Ever wonder what the smallest unit a 7-story concrete cold warehouse can be reduced to? Crumbs, apparently. Crews have gone from carting away boulder-sized concrete debris from the former Federal Cold Storage Co. site to running it through a milling machine and creating massive mounds of historic building crumbs. It looks like they’re reaching the end of the demolition phase. Demolition began in early November 2021 ….
Former Federal Cold Storage Co. building demolition, Pittsburgh, Pa., January 6, 2023.
Former Federal Cold Storage Co. building demolition, Pittsburgh, Pa., January 6, 2023.
Former Federal Cold Storage Co. building demolition, Pittsburgh, Pa., January 6, 2023.
For a complete rundown on this spectacular demolition operation and the building’s history, check out this November 2022 virtual program hosted by the Society for Industrial Archeology:
The late playwright August Wilson had some pointed opinions about the statue of St. Benedict the Moor mounted atop a church in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District. In 1968, a crane hoisted the 18-foot statue onto the church located at the gateway to the Hill District at an intersection long known as “Freedom Corner.”
Wilson told interviewer Dinah Livingston in 1987:
… all the white people are gone, so it’s all Black. And they name the church Old Holy Trinity St. Bridget St. Benedict the Moor. After much discussion about the matter, they decided to just name it St. Benedict the Moor. And they put up this stature of St. Benedict. The church sits on the dividing line between the downtown and the Hill District—and they had the statue with its back turned to the Blacks and its arms opened to the downtown. Every single person in the neighborhood … noticed that and felt insulted that we got a Black saint and he’s turned his back on us and opened his arms up to the white folks downtown.
Livingston, Dinah. “Cool August: Mr. Wilson’s Red Hot Blues.” In Conversations with August Wilson, edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Mary C. Hartig, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006, p. 46
St. Benedict the Moor statue as seen from Centre Avenue and Roberts Street in the Hill District.
St. Benedict the Moor statue facing towards downtown Pittsburgh.
In the summer of 2011, I watched as multiple residents of Decatur, Ga., duked it out over the city’s spatial boundaries in cyberspace. The exchanges spurred me to explore the city’s media ecosystem and how its residents and government officials create and reinforce Decatur’s identity online in the news and in social media. The city’s privileged white residents displayed considerable angst when reporters lumped the great expanse of unincorporated DeKalb County, which shares Zip Codes with the incorporated city of Decatur, into a singular monolithic “Decatur.” One now-defunct account admonished a prolific Decatur tweeter by writing, “[Decatur] is much more than 4 lily white blocks.”
I mothballed the posts that I wrote about Decatur’s online identity when I pulled the plug on the short-lived local news site that I created. As I write about the ways Decatur residents weaponize cyberspace and engage in online redlining, I am revisiting a lot of this material from 2011.
The 2011 posts included video clips from interviews done with municipal officials and residents with big online footprints. Here are a couple of the videos originally published at Dateline:Decatur in the summer of 2011. In them, a resident describes the physical and virtual Decaturs.
I can remember seeing this book, Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir, on bookstore shelves while living in Atlanta in the 1980s and 1990s. For whatever reason I never bought it or read it. That all changed a few months ago after I began researching a “forgotten” Pittsburgh Negro Leagues ballpark and the people involved in its development, etc. It turns out that Louis Bellinger (1891-1946), the only licensed and practicing Black architect in Pittsburgh between 1919 and his death in 1946, designed and built the stadium in 1920. And, he built Greenlee Field a dozen years later. This book is a memoir of the extended Bellinger family and their lives in South Carolina. Louis left Charleston in the teens and ended up in Pittsburgh in 1919. His father and brothers joined him by 1926. But it’s not just a window into the architect’s life. It also offers a glimpse into the life of Walter Bellinger (1901-1965), Louis’s younger brother.
Yesterday, we said goodbye to our friend Lillian Cooper Wiggins. The memorial was held at Arlington National Cemetery and the hall was filled to capacity with family and friends. I was honored and humbled to be among the many people Lil invited into her life and to be there to help celebrate that life.
Lil’s daughter asked me to draw on my many interviews with her mom to help write the obituaries published in The Washington Post and The Washington Informer. My words were unmistakable in the beautiful program Karen compiled to celebrate her mom’s life. I was fortunate to have so many of Lil’s own words to share in my tribute to her. Words like these: “My principle was to be the best I could to write as truthful as I could.” Good advice for a historian and writer.
Lil was a force of nature and one of the best people I have had the honor to know and befriend. She had a front row seat to history as Washington transformed from a Jim Crow Southern town into an iconic Chocolate City. As she transformed herself from a midwestern transplant into a centerpiece of Washington’s social, political, and economic life, Lil moved from that front seat onto center stage. Lil went from writing history’s first draft as an influential journalist to becoming part of history because of her writing and so much more.
“From the Desk of Lil” was the column that Lillian Cooper Wiggins wrote for the Washington Afro-American newspaper.
Lillian Cooper Wiggins died October 26 at age 92. She was my friend and the inspiration for much of the work that I have done since 2011 when I began writing about gentrification and racism in Decatur, Ga. I’m a historian and I first met Lillian in the pages of a history book of sorts, Dream City, the landmark 1994 work by Washington, D.C., journalists Harry Jaffe and Tom Sherwood. It’s a deep dive into the politics and culture of late-twentieth-century Washington wrapped around the story of Mayor-for-Life Marion Barry.
Dream City is required reading for anyone working and living in Washington. I first picked it up in 2007 while working as a consultant to the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC). I had been hired to do documentary research and dozens of oral history interviews to support author Tony Proscio in writing his book documenting the history of the DC LISC office.
