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.”

While researching the Karstadts’ divorce, I learned that Allegheny County had thrown away all of the machines required to read the type of microfilm cartridge where the case file is storied. Getting access to the divorce case inspired me to look into the deplorable state of Allegheny County record keeping (described in last week’s post).

I interviewed a couple of other authors in 2024: Mindy Thompson Fullilove (Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, And What We Can Do About It) and Lori D’Angelo (The Monsters Are Here). The interview with Fullilove appeared in NEXTpittsburgh as she was making the rounds marking the landmark book’s 20th anniversary. Fullilove’s work has been a significant influence in my writing about gentrification and erasure and I cite it frequently in my academic work.

I wrote about D’Angelo’s book for Pittsburgh City Paper. My first conversations with D’Anglelo weren’t about her short stories, though. She had contacted me on LinkedIn in early October: “Hi. My grandma’s brother ran numbers in Pittsburgh in the 1940s before he was murdered. I’m doing research and plan to write about it. I was hoping that we could connect.”

Of course we could connect and we did.

D’Angelo’s mobster relative was a familiar name: Gus Gianni. Gianni’s 1946 murder was one of several high-profile unsolved mob assassinations that shook Pittsburgh in the 20th century. D’Angelo did a book talk in Pittsburgh a few days before Halloween. I interviewed her before the program and I got to talk to some of her relatives. I filed my story and City Paper published it November 19.

The exploration of Gus Gianni’s life in crime also took me back to Penn Hills. Law enforcement officers suspected that Mafia assassin Joe Rosa was involved in killing Gianni. Rosa spent much of his life in Penn Hills and he was living there on Funston Avenue when Gianni was murdered.

I just can’t escape Penn Hills stories and crime.

A nice break in the routine was a story that took me back to my days in folklore and folklife. Tina Williams Brewer is an accomplished quilt artist. Brewer is working with community members to tell Wilkinsburg’s history through community quilting and oral history. I spent a Saturday afternoon in June learning about Brewer’s project and NEXTpittsburgh published “Quilt artist Tina Williams Brewer stitches together Wilkinsburg’s Black history” in July.

“The Reporter was an essential part of the South Side, so how did it go out of print?” appeared in NEXTpittsburgh in January. The Reporter covered the part of the city where I live and its demise turned Pittsburgh’s South Side into a news desert. I have long been interested in news deserts, especially in gentrifying communities. Part of my work in Decatur examines how it became a news desert and how the lack of coverage harms vulnerable people in that Atlanta suburb.

Though Brewer’s quilts didn’t contain hidden stories about organized crime, The Reporter did have its own brush with organized crime. Read my story to find out what it was.

I churned out thousands of words in 2024 on Pittsburgh’s vice history. “The hidden history of Pittsburgh’s bootlegging grandmas and roadhouse queens” appeared in NEXTpittsburgh in March. I’m not going to drop any spoilers here. Read the story.

In August, my story about author Jason Kirin’s monumental project — think counting blades of grass on a soccer field — to document every brothel that operated in Pittsburgh appeared in NEXTpittsburgh. “‘The city was one giant brothel’: Pittsburgh’s shocking history of sex work” tells the story about Kirin’s project and digs into the exploits of three of Pittsburgh’s most consequential sex workers: Nettie Gordon, Tex Gill, and Mae Scheible, the woman the FBI once dubbed “Public Hostess No. 1.”

I couldn’t get enough of Scheible’s story. She led a remarkably complicated and tragic life. To unpack some of the inaccurate and incomplete writing about Scheible I cobbled together a storymap that tracked her life from Pittsburgh’s North Side in the 1890s to her death in South Florida in the 1980s.

While researching Scheible, I encountered the off-the-charts story of Robert Miller, a.k.a. “Count Victor Lustig.” Again, no spoilers here other than to tease that Miller had sold the Eiffel Tower twice and London’s Tower Bridge once. He also tried to rip off Al Capone and lived to tell about it. NEXTpittsburgh published “The world’s greatest con man was finally caught in Pittsburgh” in October.

It’s a tossup for which of my 2024 crime stories is my favorite. Miller/Lustig or my cover story for Pittsburgh City Paper’s June 5 issue, “Floating palaces and ‘pleasure scows’: Pittsburgh’s colorful history of raucous riverboats.” The story of the floating speakeasy and casino first known as Bongiovanni’s Floating Palace and later, The Show Boat, has captivated me ever since I began researching the history of organized crime in Pittsburgh. And, I absolutely love what City Paper did for the cover.

My final trip down Pittsburgh crime history memory lane stops by a new column that is being published in Western Pennsylvania History magazine. I’m calling it “The Backstory” and I’ll be writing about some of the city’s hidden/forgotten stories. The first column just came out in the Winter 2024-2025 issue and it’s about Rolling Rock beer’s cryptic beer bottle label. The “33” prominently featured in the enamel painted label has been the source of speculation and legendry for decades. The magazine adapted one of my photos of the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House into a line drawing that will appear with every column.

Are We Done Yet?

One social justice story that I left out of Part I involves this one published in NEXTpittsburgh in June, “Segregated history of Highland Park Pool highlights ‘Pittsburgh’s brand of apartheid’.” I wrote about how Pittsburgh historic preservationists had failed to adequately document the pool’s important place in Pittsburgh civil rights history. I left this story for last because it doesn’t yet have an ending. A month after the article came out I received an email from a community group: “Our committee appreciates the important article you wrote about the history of segregation at the Highland Park Pool. We especially have been discussing the need for signage recognizing the desegregation effort.” I’m waiting to see if the signage appears and if it does, I’ll be writing about it.

Finally, I wanted to include a collage with the three Pittsburgh City Paper covers that featured my work in 2024. My first cover story appeared in 1991 in FOOTNOTES. It was a profile of pianist Chuck Leavell, best known for his work with the Allman Brothers, the Rolling Stones, and Eric Clapton. The February 1991 FOOTNOTES cover actually had two of my stories, the other was a feature on Blind Willies, a landmark blues club still going strong, celebrating its 5th anniversary.

Thank you for reading and for collaborating. Let’s keep it going in 2025.

©2024 D.S. Rotenstein

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