Author Archives: David Rotenstein

Lost Lloyds: A Pittsburgh Gambling Site Is Erased

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If only Pittsburgh had a functioning historic preservation law and a more sophisticated historic preservation advocacy community. A few weeks ago I was in the city’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood to plan for my upcoming Squirrel Hill by the Numbers walking tour dates and I noticed that the facade of 1926 Murray Avenue was missing. It had been there last winter.

Former Beacon Club (1928 1/2 Murray Ave., left) above “H&R Block” and former Squirrel Hill Veteran’s Club (right, 1926 Murray Ave.) in 2019.

I had first encountered the block where the building is located in 2019. I had begun doing interviews for my research into the social history of numbers gambling in Pittsburgh. The Beacon Club, one of Pittsburgh’s most iconic and infamous twentieth century gambling clubs, had been located next door at 1928 1/2 Murray Avenue. Many of the people I interviewed early on and later described the club’s significant roles in Pittsburgh’s underworld history, Jewish history, and Black history.

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Pittsburgh City Council Testimony: Tito-Mecca-Zizza House

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Today, the Pittsburgh City Council heard testimony related to the nomination of the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House as a City of Pittsburgh historic site. My written testimony (below) supplemented the 2021 nomination report I prepared and my oral testimony delivered during the hearing.

Tito House Historic Site Nomination
Bill No. 2022-0190
Pittsburgh City County Hearing
April 20, 2022

Testimony of Dr. David Rotenstein

For the record, my name is David Rotenstein and I am writing as the author of the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House historic site nomination report.

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The 1950 Census: Invisible No More

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In 2009, I interviewed a woman who spent her first decade of life in a suburban home that her parents bought in the 1930s. The home was located in a residential subdivision that had racially restrictive deed covenants attached to all the homes. African Americans were prohibited from buying or renting homes there.

1940s family photo.

When I interviewed the woman (who is now 78) in the fall of 2009, she told me that her family had a live-in domestic. She only knew the woman’s first name and the nickname that she and her brother called the woman. My oral history collaborator had several family photos that showed the Black woman with the family over several years in the 1940s and early 1950s. But, my collaborator didn’t recall any personal details about the woman who helped raise her.

I exhausted all of the archival records available to me at the time to try and locate the African American woman’s full name and any surviving biographical information about her. I struck out. Everywhere. I had consulted every known resource except for the 1950 U.S. Census population schedules. At the time, they were not scheduled for a public release until April 1, 2022 — today. This morning I got out of bed, let the dogs out, grabbed some coffee and made tea for my wife, and rushed into my office. I fired up my web browser and surfed over to https://1950census.archives.gov/ and typed the family’s name into the search field. A few seconds later, I had the woman’s name I had waited 13 years to learn.

She was invisible (to me) no more.

Stay tuned for more about this journey.

1936 racially restrictive deed covenant for the subdivision where the family lived.

© 2022 D.S. Rotenstein

The Jerry

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I recently spent a couple of days in Silver Spring, Maryland. A filmmaker brought me back there to be interviewed for a documentary she is making about Black history in the DC suburb.

Yesterday morning I revisited Silver Spring’s “Heritage Trail” — a group of nine eight historical markers placed throughout the central business district. Researched and designed by the Silver Spring Historical Society, the markers tell a nostalgic and whitewashed version of Silver Spring’s history. That history omits Black history and it celebrates the stories of the segregationists who created dozens of residential subdivisions with racially restrictive deed covenants and who owned the downtown businesses that discriminated against Blacks.

One of the historical society’s markers is located at the corner of Georgia Avenue and Bonifant Street. Across Georgia Avenue, there is a newly opened Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen. The restaurant opened in a storefront once occupied by a well-loved Indian restaurant.

Silver Spring Heritage Trail marker across the street from a new Popeye’s restaurant.

In 2020, when local media announced the new Popeye’s location, the president of the Silver Spring Historical Society made the rounds on social media complaining about the new restaurant. He and his classist comments quickly became fodder for Twitter ridicule.

