Author Archives: David Rotenstein

E. Brooke Lee’s Silver Spring

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E. Brooke Lee (1892-1984) was a segregationist real estate speculator. Histories of Silver Spring and Montgomery County, Maryland, celebrate his contributions to local politics and economic development while ignoring or minimizing his role in creating a sundown suburb where only whites could own and rent homes.

Though I have written about Lee elsewhere (Washington Post 2017 and “Protesting Invisibility in Silver Spring, Maryland” [2018]), the full extent of his racialized real estate practices remain unexplored. This post is a brief introduction to some of Lee’s real estate holdings and the devices he used to keep Silver Spring white.

Sign for one of Lee’s “restricted” subdivisions in NW Washington. “Restricted” was code for “whites only.” Credit: DC Public Library/National Archives and Records Administration.

Lee and his contemporaries accomplished this through the use of racially restrictive deed covenants attached to the individual properties they owned and sold as well as the residential subdivisions they developed. In Silver Spring’s commercial and public spaces, strictly enforced Jim Crow rules prevented African Americans from shopping in stores, seeing movies, eating in restaurants, and participating in civic events. The segregation buck stopped with Lee, who was a major investor and political boss and who wielded substantial power between 1920 and 1948.

Even after he left public life, Lee continued to exert considerable influence in the policies and practices that reinforced segregation in Montgomery County until 1970.

E. Brooke Lee described civil rights laws as “anti-white laws.” He viewed open housing laws enacted to eliminate discrimination as a threat to the suburbs he created.

After Lee returned to Silver Spring after serving in World War I, he began building on his family’s real estate empire. It dated back to 1840 when Lee’s ancestor, Francis Preston Blair established a sprawling plantation that relied on enslaved labor. Lee had a diverse real estate portfolio. He subdivided and sold commercial and residential lots under his own name as well as through the several development companies he founded in the 1920s and 1930s. These include the North Washington Realty Company and the Fairway Land Company.

Sample of residential subdivisions platted by E. Brooke Lee and his various companies in Silver Spring, 1920-1948.

Collectively, Lee’s real estate transactions comprised the sale and development of hundreds of parcels where African Americans could not live unless they were domestic servants employed by white property owners or tenants. Here is a sample of the racially restrictive deed covenants found in deeds Lee and his companies executed between 1920 and 1948 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racially restrictive deed covenants were unenforceable in courts.

E. Brooke Lee, Individual

For the purposes of sanitation and health, neither the Grantee, nor its successors or assigns, shall or will sell, grant, lease, rent or convey the said premises to any person of the negro race — E. Brooke Lee and Elizabeth Lee to the Convention of The Protestant Episcopal Church of the Diocese of Washington, April 5, 1929. Montgomery County Deed Book 478, p. 475.

North Washington Realty Company

For the purposes of sanitation and health it is agreed by the parties hereto that the property hereby conveyed shall not be sold, leased, rented or transferred to a member of a race whose death rate is greater than that of the white race. — North Washington Realty Company, Incorporated, to Bertha D. King, January 21, 1928. Montgomery County Deed Book 448, p. 409.

Fairway Land Company

For the purposes of sanitation and health it is agreed by the parties hereto that the property hereby conveyed shall not be sold, leased, rented or transferred to a member of a race whose death rate is greater than that of the white race. — Fairway Land Company to Clara V. Peter, March 12, 1929. Montgomery County Deed Book 478, p. 194.

After the United States entered World War II, the Washington, D.C., housing authority seized several of Lee’s subdivisions developed by the Fairway Land Company. The properties were to be developed to provide housing for white defense industry workers. Lee challenged the federal action in court to protect his deed covenants. Though the U.S. agency won the case, the housing remained mainly vacant because not enough white occupants could be found. This happened at a time when Washington area Black families and defense workers struggled to find housing. Read more about the Fairway case in this 2016 blog post and subsequent Maryland Department of Transportation Cultural Resources (CRaB) Bulletin.

Racially restrictive deed covenant, E. Brooke Lee, 1929.

E. Brooke Lee Middle School, Silver Spring. My 2017 Washington Post article describing Lee as a segregationist spurred a 2019 initiative to change this school’s name.

© 202 D.S. Rotenstein

 

The Jim Crow pet cemetery

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In Jim Crow Montgomery County, Maryland, it was easier for white folks’ pets to get a respectful burial than it was for the county’s African Americans. The indignity is compounded when you factor in the conditions of many Black cemeteries in Montgomery County versus the Aspin Hill pet cemetery. Many Black cemeteries have been abandoned and overgrown. Others, like Bethesda’s River Road Moses Cemetery, have been paved over.

