Author Archives: David Rotenstein

Performative security on Capitol Hill

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Back in 2015 I wrote an article about security at the Library of Congress. I am reposting the article here because it is relevant to the January 6, 2021, insurrection that took place at the U.S. Capitol.

Capitol Hill, 2018.

The Library of Congress is America’s national library. It also may be the only library in the United States where getting into one of its Capitol Hill buildings is a lot like trying to board an airplane. Security protocols that once emphasized preventing loss by theft now appear more focused on keeping weapons and bombs out.

Since Timothy McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995 and the 9/11 attacks, security at the Library and elsewhere in the federal ecosystem has been dialed up to high. Between 1995 and the aftermath of 9/11, streets in the federal core were closed and new gates, bollards, and industrial-sized planters protect building exteriors. Many Washingtonians believe that the city has been turned into an armed camp. Continue reading →

About that art

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In 2017 I was deep in oral history interviews with residents of Lyttonsville, a historically Black community in Silver Spring, Maryland. I had just organized a public event meant to draw attention to murals that erase the Black experience and uplift the stories of white supremacy.

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

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

Shortly after the event in Acorn Urban Park, a lifelong Lyttonsville resident mentioned a photo collage she saw in a Silver Spring bank branch. She asked if I had seen it and I replied that I had not. I asked her to describe it for me.

The woman explained that it showed Black folks in Silver Spring who “never existed” in her community. She said that like the murals in Acorn Park, it creates a false sense of history by placing Black people in spaces in a time when and where they never would have existed. I asked her what was so troubling about the image. She replied,

It could be [bank] is making a statement about American history in a special way.  However, it is strange to have a beautiful photo there in the midst of Silver Spring’s history.  When I went to the bank and saw it, I was shocked, but so pleased because most photos of my people are not shown in the public.

Bank photo collage, photographed in 2017.

After our initial conversation, I went to the bank to photograph the collage. After seeing it for myself, I then exchanged emails with the Lyttonsville resident who brought it to my attention:

I wish I knew who the people were because it looks like a photo from the early 1900’s.  I don’t know that the photo in that day was color.  I have seen photos of our race like this, but always black and white.  My grandmother and grandfather would have dressed like this.  So, it is authentic, but I don’t know who they are or where they are from.
Dressing up has always been very important to African Americans, until the 60’s.  Even when they were enslaved, a head covering for women was very important.  Should they have escaped to freedom, they were going to dress.  The hats in this photo are authentic and so is the pose.  This had to be a church portrait or something important connected to “family.”

There is a fine line between appropriation and celebration. Nostalgia runs deep in Silver Spring and in many communities. It’s tempting to exploit nostalgia to connect national brands with the communities where their branches are located. But what are the impacts of haphazardly selecting images and throwing them together in a visually appealing presentation that has no connection to reality or to the people in the community?

The Silver Spring Historical Society frequently posts about nostalgia-laden murals in the community.

 

The Stardust: Pittsburgh’s mob outpost in Vegas

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The Stardust Hotel and Casino opened in 1958. Its owners included Cleveland racketeers Moe Dalitz, Morris Kleinman, Ben  Rothkopf, and Samuel Tucker — leaders of Cleveland’s so-called “Silent Syndicate” of Prohibition-era bootleggers turned gambling entrepreneurs. Pittsburgh resident Milt Jaffe also had a stake in the Stardust. Jaffe was the MobsBurgh connection to the Cleveland and Chicago mobs.

Stardust hotel and casino postcard, c. 1960s.

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The Pittsburgh mob’s Miami resort

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The Ankara was a popular Pittsburgh nightclub and restaurant. Located just outside the city limits on Route 51 in Pleasant Hills, it opened in 1946. For more than 20 years, the Ankara fed and entertained Pittsburgh residents. Its floor shows, dancing, and ice revues were part of the city’s nightlife golden era. The Ankara, though, was mob owned and operated.

Ankara nightclub souvenir photo cover.

