Author Archives: David Rotenstein

Acorn Park Revisited

Posted on by
Reply

In 2017, I organized events aimed at persuading Montgomery County, Maryland, leaders to tell a more accurate and inclusive story in a Silver Spring park. The events generated some media buzz and I wrote several articles and a book chapter about them. In the end, though, nothing happened.

Protesting Invisibility, Acorn Urban Park, Silver Spring, Maryland, June 2017.

Or did something change?

Acorn Park and the adjacent Silver Spring Memory Wall still tell a whitewashed and exclusionary story. Nothing has changed there. But beyond the park, scholars, journalists, and residents now describe Silver Spring as a sundown suburb. Local planners have incorporated my research into new policy documents on creating equity in Montgomery County.

Earlier this year, a Baltimore planner published a podcast episode, “Story Shift: Acorn Park.”

Screenshot from Acorn Park podcast (October 2024).

Podcaster Zoe Roane-Hopkins recounted the park’s history, including its new chapters added in 2017. Her observations about the park in 2024 speak volumes to how effective my efforts were: they raised awareness, but accomplished nothing in terms of changing the narrative in the park:

In 2017, the Maryland National Capital Parks and Planning Commission was solicited in public feedback for improvements to Acorn Park and in response, local nonprofit Impact Silver Spring and showing up for racial justice, Montgomery County joined together to stage a protest at Acorn Park to highlight the continued lack of visibility for black folks through public art in the park.  They called for an increase in accurate representation in stories in public art and proposed suggestions to do this at the Acorn Park site …

… When I visited Acorn Park for this episode, there was no evidence of any moves to rewrite the narrative of this little green space to be more representative.

Zoe Roan-Hopkins, Story Shift: Acorn Park

The changes are small, but positive. Perhaps one of these days, Montgomery County will get around to scrubbing off some of the whitewash.

© 2024 D.S. Rotenstein

Joe Tito’s Hill District

Posted on by
Reply

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.
Continue reading →

Stanley’s Tavern

Posted on by
Reply

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.
Continue reading →

A stroll through Schenley Farms

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Continue reading →

Erasure, Chapter X

Posted on by
Reply

Erasure is when a couple like Luther and Maudelena Johnson make history: he with a photo studio and she as a musician and music teacher. And,

The Pittsburgh Courier, January 12, 1929.
Screenshot

Erasure is when all that’s left of the Johnson studio is a parking lot (and a bronze plaque). And,

Erasure is when all that’s left of your suburban home is a vacant plot of grass.

Any questions?

Black journalism awards

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Fox Chapel was the whitest place I’ve ever lived

Posted on by
1

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.

Continue reading →

Today on City Cast Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh’s racist real estate history

Posted on by
Reply

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.”

Listen to the complete City Cast podcast here:

Historic Preservation Contributes to Black Trauma

Posted on by
Reply

Buried deep inside my recent Pittsburgh City Paper cover story is a little bit about historic preservation:

In his 1984 memoir Brothers and Keepers, John Edgar Wideman, the award-winning Pittsburgh-born author, made the prison the setting for his brother’s incarceration and a central character.

“Western Penitentiary sprouts like a giant wart from the bare, flat stretches of concrete surrounding it,” Wideman wrote. To Wideman, Western Penitentiary punished its inmates and their loved ones by dehumanizing them.

Wideman’s take on the prison captures the sentiments held by Black Pittsburghers: revulsion, not nostalgia. Compare that to the efforts by white historic preservationists who sought to protect the landmark which in 2022 was listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

The conflicting views of the impending demolition underscore the need to better understand history holistically and equitably. They also speak to how Pittsburgh preserves its Black history landmarks: the jail at one end of Wylie Ave. is a tourist attraction with a brass plaque, and the church at the other end is condemned.

Former Western Penitentiary (2023).
Condemnation notice affixed to the John Wesley AME Church (2020).

The Pittsburgh preservationist who was pushing to save the former Western Penitentiary is the same one who fought to preserve the Civic Arena. Constructed in the Lower Hill District, the Civic Arena and its sprawling parking lots replaced hundreds of mostly Black owned and occupied homes, businesses, churches, and recreational spaces.

The Pittsburgh Civic Arena and the Lower Hill District. “The Changing City: Report of the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh.” Pittsburgh City Archives.

Wait, what? Yep, the same white preservationist dude who 15 years ago wanted to force the city to preserve one of the most painful reminders of urban renewal and displacement wanted to keep the hulking reminder of mass incarceration. At best, it’s tone deaf. At worst, it’s a reminder of the white supremacy and classism that continues to dominate historic preservation.

© 2024 D.S. Rotenstein

Black History Month 2024

Posted on by
Reply
NEXTpittsburgh screen capture, Feb. 26, 2024.

Throughout February, NEXTpittsburgh has been featuring my articles about Black history in Pittsburgh. NEXT originally published most of them in 2023:

That’s a lot of Black history content published throughout the year. Let’s see if I can boost those numbers in 2024.