Author Archives: David Rotenstein

A visit to the Pittsburgh eruv

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Introduction

The Fern Hollow Bridge collapsed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the pre-dawn hours of Friday January 28, 2022. The structure had carried Forbes Avenue across a steeply sloped stream valley on the eastern edge of Frick Park. Constructed in 1901 and replaced in 1973, the Fern Hollow Bridge and Forbes Avenue comprised a large segment of the Pittsburgh eruvā€™s northern boundary. Stone walls, some laid by masons and another the sheer face of a steep hill, carried the boundary to the bridgeā€™s approaches. Then, using metal poles and then light poles along the bridgeā€™s spans, the eruv boundary crossed from west to east. When the bridge fell that cold winter morning, Pittsburgh residents lost critical transportation and spiritual infrastructure.

Forbes Avenue entrance to Frick Park and approach to the Fern Hollow Bridge, December 2022. Photo by David S. Rotenstein.

Pittsburgh has had an eruv since 1986. The Pittsburgh eruv originally wrapped around the cityā€™s Squirrel Hill neighborhood, an area with many synagogues, Jewish day schools, and stores catering to Pittsburghā€™s large Jewish community. Later expansions added several nearby neighborhoods and institutions serving Jews, including universities (Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, Carlow University, and Chatham College) and several hospitals. The Fern Hollow Bridge is located in an expansion area added in the early 1990s. Currently, the Pittsburgh eruv covers 6.7 square miles with an approximate 16-mile perimeter.

Eruv Map.jpg: Maps showing the Pittsburgh eruv boundary prior to a 2022 expansion and the Fern Hollow Bridge location. Adapted from https://www.pittsburgheruv.org/eruv-map.

A city marked by three rivers, many stream valleys, and steep topography, Pittsburgh has 446 bridges in its city limits. Though the investigation into the cause of the Fern Hollow Bridge collapse is ongoing, preliminary assessments point to deferred maintenance and a significantly deteriorated substructure. A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigation in the months after the collapse revealed that the Fern Hollow Bridge was one of many in the city and region rated poor and potentially dangerous.

It took less than a year for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation to design and rebuild the Fern Hollow Bridge. Just before it reopened, I reported on the eruv and the bridge collapse for NEXTpittsburgh, a local online news outlet. This post expands on that reporting.

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Are there any Black history sites in downtown Silver Spring, Md.?

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Earlier this week a Silver Spring, MD, community group hosted a virtual talk on historic preservation in Montgomery County. Eileen McGuckian (a former Historic Preservation Commission chair and president of a countywide preservation organization, Montgomery Preservation) spoke for about an hour and then took questions.

One Silver Spring resident asked McGuckian if there were any Black history sites in downtown Silver Spring. This video clip captures the exchange.

(Video clip is from the Zoom recording posted by Silver Spring Town Center, Inc.)

Spoiler alert: contrary to McGuckian’s answer, there are many Black history sites in the area covered by the question. In fact, the Montgomery County Planning Department recently released a short video about a new marker commemorating one of them:

Pittsburgh’s Black-Owned Barber Shops are a National Treasure

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Pittsburgh’s Black-owned barber shops are an important part of the city’s history. They are the quintessential African American third spaces: places where business is transacted, information is exchanged, and social ties are maintained. They are places where the built environment meets intangible cultural heritage and they are ripe for a closer examination before the buildings and the people that make them special disappear forever.

Big Tom’s Barber Shop, Centre Ave.

Pittsburgh Planning Director Karen Abrams, at the February 2023 Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission meeting, observed that the city may be filled with sites planners and preservationists don’t know about or have historically ignored. “How we can bring light to some things that have just been not on our radars in the city, that are in predominantly Black neighborhoods,” Abrams said in a discussion of the National Register nomination for a house in Homewood once owned by Pittsburgh barber and gambling entrepreneur William “Woogie” Harris and his wife, Ada.

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Imagine if this was your family

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Just imagine if this was your family and all this had been published over a period spanning nearly 20 years.

2007 City of Pittsburgh historic site nomination completed by the Young Preservationists Association of Pittsburgh (PDF p. 9).
“National Opera House” website, January 2023 screen capture.
January 3, 2023, Facebook exchange, with corrections that were also emailed per the FB request.
“National Opera House” website, March 7, 2023, screen capture.

