until being annexed by Fox Chapel seven years later). Stoehr gave the area the highest rating, an “A” for “first grade.” He reported that there were no foreign born families, no families “on relief,” and no Black families. “The area is aristocratic. Pride of ownership is very good,” he wrote.

Fox Chapel developers and property owners didn’t use (as far as I could find) any racially restrictive deed covenants. Instead, they used — and the borough still uses — single-family zoning, large lot sizes, and outrageously expensive home prices to keep the community wealthy and white.

Created in 1934 after seceding from O’Hara Township, Fox Chapel has remained mostly white. The only Black people living in the borough in the 1940 and 1950 censuses were the domestic servants living in their employers’ homes and a private school’s live-in workers. In 2020, Fox Chapel had 5,343 residents; just 59 people (1.1%) reported that they were Black or African American.

Anyone daring to locate in Fox Chapel should realize from to start with that he or she cannot run down to the corner store for cigarettes or sundries or ride a street car home or to the movies. Servants and children must be transported by the family car.

1955 final report to the fox chapel planning commission on a master plan for the borough (1955).

For how Fox Chapel residents in the 1940s found a fix for their self-imposed isolation, readers should temporarily jump over to my April City Paper article. Decisions made in the 1920s and 1930s continue to resonate through the community. Public transportation goes no deeper into Fox Chapel than the Veterans Administration hospital (around which Fox Chapel’s corporate boundary wraps) in the southern part of the borough.

As for sidewalks, they’re non-existent. One of our former neighbors posted to a neighborhood listerv about sidewalks. “Fox Chapel doesn’t have sidewalks,” he quoted a borough official.

In my reporting, I asked Fox Chapel’s borough manager about sidewalks. He said that Fox Chapel was no different from other suburban communities: “A lot of communities that are more of the residential type that don’t have many sidewalks.” He also said that the borough is working on a new comprehensive plan and that sidewalks are part of the discussion.

Fox Chapel constructed and maintained its suburban character, wealthy and white, by rigidly enforcing exclusion and isolation. Individuals and companies selling properties in the borough repeatedly touted the “restrictions” placed upon them. “Restricted” was the code word for “whites only.” The euphemism appeared in newspaper ads, billboards, and other material hawking suburban homes.

Fox Chapel became a sundown suburb through a zoning code that mirrored the restrictions placed in deeds by developers and property sellers. “To date, Fox Chapel is a purely residential acreage free from commercial holdings of any type,” the 1955 master plan’s author wrote. “Zoning is the control valve for the life flow of any borough.”

We lived in Delafield Heights, a part of Fox Chapel annexed in 1944. It was the “low-rent district” as some folks joked. The lot sizes and homes were smaller and so were the property price tags. Early borough zoning maps coded Delafield Heights parcels as “A-R” or “As Recorded.” The other zones were A-1 (one acre), A-2 (two acre), and A-3 (three acre). The 1955 master plan encouraged property owners to upzone: “Anyone now owning acreage now zoned below three acres and not yet recorded for subdivision purposes cannot help but be greatly benefited by applying for revision upward as from one to two acres or from two to three.”

Our neighborhood was part of what the 1955 master plan called a protective “fringe of one and two acre residential properties.” Though Fox Chapel’s zoning code has been updated several times since the borough’s founding, there are still no apartment buildings there. The 2020 census identified 1,957 housing units in Fox Chapel. Most (74.9%) had four or more bedrooms (compared to Allegheny County, with 20.7%). Only six percent of Fox Chapel’s housing units were not owner-occupied. So few people rent housing in Fox Chapel that the census was unable to calculate a median gross rent for the borough.

[Ephemeral] change came slowly and in small doses

After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, several yards in our neighborhood sprouted Black Lives Matter signs. One home even had a Trump-themed Halloween-campaign banner combo.

We also had a neighbor who had turned a state agency work vehicle into a Donald Trump campaign ad complete with a MAGA hat and other swag prominently displayed on the dashboard. Their ranch house picture window had a Trump campaign sticker plastered in the middle.

A Democratic party organizer lived right across the street from them. Though Fox Chapel voted for Biden over Trump in the 2020 election, it was pure MAGA in-your-face hostility. On our block, to preserve friendships, neighbors didn’t talk politics.

I asked one of my sources for the first City Paper article what the people who live there will think of my reporting. “I don’t think that they will like that because they again have been extolling the fact that they are not a segregated community,” he said.

To me it sounded like my source was framing the borough’s collective persona as just another variation on the “one Black friend” trope because the school district, which extends beyond the borough’s borders, has Black students.

Denials and Deflections

One editor I worked with on the articles asked me to revise the way I described Fox Chapel. They thought my characterization of Fox Chapel as a sundown town today was a bit harsh. After all, there are some Black residents and in 2020 the borough voted to rename a road to remove what many described as an ethnic slur.

It’s no longer 1934, right? Or, is Fox Chapel more like 1934 than folks want to admit?

We found a compromise in the final edits. Fox Chapel isn’t Elaine, Arkansas, or Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood or even Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where in 1923 the mayor ordered all Black residents to leave the city.

Response to the first City Paper article was swift and passionate. There was a lot of pushback against describing Fox Chapel as a sundown town. City Paper’s Facebook post got more than 600 comments. A former neighbor told the listerv, “everything noted also applied to Catholics and Jews as well.” My takeaway from his comments and those shared in social media: everyone else did it so Fox Chapel isn’t so bad.

Among the readers were people who have experienced racism in the borough in recent years and a member of the first Black family to buy a home there in 1964. My second City Paper article tells some of those stories. I’m not going to repeat them here.

The follow-up reporting on Fox Chapel was just as compelling as my original work. It reinforces my late friend Jim Loewen’s characterization of sundown towns: “Some towns are still all white on purpose. Their chilling stories have been joined more recently by the many elite (and some not so elite) suburbs like Grosse Pointe, MI, or Edina, MN, that have excluded nonwhites by ‘kinder gentler means.’”

Elsewhere, Loewen — never one to shy away from taking controversial but eminently defensible positions about how Americans think and write about race — wrote this in 2016:

Another axiom historians, social scientists, and journalists can draw: when researching a town or county, if it is overwhelmingly monoracial, decade after decade, ask why. Most likely, even in out-of-the-way locations like Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, it didn’t get that way and stay that way by chance. Just because African Americans are out of sight, however, they should never be out of the researcher’s mind. They are never out of the minds of the residents of sundown towns, and their presence and that policy of exclusion is therefore always part of the community’s overall story.

Jim Crow moved away from Fox Chapel long ago. Writing generally about late 20th century American racism, blues musician Hugh Holmes Jr. wrote, “Nowadays you have Chad Crowe , Esq. , grandson of old Jim Crow. A little more laid back, but still the same.” Holmes could have been writing about contemporary Fox Chapel leaders and residents.

The evidence is abundantly clear: Fox Chapel was and is a sundown town.

©2024 D.S. Rotenstein

Shortlink for this post: https://wp.me/p1bnGQ-433