Charles Jamal was a Turkish immigrant who bounced around North America in the years before World War II. He named his new Pittsburgh nightclub for the city in his homeland. Jamal’s organized crime ties beyond the club remain opaque. In 1952, muckraking journalists Jack Lait and Mortimer Lee described Jamal, “a Turk who runs the swank Ankara nightclub” as one of Pittsburgh’s “big boys” in the county outside the city limits, in their survey of American organized crime, U.S.A. Confidential.

You can read more about the Ankara and Jamal in this August 2020 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article. This post digs into the crime family that was closely associated with Jamal and the Ankara from the time the club opened until the early 1960s: Nathan Mattes, et al. MobsBurgh previously featured Nate Mattes and his brother, Irwin, a..k.a., Pittsburgh’s “Big Six” of Gambling. This time around we’re going to highlight the nightclub’s Miami Beach, Florida, namesake, the Ankara Motel.

The American Jewish Outlook, September 1, 1950.

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“Where the hell is Jakie Lerner?”

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“805 was a burner. Where the hell is Jakie Lerner?” That’s how aging racketeer Sam Solomon responded to University of Pittsburgh history graduate student Rob Ruck in 1981 when the latter asked him about a big numbers gambling hit from 1930. Ruck interviewed Solomon for a dissertation (and later book) on Black sport in Pittsburgh, Sandlot Seasons.

In the dissertation and book Ruck didn’t flesh out Lerner’s identity. Also left unsaid was why Lerner might be important in any discussion of Pittsburgh’s organized crime history. Not a fan of unanswered questions, I went looking for Lerner and I found him buried in a suburban Jewish cemetery. Along with his grave, I also found a criminal career spanning more than 60 years and several states. Lerner, it seems, was one of Pittsburgh’s most notable racketeers. He also was misogynist and, as one relative told me, an asshole for whom “describing him as a scoundrel would be a compliment.”

Jakie Lerner’s gravesite, Shaler Township, Pennsylvania.

Continue reading →

Counting numbers

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As the rest of the nation focuses on election returns, I’m going to spend a few minutes on some different numbers. These numbers were published in newspapers throughout the United States and racketeers co-opted them to calculate a daily lottery number. The “numbers racket” sprung from the hope that a penny, nickel, dime, or quarter bet would yield wins that equaled or exceeded a week’s pay.

Yet, factory workers, government clerks, housewives, and even schoolchildren picked three-digit numbers six days a week losing much more over the years than they ever won. Starting in the years after the Civil War, the game was called “policy.” In the 1920s, a new nationwide numbers racket spread through cities and small towns that relied on daily reports from the New York Clearing House published in newspapers.

Cumberland Evening Times, March 21, 1930.

Folks picked their numbers using birthdates, things they heard on the radio and read in comic strips, and suggestions they got from psychics or in the many “dream books” and “hot numbers” pamphlets that circulated. Lottery dates, however, remained among the most popular ways to pick a lucky three-digit number.

Typical newspaper numbers tips published in newspapers.

For example, take Monday July 14, 1930. In Pittsburgh, that seemed like a good bet and many bettors put their change on a winning combination drawn from the actual date, 714. Panic ensued as the city’s numbers bankers failed to pay the winners.

The Pittsburgh Press July 17, 1930.

Can you spot the three-digit combination used as the winning number that hot summer day in Pittsburgh?

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 15, 1930.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

White Fragility: Historic Preservation Edition

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It’s difficult to heal trauma without truth-telling. You have to uncover and acknowledge what has been done wrong before you can fully move forward. — Rev. Mark Sills, NPR, October 11, 2020.

Starting in 2016 members of the Silver Spring Historical Society (Silver Spring, Maryland) began attending my public programs (lectures, walking tours). They regularly monopolized discussion times with long-winded and disruptive comments about how their organization wasn’t racist.

In early 2018, I was invited to speak in Takoma Park, Maryland. Almost on cue, the Silver Spring Historical Society’s Marcie Stickle and Mary Reardon launched into their speeches during the Q&A. The City of Takoma Park recorded the program and posted it on YouTube. The recording captures the embodiment of white fragility in the Silver Spring Historical Society members. The clip below is from that recording.