As I was photographing the marker across from the Silver Spring Popeye’s it hit me: wouldn’t it be a terrific idea if the restaurant honored the Silver Spring Historical Society’s “contributions” by introducing a new menu item? It would be made with all white meat and served on white bread with mayonnaise. They could call it The Jerry.

DAM it all to Hell: Pittsburgh Historic Preservation’s Rube Goldberg Machine

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In 2018, the City of Pittsburgh passed a law recognizing community organizations and implementing a process to improve stakeholder participation in development activities. The new law added to an already complicated bureaucracy for such municipal boards and commissions as the Zoning Board of Adjustment, Planning Commission, and the Historic Review Commission. These quasi-judicial boards hold public hearings where members of the public and City officials “are allowed to give testimony concerning issues under consideration.” The new Registered Community Organization Law requires all people living in a neighborhood with a registered community organization (RCO) to hold a public meeting called a development activities meeting or DAM before they can have a case heard before one of the city’s quasi-judicial boards.

Gina and Steve Super got sucked into the new DAM system soon after it launched. In1996, they bought a historic building on Pittsburgh’s Southside. For almost 50 years prior to their purchase, the two-and-a-half-story brick building at 2106 East Carson Street had housed Gerson Brothers, a tailoring and dry cleaning business. After buying the building, Gina Super opened The Laundry Basket in the storefront space.

2016 East Carson Street (Lucy’s Handmade Clothing Shop). Photo December 2021.

About two years ago, the Supers decided to make some changes. They closed the laundry business and converted the space into a retail store. At the same time, the Supers painted the building’s exterior. “All we wanted to do was freshen up the paint on the front and we replaced it with the same exact colors,” Gina Super told me in a January 2022 interview. “It wasn’t like we were changing or altering the front of the building. We repainted the identical colors.”

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Performative Regulatory Compliance: The Pennsylvania History Code

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My first experiences with the Pennsylvania History Code (Title 37 of the Pennsylvania Statutes) happened in the late 1980s. I was in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania and working as an archaeologist. My employers had lucrative regulatory compliance contracts: working for agencies and private sector entities required to comply with federal and state laws. These laws (the National Historic Preservation Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Pennsylvania History Code) required parties receiving federal and state funds, permits, and licenses to identify historic places, evaluate their significance, and resolve adverse effects to them introduced by the projects triggering regulatory compliance.

Until 1995, compliance with the Pennsylvania History Code meant doing intensive and costly archaeological surveys and excavations. At the time, Pennsylvania’s state archaeologist had a thing for deeply buried prehistoric sites. Consultants had to prove to his satisfaction that they had dug deep enough and used the appropriate technical expertise to reach soils deeper than what the first Native Americans who lived in Pennsylvania ever walked upon. That meant very deep holes and hiring expensive soils science specialists called geomorphologists.

I remember cursing the state archaeologist many times as I dug or supervised the excavation of neat square holes — sometimes using backhoes and other heavy machinery because the soils were so deep — to identify sites that dovetailed with his research interests. Some of my most vivid archaeology fieldwork memories involve working in subfreezing cold temperatures with negative windchill numbers to meet project deadlines and the state archaeologist’s obsession with so-called Paleo sites.

The author standing in an excavation unit in December 1990. Note the mattock pick (on the surface) used to break up the frozen river bottom soil

Back in late 1990 I and a colleague excavated a deep test unit in temperatures so cold that the dirt re-froze between the excavation unit and the screen being used to recover artifacts — if any were to be found. It was so cold that we had to use a mattock pick (typically used for breaking rock) to excavate in the usually fine river bottom soil because it was frozen. We then had to wait in the cold for the geomorphologist to arrive to tell us what we could see for ourselves: there was no archaeological site where a Weis supermarket was going to be built.

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Something stinks in Pittsburgh’s Strip District

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A historic building in Pittsburgh’s Strip District is being demolished. There’s no question that demolition was the only economically viable alternative for the former Federal Cold Storage Company building. I had known about the building for decades: its giant illuminated fish had been a familiar sight that I fondly recalled from living in the city during the 1990s. In 2020, a developer found the right combination of plans and financing to convert the property from an abandoned industrial warehouse into a new mixed-use development. But first, the historic building had to be demolished.