Montgomery Preservation, Inc., a historic preservation advocacy group recently announced that it was giving its prestigious Wayne Goldstein advocacy award to someone for “documentation of, advocacy for preservation of historic Aspin Hill Pet Cemetery.”

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The unremarkable warehouse: a Pittsburgh Wool photo essay

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Even with its new warehouse, there are no guarantees that Heinz will be able to maintain its manufacturing presence perpetually, and if someday they leave, Pittsburgh will be left with an unremarkable 1990s warehouse — David S. Rotenstein, Society for Industrial Archeology Newsletter, Fall 1999.

I should have put money on that 1999 prediction. Heinz did leave Pittsburgh and the city did end up with an ugly and unremarkable (and now abandoned) 1990s warehouse.

Former Pittsburgh Wool Company site, 2019.

Twenty years ago the Pittsburgh Wool Company building was demolished so that the Heinz company could build a new warehouse to distribute soups and baby food. The demolition marked the end of a historic building and more than 150 years of continuous use of a single site by the leather industry. Since the 1840s, wood (and later brick) tannery buildings had occupied the site on the north shore of the Allegheny River where the Pittsburgh Wool plant was located.

They, like their neighbor to the south, the H.J. Heinz Company, were part of Pittsburgh’s industrial heritage. Yet, in 1999 then-Mayor Tom Murphy cut a deal with Heinz to enable the company to expand its footprint to the north. The deal included the threat that if the company that occupied the property Heinz wanted didn’t agree to leave, the city would use its eminent domain powers to seize the land that had been declared blighted in 1980. The Pittsburgh Wool Company was the entity that needed to move.

In a new PublicSource article, I re-examined the 1999 eminent domain battle through a lens shaped by my recent work on displacement and gentrification. This photo essay documents the Pittsburgh Wool Company site through time.

This is a basic warehouse building undistinguishable from a thousand other buildings in the city — John DeSantis, Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission chairman, July 1999.

James Callery tannery, c. 1889. The Pittsburgh Wool Company occupied the highlighted building from the 1950s to 2000.

A view the Pittsburgh Wool Company, the National Lead Company and surrounding businesses on River Avenue looking to the Allegheny River. Pittsburgh City Photographer, December 20, 1962. Historic Pittsburgh image.

Pittsburgh Wool Company, 1997.

Pittsburgh Wool Company, 1997.

Pittsburgh Wool Company as seen from Pennsylvania Route 28, 1997.

Pittsburgh Wool Company demolition, October 2000. Photo by Elsie Yuratovich.

Pittsburgh Wool Company demolition, November 2000.

Abandoned former Heinz warehouse, Pittsburgh Wool site, October 2019.

The Pittsburgh Wool Company relocated to the Strip District when its historic building was demolished. By 2019, all that remained was a shell company used by the former owner to manage his real estate assets.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

 

 

Where are the pictures?

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I recently took a group of public history students to the Black history exhibits in the redeveloped Beacon municipal center in Decatur, Georgia. Ever since the space opened in 2015, I have described it in conference papers and articles as “Black history under glass.”

It is a sanitized, flattened version of the city’s Black history that does great violence to the city’s history and the people who made it happen. Much of the single story told in the Beacon exhibits derives from the experiences of one person: a tokenized African American woman who made significant civil rights contributions to the city and who became a controversial figure after serving in city government.

The students who accompanied me on the visit earlier this month have been working with a church congregation that was founded in Decatur in the 1860s. It was the oldest Black church congregation in the city before it was displaced in the 1990s. Though their grant-funded project has been widely reported by multiple Atlanta media outlets, it has received no coverage in Decatur-based media (blogs or city publications).

Antioch A.M.E. Church digital history project screen capture. The website is a rich archive of textual, visual, and oral history primary materials.

Their work, and the stories of the multiple generations of church members with whom they have been working, are some of the notable erasures in the Beacon exhibits. They are erasures first brought to my attention in calls and emails I began receiving after the exhibits opened. Many lifelong Decatur residents who grew up in the razed and erased Beacon community contacted me to tell me that the exhibits didn’t tell the their community’s entire story. They were angry that it privileged the story of a single individual, whose experiences didn’t match their own.

Beacon Community story map. Beacon Municipal Center, November 2019.

In the discussion with the public history students, I asked them what they thought was missing from the exhibits. One woman pointed to a graphic illustration of the erased community (a map with historic photos and text panels) and she asked where all the pictures were. Through her work with the historic Black congregation, she and her colleagues knew that there were photos of sites indicated in the map, yet they weren’t represented.