What’s the problem with being “not racist”? It is a claim that signifies neutrality: “I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.” But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. — Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019).

In my measured opinion, Silver Spring and other places like it will never heal, never move forward without community truth-telling and without abandoning the safe places where folks declare that they are not racists.

 

The digital People’s Court

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Banner, Internet Court of Lies.

Robert Thibadeau wants to jail all of the lies floating around on the Internet. To accomplish this lofty goal, the retired Carnegie Mellon University professor is using an old Moose lodge in a Pittsburgh suburb as a virtual courtroom where he runs the Internet Court of Lies.

Thibadeau’s idiosyncratic approach to Internet truth dismisses decades of scholarship on lies and lying. Instead, he has concocted a dubious definition of “lies” and an even more questionable approach to identifying and mitigating digital dishonesty. I first noticed his “courtroom” while driving through Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania, about six miles north of downtown Pittsburgh on the Allegheny River. The banners and other items affixed to the former Moose lodge piqued my curiosity. I bought a copy of Thibadeau’s self-published book, How to Recover Your Lies (Privust LLC, 2019), and then I asked him for an interview.

After a two-hour Zoom conversation, multiple follow-up emails, and communications with a linguist who literally wrote the book on lies and lying, I cobbled together a two-part blog post for the New Directions in Folklore blog. Read about the Internet Court of Lies here:

The Internet Court of Lies: A Digital People’s Court? (Part 1)
and
The Internet Court of Lies – Part 2

The Internet Court of Lies is the first thing people see as they enter Sharpsburg, Pa., from the south.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

 

 

Field trips

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In 2019 I began teaching a seminar on ethnography and community engagement for historic preservation in Goucher College’s graduate historic preservation program. Goucher’s summer residency program has a tradition: field trips to Baltimore area historic sites and museums. I took my inaugural class to Baltimore’s Otterbein neighborhood. That had been my plan for 2020 and then the pandemic hit. All bets were off: Goucher’s classes moved online to Zoom and my students wouldn’t be traveling to Baltimore from New Mexico, Maine, and elsewhere. The only way I was going to have a field trip was if I did something virtually. Otterbein was my first choice as a “destination.”

Baltimore resident tells Goucher students about her neighborhood’s history, July 2019.

By June I was already reaching out to Baltimore colleagues to help assemble video footage and photos to fill in my Otterbein gaps. I would try to recreate the 2019 field trip in which we walked through the historic district and discussed issues of regulatory control over aesthetics, gentrification, affordable housing, and which histories are privileged in places we recognize as “historic.”

Homesteader Park, Otterbein neighborhood, Baltimore, 2015.

My virtual tour script was taking shape and I was just about to send emails with requests for specific video footage and photos when I got an email from a Decatur, Georgia, resident. He had seen social media posts about a virtual walking tour I had done for the 2020 National Council on Public History’s March conference that had moved online.

Atlanta Daily World urban homesteading ad. June 10, 1979.

After a few email exchanges and Zoom chats, we moved forward with a plan to revive the NCPH virtual tour for my class and for Decatur residents. It was going to be a remote community engagement exercise that brought my graduate students into the same virtual space and Zoom grid as more than 30 Decatur residents interested in learning about the city’s erased Black history sites.

In a way, it was a perfect idea. My interest in in Baltimore’s Otterbein neighborhood originated in my Decatur research. The first Decatur teardown that I documented in October 2011 belonged to an urban homesteader. Urban homesteading was an innovative affordable housing program introduced in the early 1970s and Decatur was one of 21 pilot cities [PDF] for the federal program. Baltimore also was one of the earliest urban homesteading cities.

My article about the Decatur virtual tour appears in History@Work post, “A Virtual Walking Tour in Decatur, Georgia: Linking Race, History, Community.”

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

 

Montgomery County African American Cemetery Headstone Photo Essay

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While researching African American communities in Montgomery County, Maryland, I visited several historic Black cemeteries and photographed the cultural landscapes and grave markers. This slideshow is a sample from that research.

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© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein