Category Archives: History

The man who saw canal boats

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Canal boat mural by Laurie Lundquist, Pennsylvania Route 28 retaining wall, Pittsburgh. Photo by David Rotenstein.

I recently met a man who looked at a hillside in a highway corridor and he saw canal boats instead of concrete retaining walls. The man is Jack Schmitt and we met during a walking tour in the Pennsylvania Route 28 highway corridor along the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh. Schmitt is a historic preservation activist who was a catalyst the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) decision to explore alternative approaches to mitigating the impacts of destroying an entire neighborhood along Route 28.

My article on Schmitt and how his work fits into emerging national trends in historic preservation has just been published in the National Council on Public History’s History@Work site. This post digs a little deeper into Schmitt’s advocacy with PennDOT.

My first conversation with Schmitt took place during an Allegheny City Society walking tour in May 2019. We met again in June at a Pittsburgh sandwich shop and I ran an audio recorder during our 90-minute chat. I also had a long history with Route 28 and the historic resources there. The former tannery buildings and the derelict industrial landscape comprised the core of the 1997 Pittsburgh History cover article that I wrote about Pittsburgh’s leather industry. The walking tour, my recent move back to Pittsburgh, and the conversation with Schmitt brought me back to a consequential episode in my professional history.

I wanted to revisit some of my understandings about the Route 28 project with the benefit of the subsequent 20 years of complicated regulatory compliance consulting and my research into how history and historic preservation are produced. This blog post and my History@Work essay are my first steps in this process.

Towards Better Mitigation

Jack Schmitt didn’t think much of PennDOT’s approach to mitigating the Route 28 impacts to historic properties. In fact, he questioned if the agency even had a mitigation plan. And what is mitigation? Mitigation represents the steps a government agency must take to compensate a community for destroying or polluting its natural or cultural resources. Most often mitigation comes in the form of reports and photographs that no one will ever read or see and archaeological excavations. Other times, it’s a flat-out bribe: An agency throws some money for historical research or a museum exhibit and calls it square.

The archaeologist and prolific regulatory compliance critic Tom King knows mitigation and how it is misunderstood and abused. In one of our many exchanges on the subject, King wrote to me in 2018, “Mitigation is widely and incorrectly understood to mean shitty compensation.” Yet, that’s frequently what results from poorly executed historic preservation research work done in coordination with a project that will destroy someplace or something people in some community value.

As a resident of one such community, Schmitt wanted better from PennDOT. Schmitt saw the steep hillside in the corridor as an opportunity. “There was going to be walls on the north side of the road and we tried to get them looking better,” he told me. “They were just going to be poured concrete walls like all the other bypasses.”

Pennsylvania Route 28 retaining wall in Etna, north of Pittsburgh.

Schmitt’s solution was to reach out to the American Canal Society to get the rights to use an image of a canal boat. Schmitt envisioned creating a visual history lesson using the new retaining walls. “As you drove along the highway, you would be passing canal boats with mules and you would get the feeling of what was happening there at one time in history,” he explained.

Canal boat image Schmitt proposed using in Pennsylvania Route 28 retaining walls.

PennDOT balked. What ended up being built were retaining walls using concrete shaped and treated to appear like stones used in Pennsylvania Canal locks. And, one of the five murals depicting images drawn from the corridor’s history did include a canal boat being drawn by mules — it is twice the size of the other murals (see the first photo in this post). Read the History@Work post to learn more about the murals and the artist who designed and executed them.

In the remainder of this post, I’d like to spend a little more time on the concept of mitigation and how folks in the real world (i.e., those who don’t work for state and federal agencies or people who aren’t cultural resource management consultants) see mitigation.

I asked Schmitt if he thought that PennDOT had fulfilled its obligations to comply with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. “I think they tried very hard and they did a lot. I have to give them credit for that,” said. Schmitt concedes that his opinion might be more positive if the historic St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church had not been demolished. The reasons why the church, which was located in the corridor, was demolished are complicated and not fully tied to the road project.

St. Nicholas church demolition, 2013. Pittsburgh Tribune-Review photo.

With the church gone and all of the homes, businesses, and industrial sites along with it, I asked Schmitt how people will learn about the community’s history. Schmitt replied, “The people learn about the community through their living memory and their oral traditions. They’re talking about that even now.” The murals, historical markers, and commemorative features at the demolished church site will help.

Former St. Nicholas church site with reproduced grotto, bronze tower base outline, and historical markers, June 2019.

