Tip for Journalists and Historians: When You Don’t See Blacks in a Community Ask Why — James Loewen, 2016.
My wife likes to say that we failed Fox Chapel. We moved to the Pittsburgh suburb in 2019 and we always knew it was a temporary stop. Our move back to Pittsburgh after leaving exactly 20 years earlier allowed us just one day to find housing. Fox Chapel was a familiar suburb, in many ways like Silver Spring, Maryland, and Decatur, Georgia. Just a few miles away from our 1990s home, its housing stock includes more modest brick Cape Cods, Colonial Revivals, and ranch houses with spacious yards and lots of trees. Not all of the homes there are manorial estates with brick and stone mansions.
And, like Decatur and Silver Spring, Fox Chapel was a sundown suburb, a place with a history defined by exclusion.
Fox Chapel was the whitest place I think I’ve ever lived. Unlike Silver Spring and Decatur, there wasn’t any collective effort to hide behind false white progressive liberal cloaks. We knew that our tax dollars wouldn’t be going to any municipally-sponsored racial reconciliation projects. We didn’t expect any Decatur Dinners or Community Conversations (Decatur flavor) or Community Conversations (Montgomery County flavor). Efforts like those do little to repair communities. They are, as I wrote for Next City in 2017, taxpayer-funded cosmetic efforts.
Continue reading“Hitman Kills Local Developer.” That should have been the headline in April 1977 after Hertz Rotenstein’s business partners conspired to kill him. They hired a self-described “apartment building owner” who then offered to pay someone who turned out to be a professional FBI informant $6,500 to kill Rotenstein.
Continue readingI began writing about the history of numbers gambling in Pittsburgh in 2020. My earliest articles relied on decades of historical research and writing, much of it focused on the city’s Hill District. After several months of research and doing interviews with community members it became clear that much of that earlier work that I relied upon was incomplete and in some cases just plain wrong.
Unfortunately, some of my work published between 2020 and 2022 also repeats long-held beliefs about chapters in Pittsburgh’s history. One of the most problematic mistakes I made was writing that Pittsburgh gambling entrepreneur William “Woogie” Harris was a barber and that he opened the Hill District’s iconic Crystal Barber Shop. Historians and journalists for decades have written about Harris as a barber and the individual who founded the Crystal Barber Shop.
It turns out that Harris didn’t actually “open” the Crystal Barber Shop; he bought it in the mid-1920s from a master barber named Frank Belt. Belt was a Maryland transplant whose family included an ex-wife, Bessie Simms, and daughter, Madeline Belt. The Belt women were among the best known stage stars during the Harlem Renaissance and I told some of their story in an article published earlier this year.
Recently historians have begun citing my work in their writing on Hill District history. Earlier this week, a new Hill District Digital History Project launched. The essay on the Crystal Barber Shop was more legend than history. It recycled more of the same stories about Harris and his various business enterprises. And, it repeated the error that Harris founded the barber shop.
You really can’t fault the essay’s author or the project’s leaders. Correcting decades of incomplete and incorrect history is a heavy lift. So is owning up to making mistakes that make their way into new historical research and writing. Mistakes like my first work on Hill District history, including the Crystal Barber Shop.
I emailed the history professor leading the new digital history effort with specific concerns about the accuracy of the Crystal Barber Shop entry. He replied,
I went back and looked at the Crystal Barber Shop story with your critiques in mind. In your original email yesterday morning, you wrote, “Woogie Harris didn’t open and operate the shop; he owned the business as a front for his numbers business.” So I went to the original written narrative which includes all citations; ironically, the student used your article in Very Local, which reads, “Harris might have been Pittsburgh’s best-known barber...[he] opened the Crystal Barbershop on Wylie Avenue in the Hill District in the 1920s.”
Guilty as charged. The tainted history that I used found its way into downstream work, from respected local university professors, journalists, and book authors, to my first forays into Pittsburgh numbers history. And now, the new Hill District Digital History Project.
In subsequent emails with the project historian I laid out how I ended up repeating bogus historical facts that had worked their way into established local oral tradition and academic histories. And then I asked him to remove the link to my 2022 article about the Crystal Barber Shop. I suggested linking to later work that reflects my recent research that more correctly recount’s the shop’s history.
I then emailed one of the online news outlets that published one of my articles about the Crystal Barber Shop. I asked, “Please make a correction to my 2022 article.”
“New research shows that Woogie Harris didn’t ‘open’ the Crystal Barber Shop,” I wrote to a Very Local editor. “He bought the business from barber Frank Belt. He also wasn’t a ‘barber.’ My article was based on the decades of writing about Harris.”
The two mistakes that I pointed out in my request for a correction don’t invalidate the entire article. But, they do diminish its capacity as a teaching tool and as a piece of journalism. I have not yet received a reply from the editor and I will update this post once/if I do.
