Category Archives: Historic Preservation

Posts here relate to historic preservation issues.

The path to Mrs. Slater’s living room

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The fireworks have started over my recent NEXTpittsburgh op-ed about the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation’s National Register of Historic Places nomination for a house historic preservationists have dubbed the “National Negro Opera Company House.”

One local historic preservation group complained that my op-ed didn’t give them enough credit. Another hurled threats.

While the preservationists have been circling their wagons and firing their defensive shotguns, none of them has bothered to ask me a few basic questions. One no-brainer is, “What other factual errors in the NRHP nomination are there besides the ones laid out in my article?” I first suggested to PHLF that there were issues with the NRHP nomination as early as the first week in January. Another is, “Why does it matter?”

PHLF is doubling down on its position that the NRHP nomination was defensible and accurate work. A PHLF spokesperson told me in the interview I did with him for the article, “We absolutely stand by it.”

PHLF reiterated its stance in communications with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, the state agency that reviews National Register nominations before forwarding them to the National Park Service for a final determination and listing. “We stand behind [the PHLF consultant’s] work 100%,” wrote PHLF’s education coordinator in a February email to the state.

And yet, no one among the preservation crowd is curious about what led me to read the NRHP nomination and to the Hill District living room where I interviewed the 95-year-old woman quoted in my lede: Mrs. Dolores Slater. Nor are they interested in why I made such a fuss about the lack of oral history in the NRHP nomination. It’s not like PHLF didn’t have the money to do oral history — the National Park Service awarded the organization $41,378 to do oral history and the NRHP nomination.

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Where history goes to die

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Historic preservation is where history goes to die. One of its graves can be found in Pittsburgh’s Strip District which was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2014, with a period of significance from 1850-1964.

It’s as if all history ends with the 50-year criterion and consultants can’t see Criteria Consideration G properties or traditional cultural properties (TCPs) right in front of their faces. Like many industrial districts throughout the world, Pittsburgh’s Strip District changed (technology, economics) and nightclubs, restaurants, artists, etc. began moving in. Some of these changes can rightly be called gentrification. Low rents, cool buildings, and a certain vibe attracted entertainment entrepreneurs in the 1980s-1990s. LGBTQ culture developed a strong foothold there, with bars like Cruze on Smallman Street. The bar closed in 2019, displaced by development (there’s now a parking deck at the site). The only evidence of Cruze in the National Register nomination are a couple of Smallman Street streetscape photos that captured the bar’s facade.

Smallman Street streetscape showing Cruze. Strip Historic District National Register of Historic Places Registration Form.

Former Cruze site, June 2022.

The Real Luck Cafe (Luck’s) is another gay bar whose building is a contributing property to the Strip Historic District. Its history is similarly erased in the National Register nomination. Readers looking for the landmark bar’s history will only find a couple of sentences describing the building’s exterior and a mention of the jeweler who owned the building between 1869 and 1890. For a more complete understand of the bar and its cultural context, folks are better off exploring the work of the Pittsburgh Queer History Project, especially the 2014 “Lucky After Dark” exhibition that debuted the same year that the Strip Historic District was listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Another good source would be Dr. Harrison Apple’s 2021 University of Arizona PhD dissertation, “A Social Member in Good Standing: Pittsburgh’s Gay After-Hours Social Clubs, 1960-1990.”

1519 Penn Avenue (Real Luck Cafe) description, Strip Historic District National Register of Historic Places form.
Lucky’s after dark, June 2022.

© 2022 D.S. Rotenstein

The Inside Man

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I wonder if Preservation Pittsburgh has evaluated its potential legal exposures created by having the organization’s president Matthew Falcone serving as a Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission member? As Preservation Pittsburgh’s leader, he nominates properties to become City of Pittsburgh historic landmarks. As a commissioner, he debates the merits of those nominations and votes on recommending designation to the Pittsburgh City Council. In 2020, Falcone even nominated, debated, and voted on the designation of his own home.

Preservation Pittsburgh website landing page.

Curiously, Pittsburgh’s historic preservation law makes all of this possible. It created a massive legislative loophole that enables this conflict of interest:

Submission of a nomination by a member of the Historic Review Commission, the City Planning Commission, or the City Council shall not preclude that member from full participation in the review of the nomination nor from voting on the recommendation or designation. (Pittsburgh Municipal Code §1101.03(a)(1)(b).

There’s no doubt that the HRC plays an outsize role in whether properties get landmarked or not. Being the board’s resident historic preservation expert doesn’t help, either. Along with the Planning Commission, the HRC acts in an advisory capacity under Pittsburgh’s historic preservation law. In its final say, the City Council puts great weight on what the two boards recommend.

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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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How I became an anti-racism activist

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In 2011, I started down a path towards becoming an anti-racism activist and I began dedicating my professional work to showing how historic preservation is implicated in erasure and the production of racist histories & commemorative landscapes. My work began in Decatur, GA, and Silver Spring, MD.