Towards the end of our conversation in the restaurant, Schmitt recounted something he told an individual whose first involvement with the Route 28 project was as a volunteer in the effort to save St. Nicholas. That individual later went to work for an engineering company that does Section 106 work. Schmitt said,

I used to kid him. I said, “You were in historic preservation and now you’re in historic destruction cover-up.” I said, “You make the case for these historic things and then you mitigate them by saying we said this.” I said, “You can’t just say this, put it in a book in the library on the shelf and it doesn’t help the neighborhood to mitigate that terrible loss.”

I think that the murals and other treatments in the Route 28 corridor make great strides towards mitigating the loss of the buildings and the community. Like Schmitt, I have issues with the final results. There’s a lot missing and much of the historical knowledge that informed PennDOT’s decision-making was flawed. I only wonder what might have happened in the corridor had the agency understood what made the place special to the people who valued it. If the agency had understood and fulfilled its obligations under the National Historic Preservation Act, completing the project might have been a whole lot smoother, less expensive, and the mitigation might have been more collaborative, memorable, and meaningful.

Read the complete History@Work post on the murals and creative mitigation: https://ncph.org/history-at-work/community-driven-mitigation/.

© 2019 D.S. Rotenstein

Back to Pennsylvania Route 28

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In the summer of 1996 I emailed copies of my PhD dissertation to all the members of my committee. My dissertation was about family firms, craft dynasties, and leather tanning in the Catskills and eastern Pennsylvania, c. 1780-1950. Instead of sitting back and waiting to read their comments, I followed up on some research notes I had made about tanneries in the Pittsburgh region. That research ultimately led to several published articles, a couple of Historic American Engineering Record reports, a PBS interview, and several newspaper articles. But those aren’t what this post is about.

At the same time I was researching leather tanning in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, a cultural resource management (CRM) company was doing compliance studies for a highway improvement project in Pittsburgh. The highway project cut through the geographical heart of the space I was researching: Pittsburgh’s North Side and the north shore of the Allegheny River. After I read the CRM company’s report I published a review in my website and shared it with colleagues via various nascent listervs (this was the early days of the Internet before blogs, Twitter, etc.). The original post also was written long before the field of critical heritage studies emerged.

My review and the criticisms of the National Historic Preservation Act compliance stirred up quite a kerfuffle. The fallout included lawsuit threats and a considerable amount of retaliation by the firms involved in the studies and the agencies that reviewed them. Over the years, my website morphed into a blog and the original Pennsylvania Route 28 page ultimately was deleted. The Route 28 research, though, never really disappeared from public view. Every few years I get calls from print and radio reporters with questions about the highway and the area’s history.

I have recently returned to Pittsburgh and to some of my work from the 1990s. New publications and projects are forthcoming, including a recap of a May 2019 walking tour of PennDOT’s mitigation efforts in the Route 28 corridor. But, in the meantime I have decided to resurrect the 1997 web review (with some minor edits).

Carole Ashbridge  talks about the history of the Heinz plant in the Route 28 corridor. Allegheny City Society Lost Allegheny City Murals Walking Tour, May 19, 2019.

Continue reading →

Silver Spring: Sundown Suburb in the Capital’s Gateway

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I began doing Silver Spring Sundown Suburb talks in early 2017. I spoke about erasure and the ways local history organizations celebrate the white supremacists who made Silver Spring a desirable bedroom suburb for the nation’s capital. These same organizations marginalize, omit, and seek to tokenize stories of the black experience and the roles that Jim Crow segregation, environmental racism, and housing discrimination played in the community’s history.

I was invited to give this talk to local churches and nonprofits and I was invited several times to present it to students in the University of Maryland’s African American Studies Program. This talk explores the erasures and some of the stories of Silver Spring’s other side of the tracks, Lyttonsville. Jay Mallin recorded one of these talks given at Silver Spring’s Gwendolyn E. Coffield Community Center April 13, 2019.

I would like to thank the members of the Talbot Avenue Bridge Events Committee for sponsoring the program and Jay Mallin for donating his considerable professional skills and equipment to document the event and produce this video.

© 2019 D.S. Rotenstein, The Talbot Avenue Bridge Events Committee, and Jay Mallin.

Sewell D. Horad, 1922-2019

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Sewell and Evelyn Horad, May 2017.