Update (Nov. 21, 2023): I never received a response from Verylocal.com.
© 2023 D.S. Rotenstein
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 ….
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:
©2023 D.S. Rotenstein
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.
Thank you Lil for everything.
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.
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.”
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Professional accomplishments directly resulting from my research in and about Decatur, Georgia, 2011-2023. No, it’s not a game.
September 6, 2023: “Decatur Day and the History of Serial Displacement in an Atlanta Suburb.” The Metropole (Urban History Association blog).
April 24, 2023: “Our Missing Middle Housing Didn’t Just Go Missing. It Was Torn Down.” Next City.
August 6, 2022: “Heirs, History, and Land: Recovering and Conserving Black Spaces and Stories.” Featured presentation, Shelton Family Settlement at Possum Trot Family Reunion and Historical Marker Unveiling, Berry College, Rome, Georgia. (Delivered remotely.)
July 2022: Agnes Scott College is awarded a $750,000 Mellon Foundation grant to conduct research, community engagement, and develop curriculum on race and racism in Decatur, Ga. The grant application relied on my research; the institution wrote that if the grant is awarded that the college would seek to hire me as a researcher and adjunct professor. It would have been nice if Agnes Scott College had consulted with me prior to using my name and my credentials in the application. Needless to say, I did not collaborate with Agnes Scott College on its project.
Continue readingObsessed is probably too strong of a word to describe my interest in the October 1934 turf war among two Washington, D.C. gambling entrepreneurs. But, I have had a very keen interest in the case ever since 2019 when I first read about it while working on the Talbot Avenue Bridge Historic American Engineering Records (HAER) report. It had been nearly four years since my first interviews with an aging Washington, D.C., former journalist had turned me onto the historical significance of numbers gambling. By the time that my research took me to the Takoma Park, Md., driveway where a notorious mob hitman gunned down newspaper employee Allen Wilson, I was hooked.
On July 25, I’m continuing the mini-mob-lecture circuit with a talk on racketeering in the D.C. suburbs: “The Numbers Game in the Burbs: Racketeering in Montgomery County.”
The free virtual program covers the history of racketeering and numbers gambling in the D.C. burbs, from the Black gambling entrepreneurs who ran the numbers in rural African American communities throughout the mostly rural suburban county to the white D.C. kingpins who made their homes there to complicate law enforcement efforts to rein them in. The so-called “Mistaken Identity Murder” caps the program as I connect the dots on one of the D.C. area’s most sensational gangland killings.
The alleged hitman, Tony “The Stinger” Cugino, was one of the East Coast’s most feared killers. In my “Squirrel Hill by the Numbers” walking tours, participants visit the site where Cugino allegedly dumped the body of one of the loose ends he cleaned up earlier in 1934 before killing Wilson. With Cugino, it’s always “allegedly” because he never made it to trial, for the Wilson murder or any of the others attributed to him. The official reports were that he hanged himself in 1935 in a New York City jail cell after the police finally caught up with him. By that time he had been suspected in hits all throughout the mid-Atlantic and upper South, including another infamous Montgomery County murder case (the “Chevy Chase Car Barn Murders“) just a few months after Wilson’s “Mistaken Identity Murder.”
Come for the numbers history and stay for the murder!
Beyond the Zoom room
The Silver Spring program is the second of three lectures on racketeering history I’m giving this month. Pittsburghers can drop in on “Cold Storage and Real Luck” at the Lawrenceville Historical Society July 20. There were mobsters on 1500 block of Penn Ave. in Pittsburgh and the story of the city’s giant refrigerator building and Pittsburgh’s most aptly named bar has several good rackets chapters.
On August 1, just a few days before Pittsburgh’s infamous 805 episode‘s 92nd anniversary, I’m speaking to the Moon Township Historical Society. Tony “The Stinger” and his 1934 visit to Pittsburgh may or may not be on the program but lots of Steel City vice will be.
© 2022 D.S. Rotenstein
Under every stone (or building foundation) in Pittsburgh there seems to be a mob story. It’s no different in the 1500 block of Penn Avenue in the city’s Strip District. The mob history is what caught my attention around the same time that plans became public to demolish the former Federal Cold Storage Company building popularly known as the “Wholey’s Building” for the giant illuminated fish that dominated one facade. Over the past year i have been documenting the building’s history and the lives of the people who owned it and who worked there. As I watched a demolition carefully deconstruct the walls adjacent to a historic bar, I got interested in the bar’s story, too.
Folks can learn more about the cold storage building and the Lucky’s story at a special Lawrenceville Historical Society program Wednesday July 20 at the Carnegie Library on Fisk Street. No more spoilers here. The program is free and open to the public. See you then.
Facebook friendly link: https://ivernacular.wordpress.com/2022/07/09/cold-storage-and-real-luck/.