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.
Federal Cold Storage Company building demolition, Feb. 2, 2022.
Federal Cold Storage Company building demolition, Feb. 11, 2022.
Federal Cold Storage Company building demolition viewed from the Hill District.
1519 Penn Ave. Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission Historic Resource Survey Form.
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.
Decatur, Ga., got a new school last week. Sort of: it’s an old city school building with a new name. The City Schools of Decatur voted May 22 to change the name of the city’s only middle school from Renfroe Middle School to Beacon Hill Middle School. The new name went into effect July 1, 2022.
Carl G. Renfroe Middle School, 2018.
A grassroots effort to change the school’s name began in 2020 after I designed a walking tour of Decatur’s erased Black community. The middle school, which is located across the railroad tracks from the former Beacon Community, was one of the stops in the tour created for the 2020 National Council on Public History annual conference (which was cancelled due to the COVID pandemic).
Renfroe Middle School as viewed from across the railroad tracks in 2015.
I conducted the tour intended for the conference virtually and then recreated it several times over the next year for various Decatur community and religious groups. Participants in one of those virtual tours began an online petition to change the school’s name: “Rename Renfroe Middle School To Reflect Decatur Values.”
The petition got more than 700 signatures and the attention of city leaders. In the first paragraph, the petition’s authors cited my walking tour, which included oral history excerpts of people talking about the school’s namesake, Carl Renfroe who was Decatur’s school superintendent between 1959 and 1975.
“Rename Renfroe Middle School To Reflect Decatur Values” petition screen capture.
The petition only cited one of the examples that I used in the walking tour. It was an excerpt of an interview that I had done with a Black man who attended Decatur’s segregated schools (a federal consent decree forced Decatur into compliance years after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case).
Decatur Displaced and Erased Walking Tour screen capture, Renfroe Middle School stop.
The complete entry for the walking tour’s storymap was a lot more detailed and it included an excerpt from an interview with a former civil rights and social justice activist who lived in Decatur during Renfroe’s tenure. William Denton taught education at Agnes Scott College and Atlanta University.
Commerce and West Howard This intersection didn’t exist before the 1960s. It was created during urban renewal when the city of Decatur extended then-Oliver street south to Howard. Visible to the south is carl g. Renfroe middle school. Intersection didn’t exist until urban renewal in 1960s. This is Decatur’s only middle school. It is named for educator Carl G. Renfroe (1910-2004), who was Decatur’s school superintendent (1959-1975). Despite serving after the Brown v. Board of Education case (1954) Renfroe resisted desegregating city schools and is remembered by residents for racially biased decisions and language.
It was an embarrassing situation for me to be sitting during my graduation and the superintendent of the school system, Carl Renfroe, spoke and commented that evening, “we are proud of our nigras,” you know …“we are proud of our nigras” — R.L, Decatur resident and former trinity high school student, February 2018.
I just have to say that that brought to mind a sense of irony because when we were first there, the superintendent, Renfroe, was of the old school and he did everything he could to keep black and white children separated — William Denton, former Decatur resident and civil rights activist, February 2018.
The interview with Denton was one of several that I did with the former Decatur resident over ten years. Denton is one of a dwindling number of people still living who would know about the inner workings of Decatur city government and its schools. He and his wife Barbara were active in their efforts to bring equity to the city’s school system. They also were among the first generation of 1970s community activists who sought to maintain Decatur’s trajectory towards housing and social equity. For years they were among the leaders of the South Decatur Community Council, the precursor to the contemporary Oakhurst Neighborhood Association.
The Dentons agreed with the city’s decision to change the school’s name. Barbara Denton expanded on our earlier conversations about Renfroe:
Regarding the late-great “Renfroe” Middle School and Carl’s role in maintaining school segregation: He advised the Board to gerrymander the school zones in the early 70’s in order to maintain maximum segregation. Bill wrote to him in disagreement. When he failed to respond, Bill informed federal E.E.O. of this action. The Decatur distract thus joined about 80 other Georgia distracts under E.E.O. supervision.
She added that she and her husband attended the school board meeting when the school was named for Renfroe:
We were at the Board meeting when the naming of the new middle school was announced. Board member Scott Candler looked directly at us and smirked when he saw our jaws drop. Fait Accompli! I’ll never believe Renfroe deserves credit for a desegregated middle school. Given Carl’s history we think its origin lies in the E.E.O. designation as an obstructionist system.
After the petition went live, accusations started flying about the veracity of the allegations against Renfroe, whom the Dentons said vigorously resisted desegregation.
Oakhurst Neighborhood Association Facebook comment attached to a post about the name change petition.