Lillian Cooper Wiggins aboard Air Force 2 while covering Hubert Humphrey’s trip to Africa. Photo courtesy of Lillian Cooper Wiggins.
Jaffe and Sherwood introduced readers in Washington and beyond to Lillian’s best known contribution to Washington history. In the 1970s, she began writing about what has become widely known as “The Plan.” Jaffe later wrote, “We can thank Lillian Wiggins for first articulating this particular conspiracy theory [as a] columnist for the Washington Afro-American.” Jaffe got some things wrong in that 2010 Washington Examiner article, but the gist of his observation is correct: Lillian did expose many generations of journalists, historians, and sociologists to “The Plan.”
It’s not too late to register for Tuesday evening’s program, The Invisible Syndicate: Pittsburgh’s Jewish Racketeers, 1920-1980. It’s at the New Light Congregation in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood. The program is free but registration is required. Details at this link: https://newlightcongregation.org/events/new-light-lecture-series-the-invisible-syndicate-pittsburghs-jewish-racketeers-1920-1980/.
Like New York City, Cleveland, and Detroit, Pittsburgh has a significant Jewish organized crime history. Eastern European Jews living in the Hill District collaborated with other immigrants — Southern Blacks and Italians — to create informal economies in a city where racism, antisemitism, and generalized xenophobia erected barriers to good jobs, housing, and financial institutions. A small group of Hill District Jews went into bootlegging during Prohibition and then gambling. By 1930, a loosely organized Jewish syndicate occupied a top tier of Pittsburgh’s vice underworld. This presentation explores the social history of Pittsburgh’s less violent counterpart to Cleveland’s “silent syndicate” and Detroit’s “Purple Gang.” These Jewish vice entrepreneurs helped to create some of Pittsburgh’s most enduring brands, including the Pittsburgh Steelers, and were integral to the city’s early entertainment sector as theater and nightclub owners. The program’s arc begins in the Hill District and ends in Squirrel Hill where the invisible syndicate’s leaders had their homes and gambling clubs.
Come for the stories and the history. Who knows, you might even find out how Meyer Sigal got his nickname!
Earlier this week I got a Facebook message from a friend who lives in Decatur, Ga.: “More construction in Decatur Oakview Rd.”
I am used to messages like this. They have arrived via email, Twitter, Facebook, and text for the past decade. Many of them come from people like my 60-something Decatur friend: the senders are Black, elderly, and many have been lifelong Decatur residents. They include photos of buildings being demolished and the McMansions that replace them. They also include comments about displacement and racism. For years these folks have tried to get relief from city officials and to get their stories told by the press.
Unlike local bloggers, overworked newspaper reporters, and disinterested broadcast journalists, I listened and I wrote. A lot. I earned the trust of a lot Decatur residents while also angering many others invested in the myth of a liberal and progressive city that only exists in their minds and the city’s flashy advertising campaigns.
The site shown in the message I received is located on Oakview Road, between Second and Third avenues, just inside the Decatur city limits. Until last year, it was one of the Oakhurst neighborhood’s few surviving twentieth century commercial nodes. The one-story buildings occupied by a beauty parlor and grocery store had been community fixtures for decades.
Oakhurst Grocery (1529 Oakview Road) and “Purple Building” (1531 Oakview Road), May 2012.
In the spring of 2021, a group of Decatur, Ga., residents approached local institutions with a request for information about the history of Juneteenth in the city. They wrote to the DeKalb History Center and to city officials, including assistant city manager Linda Harris.
Harris replied to an initial query by directing the group to the City’s “Historic Decatur” web page and to a page dedicated to the history of Decatur’s erased Beacon community. It’s curious that Harris would direct someone asking about Black history in Decatur to the “Historic Decatur” page because the information there only discusses white history and Black history is completely absent. In fact, the page is such a clearcut example of whitewashed history that I use in in my lectures, one as recently as August 6, 2022.
Slide used in Black history presentation delivered at Berry College, Rome, Ga., Aug. 6, 2022.
By many accounts, Pittsburgh-raised gambling entrepreneur Jakie Lerner was a very generous man — when the odds were in his favor. Like many of his peers who relied on betting in one form or another to make a living, Lerner had his ups and his downs.
Jakie Lerner
When he was up, he liked to give friends and relatives gifts. He gave them dogs, cashmere sweaters, and jewelry. Lots of jewelry.
Last month I interviewed the daughter of another Pittsburgh gambling entrepreneur, a smalltime numbers operator who plied his trade in the city’s Strip District. He was friends with Lerner and Lerner’s daughter was friends with the woman, then about 10 years old. Lerner was a frequent visitor to their Millvale home during the summers he spent in Pittsburgh visiting from Tucson. Lerner caught up with friends and relatives, gambled, and checked in on the Hill District numbers rackets he oversaw remotely from Arizona.
In the interview with the Strip District numbers man’s daughter, she told me about one memorable 1950s visit by Lerner to their home. Lerner had bought a gold watch for his own daughter and he showed it to the friend’s daughter, asking if she liked it.
The young girl swooned. Seeing her reaction, Lerner gave her the watch and said he’d buy another for his daughter. Still living in Tucson, Lerner’s daughter told me in interviews in 2019 and 2020 that her father had given her jewelry. After speaking with the woman raised in the Strip District and Millvale, I texted Lerner’s daughter and asked if she recalled getting a watch from him in the 1950s.
“He did buy me several watches through the years but this one might’ve been a Hamilton that had diamonds around it. I still have the watch I don’t wear it,” she replied.