Detail from the Beacon Community story map. The exhibits were completed after the former Antioch A.M.E. church building was demolished. The map doesn’t include a photo of that building or its pre-urban renewal predecessors and it incorrectly tells visitors that the church “is now located on Atlanta Avenue.”

The City of Decatur boasts that the Beacon exhibits, “Preserve the history of the Beacon community and … honor its spirit.” Hardly. The exhibits are another act of racial violence in a city with a long history of racism and anti-Semitism. If the erasures are so evident to undergraduate history students, I wonder what a public forum comprised of former Beacon residents that fully represents the community’s long and rich past might tell city leaders about its cosmetic effort to erase decades of racism.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

Solutions for a racist city

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A colleague invited me to Decatur, Georgia, to take her public history class on a test run for the walking tour I designed for the National Council on Public History 2020 annual conference. I began last week’s session in my colleague’s college classroom with an introduction to how I began my research in Decatur. I described documenting more than 130 teardowns over three years, African American families packing their lives onto U-Haul trucks for moves away from the city, and erased Black history.

At the end of the introduction we had a brief discussion with questions from the students, the professor, and a college administrator. One person asked me how Decatur could address is racism problems.

I thought for a moment and replied, “I don’t think it can.”

Classroom, February 7, 2020.

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The Crawford Grill No. 2 and the danger of a single story [updated]

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Introduction

Most Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, residents recognize the building on the northwest corner of Wylie Avenue and Elmore Street as the Crawford Grill No. 2. That’s the name that the most visible business in the building went by for half a century and that’s the name that historic preservationists used in 2019 to nominate the property to the National Register of Historic Places.[1]

2141 Wylie Avenue, Pittsburgh. October 2019.

The Crawford Grill No. 2 isn’t a bad name for the building. It fits, considering how long the nightclub occupied the space. But because historic preservationists have focused on the building’s time as the Crawford Grill No. 2 and the people who owned it between 1945 and 2003, there’s a lot missing from the building’s story. The historic preservation narrative, which closely hews to previously published texts documenting the building’s colorful time as an internationally renowned jazz club, conforms to what the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the danger of a single story.”

The “single story,” according to Adichie, flattens experience and they encourage stereotypes: “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

This post offers some additional storylines to the three-story brick building at 2141 Wylie Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. I need to be up front about how I ended up reading the draft National Register nomination for the property. In August 2019 I began a research project stemming from my work on a book about erasure and gentrification in an Atlanta suburb. I had been studying numbers gambling in urban and suburban areas since 2015.

[A quick primer on numbers gambling offsite source]

Numbers slips confiscated in 1930 by Pittsburgh police in the city’s North Side. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 29, 1930.

Histories of the Hill District became essential reading and I took advantage of local archival resources after moving back to Pittsburgh in 2019. While reading some of the Hill District work I went down a research rabbit hole pursuing questions around the intersection of history and folklore in Hill District vice. The light on the other end of the rabbit hole led me to begin conversations with a university press about a book on the history of Pittsburgh numbers gambling rackets. But that’s a story for another place and another time. The remainder of this post focuses on 2141 Wylie Avenue and some of its other stories.

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Where the racketeers played: Squirrel Hill’s gambling joints

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This installment of #Mobsburgh returned to Squirrel Hill with a visit to a pair of gambling clubs.

Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, December 12, 1952. Source: newspapers.com.

Squirrel Hill is a fashionable Pittsburgh neighborhood long associated with the city’s Jewish residents. In the 1920s, first- and second-generation European immigrants accumulated sufficient capital to move away from crowded Hill District tenements and other parts of the city where they had settled. They brought with them European cultural and religious traditions adapted to American urban life. And, they carried new additions to their economic and social repertoires: Organized crime rackets, including bootlegging and gambling.

Two organized crime institutions associated with sports gambling, games of chance, and numbers gambling emerged in Squirrel Hill. The Beacon Club and the Squirrel Hill Veterans Club provided cozy spaces where the city’s racketeers could drink, gamble, eat, and share information. Racketeers from across the region patronized these clubs and the establishments became frequent targets of Pittsburgh law enforcement raids. Continue reading →

Welcome to “Mobsburgh”: Morris Kauffman’s last ride

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Last summer I inadvertently stumbled upon a story about organized crime in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Since August, I have been poring through archival records, historical newspapers, and interviewing the descendants and extended kin of people involved in Pittsburgh’s gambling and bootlegging rackets between 1920 and 1980. As I work my way through this research I will be posting stories in this space: #Mobsburgh.

The first #Mobsburgh story begins far away from Pittsburgh in the U.S. 301 and U.S. 1 highway corridors between Richmond, Virginia, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1933 and 1934, a loosely organized crew committed a string of robberies and murders. They were called the “Tri-State Gang” for the territory (Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia) where they operated.