For reference:

  • Ada B. Harris died in 1972 (not 1975)
  • The Slater family name is not spelled “Slator.”
  • Vicki Battles Fox is Woogie and Ada Harris’s granddaughter (not their “niece”).
  • Marion Slater was Woogie and Ada Harris’s daughter. She inherited the property from her mother, Ada B. Harris.

For further reading: ā€œShe died in that house.ā€

Maxwell Street, Decatur, Ga.

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I have an assignment to write an article on affordable housing in Decatur, Ga. It’s been a while since I surfed through Zillow to see what things are selling for in the city’s Oakhurst neighborhood. I nearly fell out of my seat when I saw this map.

I can recall that in 2014, Oakhurst’s first million-dollar house went on the market. I can’t imagine a house on Maxwell Street selling for 2.75 million or another one a block away from where we once lived selling for 1.28 million.

For a taste of what Oakhurst’s Maxwell Street looked like a little over a decade ago, here’s a video I cobbled together documenting the transformation of one lot, one of the first teardown-mansionization conversions. Many of the houses pictured in the driving scene at the end are now gone. So, too, are the people who once lived in them.

I made the Maxwell Street video two years before a different builder transformed another one of the lots into a spectacle by tearing down a small home built in the 1940s and building what he dubbed a “1,000 Year House.” The builder live-tweeted and blogged about the project, from start to finish. The real farce was how city officials and others bought into the hype that the new brick manor was somehow affordable and sustainable.

The “1,000 Year House” site. 2009 photo is from the Decatur citywide historic resources survey.

There are many more examples over on the Ruined Decatur site.

Ā©2023 D.S. Rotenstein

Missing Middle Housing

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I found Decatur, Ga.’s “missing middle” housing. It turns out that it wasn’t missing after all. Most of it ā€” affordable apartments, duplexes, etc. ā€” ended up in Atlanta area landfills. A snapshot from 2011-2014 appears in the Ruined Decatur blog.

Chateau Daisy apartments, Oakview Road, Decatur, Ga., 2014-2015.
Zillow screen capture, Feb. 7, 2023.

Bad History

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Ann Crichton was elected to the Decatur, Ga., City Commission in 1971. Her colleagues in 1977 selected her as mayor of the municipality that is organized under the “council-mayor” form in which the mayor is a ceremonial position. Individuals are “elected” by their peers to chair city commission meetings and to perform other symbolic functions.

Crichton, an Agnes Scott College graduate, became a nationally recognized expert in municipal government, community development, and affordable housing. After being ousted from office in 1979, Crichton went on to serve as President Jimmy Carter’s Atlanta-based regional director of the Economic Development Administration. After that, Crichton briefly moved to the United Kingdom before returning to Atlanta and founding her own economic development consulting business.

Then-Decatur Mayor Ann Crichton and then-Baltimore Mayor Walter Orlinsky representing the National League of Cities appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Housing and Community Development of the Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs, Feb. 25, 1977.
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All the news that’s missing

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How can a self-styled publisher/editor/reporter have “One Of The Oldest Women In The World” living in his community of only 20,000 people and not know it?

Or, how did the Washington Post and suburban news outlets miss what the residents in a historically Black community were telling them for years about an old bridge?

I am looking for sources who can speak to the role journalism plays in gentrification and erasure. Have a story? Let’s talk.

Public Participation Without the Public and Without Participation

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Yesterday’s Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission discussion of the National Register of Historic Places nomination of the William A. “Woogie” and Ada Harris House was billed as an opportunity for public comment.

Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission Feb. 1, 2023, agenda. Note the reason for including the “Woogie Harris House”: “for public comment.”

With no public notice (beyond listing on the HRC agenda posted on the city’s website) and no notification by the city’s historic preservation community, community groups, and other stakeholders, the 10-minute discussion was a master class in public participation minus the public and minus participation.

Monochromatic

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This is rich: the local historical society responsible for whitewashing Silver Spring, Maryland’s history and creating decades of monochromatic celebratory products is angry about a property owner erasing the color from his vintage Googie building.