This video segment is from “Silver Spring: A Sundown Suburb in the Capital’s Gateway,” recorded April 13, 2019. It includes my explanation to a Silver Spring audience for how and why I became an anti-racist.

https://youtu.be/Ox3_gFjW1h8

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

 

Historic Preservation and Folklore: Dismantling Preservation’s Diversity Deficit

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Historic Preservation and Folklore: Dismantling Preservation’s Diversity Deficit
By David S. Rotenstein
Panel, Historic Preservation and Public Folklore: Successes, Challenges,
and Failures in Responding to Community
American Folklore Society 2019 Annual Meeting, Baltimore, Maryland
October 17, 2019

INTRODUCTION

I began exploring displacement, gentrification, and erasure eight years ago this weekend. My unanticipated trip down this research road began when I spent all of Wednesday October 19, 2011, documenting the demolition of a small home in Decatur, Georgia. That led me to inquire about the property’s history. What I learned there led to questions about the neighborhood’s housing history and where the suburban neighborhood’s African American residents were going. Those queries moved me to ask how history and historic preservation are produced in that neighborhood; in the city of Decatur; and, in comparable suburbs throughout North America.[1]

Along the way, through two states and the District of Columbia, and nearly 200 interviews later, I met lots of people whose families have called Decatur, Silver Spring, Maryland, and Washington home for generations. I befriended people like Veronica, Charlotte, Patricia, Harvey, and Elmoria who navigate spaces where their stories have been erased and marginalized. They are places where the histories of white supremacists have been memorialized in commemorative landscapes and historic preservation plans. My friends will die in these places never knowing what it is like to be fully part of the communities they call home. Continue reading →

National Park Service documents Talbot Ave. Bridge

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Earlier this year I began collaborating with colleagues in the National Park Service to prepare Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) documentation for the Talbot Avenue Bridge and my report will be archived in the Library of Congress along with archival photos of the bridge.

Read about the project in the latest issue of the Society for Industrial Archeology newsletter.

Naked and Normal: thoughts on writing and historic preservation

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I am teaching a new course on ethnography and community engagement in Goucher College’s Masters in Historic Preservation program. This post is adapted from a discussion item I recently added to the course website.

A 2016 public meeting in Washington’s Bloomingdale neighborhood where gentrification and historic preservation were discussed.

Ethnography is the art of converting dynamic events into [mostly] static accounts, or some such thing, according to the late cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Over the past 30 years, ethnography and ethnographers have looked inward to better understand how we practice our craft. This “reflexive turn” has propelled ethnographic writing and analysis into literary territory and it has created many opportunities to write about people and stuff (artifacts, buildings, stories, etc.) in more creative ways. Continue reading →

Final exam

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HP 799: Ethics in Cultural Resource Management. Summer 2019 Semester.
FINAL EXAM

Congratulations. You have completed two years of coursework and you are about to embark on the most exciting segment of your journey through graduate school: researching and writing your thesis.  Our program requires all students to take this ethics class in their final semester before moving onto the thesis. Unlike all of your other classes, there is only one graded assignment: this exam. This Pass-Fail exam will determine whether you move onto your thesis and to a professional career in cultural resource management or if you will leave our program without a degree and with our best wishes for success in whatever career track you ultimately decide to follow.

Please answer all of the following questions. Answer completely and in essay form drawing on relevant laws, regulations, and professional codes of conduct and ethics to defend your answers. Continue reading →

Erasure primer (Vol. 2)

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Two years ago I published a post in this blog illustrating how maps produced by grassroots historic preservation organizations are used to erase communities of color. Yesterday I did a public program on history and historic preservation in Silver Spring, Maryland. For the first time, my slide deck included maps produced by the Maryland Historical Trust, the state historic preservation office, that have erased historically-Black Lyttonsville.

Maryland Historical Trust online mapping system. Screen capture April 14, 2019.

The Maryland Historical Trust maps are from a geographic information system (GIS) layer illustrating all properties documented in the agency’s official record of historic places in Maryland: the Maryland Inventory of Historic Properties (MIHP). The database includes long-form MIHP forms and brief determinations of eligibility for listing in the National Register of Historic Places produced by entities complying with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act:

The Maryland Inventory of Historic Properties (MIHP) is a repository of information on districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects of known or potential value to the prehistory and history of the State of Maryland. The Inventory was created shortly after the Maryland Historical Trust was founded in 1961, and now includes data on more than 13,000 archeological sites and 43,000 historic and architectural resources. The MIHP includes information about both standing structures and archeological resources. Inventoried properties contribute information to our understanding of Maryland’s architecture, engineering, archeology, or culture. — Maryland Historical Trust website.

Many of the properties in the Maryland Historical Trust’s database in proximity to Lyttonsville are simply platted subdivisions recorded in Montgomery County land records for which histories were written and the existing buildings and landscapes were evaluated for their historical significance. Some of them, like the adjacent “Pilgrim Church Tract,” are completely illegible: “Today, the Pilgrim Church Tract is filled with 16 lots, several of which have been expanded, combined, and resubdivided since the 1960s,” wrote a consultant in 2012 who was working for the agency building the Purple Line light rail. “The area is almost entirely covered by paved parking lots and late-twentieth century warehouses ….” Yet, the space first inscribed in a plat filed in 1892 is visible in historic preservation records and maps.

“Littonville.” Montgomery County Land Records, Plat Book 1, Plat 36.

The MIHP database is the product of decades of grassroots and informal research as well as professional studies done by academics and government agencies, including the Montgomery County Planning Department, the Maryland Department of Transportation, and others. Yesterday’s program was held in Lyttonsville, in the Gwendolyn E. Coffield community center. While the map from the MIHP website was on the screen I asked the people in the audience to find Lyttonsville in it. Though a settled place since 1853 and platted in 1901, Lyttonsville didn’t appear in the MIHP map. Like the maps, books, and programs produced by the local historical society, Lyttonsville was invisible to Maryland’s official historic preservation agency.

Lyttonsville vicinity, Maryland Historical Trust base map screen capture (April 8, 2019) annotated by David Rotenstein.

Maryland Historical Trust map with 1901 Lyttonsville plat overlay. Arrow indicates Lyttonsville.

Erasure: “The practice of collective indifference that renders certain people and groups invisible” —Parul Sehgal, “Fighting ‘Erasure.’” The New York Times, February 2, 2016.

© 2019 D.S. Rotenstein