Pittsburgh was a bit far afield for the gang, best known for hijacking cigarette trucks out of North Carolina and for robbing postal facilities in Washington, D.C., and Richmond. Yet, their crime spree extended to Pittsburgh in 1934 when the body of one of the gang members was found behind an apartment building in the city’s emerging Jewish neighborhood, Squirrel Hill.

Wendover Apartments, Squirrel Hill, December 2019.

The Baltimore evening Sun, May 23, 1934. Source: newspapers.com

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Ghosts and gangsters: 1129 Ridge Avenue, “America’s Most Haunted House”

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Screen capture, 13 Creepy Pittsburgh Ghost Stories, www.pittsburghbeautiful.com

While researching organized crime in Pittsburgh I stumbled upon a colossal haunted house story. My work documenting the history of a Pittsburgh family with two generations of bootleggers and numbers racketeers inadvertently led me to 1129 Ridge Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Northside neighborhood. The family I am researching was associated with the family that owned 1129 Ridge Avenue for more than 30 years.

By the last decades of the twentieth century, stories attached to the property had earned 1129 Ridge Avenue the dubious title, “America’s most haunted house.” This post, which began as an article for a community newspaper, documents how a modest 1880s home became fodder for decades of contemporary legends. Continue reading →

Where did the Decatur survey go?

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Sometime in 2019 the City of Decatur, Georgia, deleted from the municipal website its 2009 citywide historic resources survey and all of the study’s supporting materials: a comprehensive narrative report, maps, and forms for all of the properties surveyed. Visitors to the city’s website can read and download the 1982 Decatur Town Center Plan, a 2004 Greenway Plan, a 2002 MARTA Station Study, city council meeting agendas and summaries, and lots of colorful publications touting everything that makes “Decatur Greater.”

What visitors to the city’s website can no longer read and download is the costly study completed in 2009 that fully erased the city’s Black experience along with every single historic property important to Decatur’s African American community.

It may be that Decatur city officials are embarrassed by the racist survey. I doubt that’s the reason — city officials have vigorously defended it since 2012 when I began writing about the survey’s shortcomings.

February 22, 2012 email from then-Decatur Historic Preservation Planner Regina Brewer to David Rotenstein.

City officials may be embarrassed that the survey failed to meet even the most basic requirements for such surveys established by the Georgia Historic Preservation Division, the state historic preservation office. Though city officials never informed residents and taxpayers, the 2009 citywide historic resources survey couldn’t even be entered into the state’s master survey files because the city’s consultant completed, and the then-historic preservation planner approved, a deficient product.

January 2019 memorandum requesting that the Decatur City Commission approve an application for federal grant funds to complete a new historic resources survey.

Details about the deficient 2009 survey were revealed earlier this year when the city’s new historic preservation planner requested approval to seek federal grant money to fund a new citywide historic resources survey. The Decatur City Commission on January 22, 2019, voted unanimously to submit the grant application.

Buried deep inside the grant application that the City of Decatur submitted to the state, which administers the federal grant program for the National Park Service, is the admission that a new survey is needed to correct the deficiencies in the 2009 study: “The City of Decatur’s previous historic resources survey in 2009 did not use Georgia Historic Resources Survey Forms, so HPD does not have copies of the collected data. At that time, HPD requested that the correct forms be used in order to integrate the information into their inventories. That is the City’s intent with the updated survey.”

City of Decatur’s 2019 Historic Preservation Fund CLG Survey & Planning Grant Application. Copy received from the City of Decatur under Georgia’s Open Records Act.

The City of Decatur didn’t get the $15,000 it requested in its application. According to the same document, city officials expect to spend $55,000 on the new survey.

In September, I wrote to the city’s new historic preservation planner after I received a copy of the grant application. I asked, “Can you tell me if HPD approved the application?”

“They did not,” she replied.

Curious about updates to Decatur’s historic preservation planning documents, I visited the City’s website. Previously, the complete 2009 historic resource survey documents had been posted in the Historic Preservation Commission’s “Historic Decatur” page. I wrote to City Manager Andrea Arnold asking why they had been deleted. I received no response.

City of Decatur website screen capture, “Historic Resources Survey.”

Perhaps some Decatur residents or local journalists might have better luck getting answers from city officials regarding the deletion of the 2009 historic resources survey.

UPDATE:

More than a year after first emailing the Decatur city manager about the survey I tried again. Here is her reply:

Here we are rolling up on three years since the survey disappeared and two years after the city manager wrote that the survey would be restored to the city website and it’s still MIA.