To allay the claims that the oral history comments about Renfroe were unsupported and/or unreliable, here is the video clip played during the virtual walking tours. Perhaps they can assist Decatur residents in complying with the Facebook comment author’s suggestion to “be smart.”
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.
Pittsburgh’s Wylie Avenue and Washington’s U Street have lots of things in common. They both were Black entertainment hubs and African-American entrepreneurial economic engines in their respective cities’ Black strolls. Memphis author Preston Lauterbach eloquently described “the stroll” in his 2012 book, The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll:
Any place with a sizable [Black] population grew a darktown, and each of these [Black] districts centered on a main thoroughfare, a world unto itself. The maestro, in his hep vernacular, called it “the stroll” (p. 51).
But the stroll was only part of a complicated entertainment ecosystem that extended well beyond a city’s corporate limits. Black entertainment entrepreneurs opened satellite facilities in rural communities beyond the earliest suburbs. These places became popular roadhouses and juke joints in the Chitlin’ Circuit with complicated social and economic ties to their counterparts on the stroll.
Bohemian Caverns, U Street and 11th, Washington, D.C.
In 1931, after racial violence broke out at a new Pittsburgh pool, a pair of Hill District entrepreneurs found a partner in Washington, Pa., 30 miles to the south, to open a swimming resort catering to the region’s African Americans. Norris Beach as it was called became a popular Southwestern Pennsylvania stop in the Chitlin’ Circuit with touring national bands stopping to play during the summers that it operated.
To use that term without explanation gives a real negative picture of the person, what he was involved in, the numbers, were illegal he was not a “gangster” — Facebook comment attached to a post linking to one of my articles about the history of numbers gambling.
It wasn’t the first such comment I had gotten about the words I had been using in my research on the social history of numbers gambling. I have been interviewing the descendants of numbers bankers and writers since 2019 and all along the way there had been gentle (and sometimes not so subtle) pushback against describing all of Pittsburgh’s gambling entrepreneurs as “gangsters” or “mobsters.”
I created the #MobsBurgh social media presence to generate visibility for my research and to connect with potential sources. But it became clear that MobsBurgh was too limiting and perhaps too negative to achieve all of my goals.
I thought a lot about an alternative and settled on The 805 Project. After all, this undertaking began when I first read about the big 805 numbers hit in 1930. A University of Pittsburgh historian’s question to an aging numbers writer and its enticing rhyming answer sent me down this rabbit hole two years ago. I embraced the story so why not borrow its source as a way to identify this project?
Goodbye MobsBurgh (mostly) and welcome to The 805 Project.
Sometime in the late 1920s or even as late as 1930, numbers gambling arrived in Atlanta. Who brought the street lottery to the city or how appear to have been forgotten or erased. It could have been a Pullman porter or a baseball player or a musician or an itinerant laborer who taught Atlantans how to run a numbers racket. Or, it might have been a white gambler taking advantage of fertile new territory. However and whenever numbers made its way to Atlanta, it became an integral part of Black life and the white underworld just like it had in most every other city and town in the United States by 1940. This post shines a little light into a dark corner in Atlanta’s past to reveal the city’s bug men (and women).
Atlanta Constitution headline, October 21, 1968.
In Atlanta, the players and the men and women in the sporting life — the backers, writers, and runners — called the numbers racket “the bug.” It’s a catchy name that stuck and by 1932, when newspapers began reporting on Atlanta police officers arresting numbers runners and writers, that’s what reporters called it.[1] Within a decade, numbers gambling employed hundreds of Atlantans and was a profitable business that historians won’t find discussed in any of the city’s boosterist literature. Continue reading →
In 2020, public historians and preservationists were all atwitter after the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced the Monuments Project: a five-year, $250 million effort to create more honest commemorative landscapes in the United States. The foundation’s namesake, Andrew W. Mellon (1855-1937), was an early member of a Pittsburgh industrial and financial family whose ranks include bankers, lawyers, judges, and politicians. Andrew’s resume includes banking; distilling; and stints as the U.S Secretary of the Treasury and Ambassador to the U.K.
The Mellons and the institutions associated with them have long been hailed as cornerstones in American history. Yet, how well do the Mellons fare when their ties to slavery, segregation, and white supremacy are examined? In 2019, Inside Philanthropy explored this question in a blog post by Julie Travers:
For example, a recent $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the College of William and Mary is one example of how a funder can approach the legacy of slavery within the humanities. It will support research and education pertaining to the college’s history with enslaved people. During my research for this article, I discovered that several Mellon family ancestors enslaved people, which raises interesting questions about how a foundation can approach this issue in its own history.