Like me, lots of Pittsburgh residents had loved the fish sign. My attachments to the building went deeper, though. I found its industrial design and history interesting and that history dovetailed with my research interests. I have written on the history of Pittsburgh’s food-related industries and the industrial architectural and landscapes associated with it. Additionally,  I had written a history of an Alexandria, Virginia, ice plant  — a related historic property type. In 2020, I learned more about the building’s history and its roles in Pittsburgh labor and organized crime history. Continue reading →

Is this Milt Jaffe?

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Milton “Milt” Jaffe (1895-1981) was a Pittsburgh entertainment entrepreneur. He was a major player in the city’s Prohibition-era casinos and speakeasies before becoming a boxing promoter (Billy Conn) and moving to Las Vegas to manage the Stardust Casino.

Post-Gazette, Jul. 17, 1963.

For reasons that should be obvious, Jaffe didn’t like to have his photo taken. Despite many arrests and his high-profile work in entertainment and sports, few newspaper photos were ever published. Earlier this week I interviewed the family of one of Jaffe’s former racketeering associates. During the three-hour session, they broke out family photo albums with photos of their flamboyant ancestor (also in the “entertainment” biz). Several dating to the 1930s kinda-sorta look like two photos of Jaffe published in newspapers (look to your left).

I struck out with the relatives of some of Jaffe’s other closest known associates, including Art Rooney Jr.: “Could be. Not sure. He was like a relative ….” I also struck out with folks who came into contact with Jaffe at his Squirrel Hill home in the 1940s and 1950s — they were young children at the time.

Seeing no other potential information sources, I came here, to the world’s most comprehensive crowdsourcing tool. So, I’ll put it you you, friends: Is this Milt Jaffe? Let me know in the comments, along with your sources.

Is this Milt Jaffe?

© 2021 D.S. Rotenstein

Silver Spring video shorts: Acorn Park

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This is the third of three posts featuring short video segments produced over the summer for AmeriCorps. The first two covered Silver Spring’s Tastee Diner and Crivella’s Wayside Inn.

This clip features a site in Silver Spring where the community’s Jim Crow history was erased. The “Silver Spring Memory Wall” is a five-mural installation next to Acorn Park. It is the product of historic preservation and planning decisions made in the 1990s to tell Silver Spring’s history through public art.

Those murals present a nostalgic view of Silver Spring history that glosses over its decades as a sundown suburb. It also intentionally sought to ameliorate the absence of Blacks from public places in the twentieth century by replacing white people with African Americans in a depiction of Silver Spring’s train station in the 1940s.

Silver Spring Memory Wall, B&O Railroad Station mural.

Former Washington, D.C., muralist Mame Cohalan (who died in 2020) recognized that the historic photos she was using were missing Black people. She asked her Montgomery County clients for permission to add some diversity — Black people — into the artwork. The resulting mural erased Silver Spring’s Jim Crow history by inserting Black people into a place and time where they otherwise never would have been found.

1994 Montgomery County Planning Department memo asking permission to add more “cultural diversity” to Memory Wall murals.

This clip tells the Acorn Park and Silver Spring Memory Wall story.

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© 2021 D.S. Rotenstein

Silver Spring video shorts: Crivella’s Wayside Inn

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This is the second of three posts featuring short video segments produced over the summer for AmeriCorps. The first in this series featured nostalgia and Silver Spring’s Tastee Diner.

This clip visits the site where Crivella’s Wayside Inn operated for several decades in the twentieth century. In the early 1960s, its owners refused to integrate the restaurant’s dining room — even after Montgomery County enacted an open accommodations law. Years of civil rights protests and litigation ensued. Montgomery County later bought the property and demolished the building, foreclosing on opportunities to commemorate the civil rights era and Silver Spring’s Black history. County leaders could have celebrated the life of civil rights icon Roscoe Nix; instead, they rebranded the space “Bottleworks Lane” to commemorate two historic bottling plants nearby.

This clip focusing on Crivella’s tells some of this story.

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© 2021 D.S. Rotenstein