The foundation declined the blog post author’s request for comment. The philanthropy article includes some solid research, but I question why it arbitrarily limited its examination of the Mellons to slavery. What about the family’s roles in American society after the Civil War? There’s a whole lot of territory left unexplored, including mortgage lending discrimination and other structural racism reinforcing discriminatory practices that the family’s financial interests promoted.
The Mellons are American heroes. That evidence is abundantly clear in their hometown, Pittsburgh, where the commemorative landscape is filled with monuments to them: place names, a park, public art, buildings, and even a university.
In these days of truth and reconciliation, can the Andrew Mellon Foundation accomplish its goals to reshape the American commemorative landscape and “recalibrate” narratives about our shared national past without first taking ownership, telling the truth, about its namesakes? I don’t think so and one episode from the family’s history underscores why.
Andrew inherited his wealth and status from his father, Thomas Mellon (1813-1908). Thomas Mellon began his career practicing law in Pittsburgh in the 1830s. In 1859. Allegheny County residents elected Thomas Mellon as a judge in the county’s Court of Common Pleas. He served for a decade before retiring in 1869.
Shortly before Mellon left the bench, he participated in a case involving the application of an attorney who wanted to join the Allegheny County Bar to practice law in the city. George B. Vashon (1824-1878) was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. His father, John Vashon, had served in the War of 1812 and became a wealthy Pittsburgh entrepreneur and nationally prominent abolitionist.
Advertisement for John Vashon’s business, Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette, June 26, 1832.
Prayer chapels. These two rural roadside buildings competed for passersby’s souls. One belongs to a church, the other was a nightclub.
The church was built in 1867 and it served farmers and coal miners. The nightclub dates to at least 1931. It served the same crowd in addition to travelers and city dwellers. New owners converted the nightclub into apartments after World War II. Some locals found that very convenient.
“I got married in the church across the street and you could do your wedding over there and honeymoon across the street,” one man told me earlier this year. The life-long resident, in his eighties, quickly added, “I did not do that, but I’ve heard different ones talk about it.”
I asked another longtime resident if the nightclub across the street, with its liquor and dancing, ever caused any friction with the church. “Oh it’s Methodist. I mean we’re Methodist. We’re Scottish. We drink. We dance. It’s not like it was, you know, Baptist,” she explained.
Most folks still alive who remember the nightclub are in their eighties and nineties. They were children with children’s memories of a place they could not go to. But, they could hear the music. One man, now 80, explained, “They wouldn’t let me over there. I mean I heard the music. I went to that church, you know, that’s the church that I went to as a kid.” His family moved away when he was about eight.
The nearest city is about six miles away. For much of the time the nightclub operated, entrepreneurs from the city and another a little farther up the highway rented the building where they hosted bands and served refreshments, liquid and solid. There was dancing and some history was made. But if you’re driving down the highway, there isn’t much there now to catch your eye and your interest. Yet, if you’re persistent enough the stories will flow and the juxtaposed buildings might just inspire you to dig just a little deeper ….
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?
Peter Paul Brown must be turning in his grave if he knows about the kerfuffle over one of the cemeteries owned by the Black benevolent organization he founded in 1867. The Philadelphia physician who lived between c. 1822 and 1882 established the Ancient United Order of Sons and Daughters, Brothers and Sisters of Moses — the Moses Order — to provide death benefits, healthcare, and other social welfare services for African Americansin a deeply segregated Reconstruction era America. Brownwas a skilled entrepreneur and he held tight to his intellectual property and the organization’s name. That name is now the center of a fight over land in suburban Maryland just across the border with Washington, D.C., where activists claim hundreds of bodies are buried beneath a parking lot and construction site.
The site is one of many abandoned and desecrated African American burial grounds throughout the United States for which activists are seeking recognition, protection, and commemoration. One of the best known examples is the cemetery where the African Burial Ground National Monument was established in Manhattan. Massive protests and congressional hearings brought the issue to headlines in newspapers around the nation in the early 1990s.
African Burial Ground Way, New York, New York, 2018.
In 2015, the Montgomery County, Maryland, Planning Department began holding public hearings for a new sector plan in a mostly commercial area in unincorporated Bethesda. Planners disclosed that their research had uncovered the likely site of a historic African American cemetery in their study area. It had been documented in old maps and in a local history book but had been mostly forgotten since the 1960s when heavy equipment excavated much of the site to construct a high-rise apartment building and grade a surface parking lot. None of the graves was professionally excavated to relocate the bodies buried there.Continue reading →