Sewell D. Horad died April 13, 2019. He was 97 years old. A few days before, his wife Evelyn called to tell me that the end was near. My wife and I were able to visit with Mr. Horad and Evelyn the day before he passed. When Evelyn called to let me know that her husband had died, she invited me to speak at his April 24, 2019 memorial service. I told her that I would be honored. Here are the remarks that I prepared.

I am honored that Evelyn asked me to say a few words about Sewell. I met Sewell two years ago when I first interviewed him for my research. I am a historian and most of my work involves Black history, real estate, and gentrification.

I arrived on the Horads’ doorstep because Sewell Horad grew up in a family that made important strides in civil rights history in Washington, Montgomery County, and the nation. Sewell Horad was a living connection to, and active participant in, events that helped break down Jim Crow’s stranglehold on real estate and in communities throughout North America.

Former Horad home, Wheaton, Maryland.

In 1938, Sewell’s father, Romeo Horad Sr., left his job in the D.C. Recorder of Deeds and went into the real estate business. A Howard-trained lawyer, Sewell’s father had devised the District’s land recording system still in use today. Also in 1938, the Horads began building a modern brick colonial home on land in Wheaton that had been in Sewell’s mother’s family for decades.

“We were the only blacks on University Boulevard,” Sewell said in 2017. Romeo Horad was a candidate for the Montgomery County Council in 1948 — think about that date for a moment — when a Washington newspaper reporter asked him about his accomplishments. Sewell’s father told the reporter that the stately decade-old home symbolized African-American achievement.

Back in Washington, Romeo Horad embarked on intentionally breaking racial housing barriers by helping Black families buy homes in neighborhoods rigidly segregated by racially restrictive deed covenants. That work led to a lawsuit that ultimately ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1948, the court ruled that racially restrictive deed covenants were unenforceable in U.S. courts.

Sewell remembered the case: “It started when he was in Washington in the house that went to the Supreme Court involving the restrictive covenants, came out of our office,” he told me.

Real estate was the family business. Sewell said that he also got a real estate license and worked in the family firm after the Army. He did this while also teaching at Sharpe Health School. “I had a real estate license but I still taught school,” he said. The firm also included Sewell’s mother and brother. “Our name was well known as real estate people,” Sewell proudly recalled.

In Montgomery County, Romeo Horad led a grassroots civil rights organization: the “Citizens Council for Mutual Improvement.” They wanted better schools, paved roads, and water and sewers in Montgomery County’s Black communities. In its 1948 plea to the Montgomery County Council, Romeo Horad and his partners also called for the removal of Jim Crow signs in county office buildings.

“He was in politics and he was well respected, too,” Sewell said of his father.

Throughout this pivotal period in American history, Sewell taught physically challenged students in Washington. He told me about teaching the children of diplomats and embassy workers afflicted by exposure to Thalidomide.

Sewell also became an active member in some of Washington’s most storied African-American social clubs. When we spoke, Sewell smiled when he told me about the group he called “the best male group in Washington,” the “Whats” or “What Good Are We.” The Whats and Sewell’s golf group, The Pro Duffers, were among the many Black institutions that made Washington the nation’s quintessential Chocolate City.

I wish that I had met Sewell Horad much earlier in my life and career. Even as he approached his final months, Sewell was a teacher. I will always value what he taught me about his family’s history and the indelible marks he and they made on our nation’s history.

© 2019 D.S. Rotenstein

 

Historic preservation and community value

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Last December, the Arkansas Review published my photo essay on erasure in the Mississippi River Delta region. This post expands on one of the entries in my essay: “Juxtaposition.” The entry featured a photograph of three historic properties in Helena, Arkansas: Centennial Baptist Church in the foreground; the recently reconstructed Civil War-era Fort Curtis in the middleground; and, the historic Moore-Hornor House in the background.

This image offers a window into the roles race and power play in how Helena prioritizes historic preservation.

Juxtaposition. October 2018. Photograph included in Arkansas Review photo essay.

The Moore-Hornor House dates to 1859 and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The property is carefully restored and it is used for educational and recreational programs. Helena’s tourism literature touts the property as a “Helena Civil War attraction.”

Moore-Horner House, April 2017.

Moore-Hornor House and interpretive panel, October 2017.

Fort Curtis was an important Union Army encampment during the Civil War. During the 150th anniversary of the conflict, Helena began marketing its Civil War heritage and funds were raised to reconstruct the fort. The site opened in 2012 and it is operated by the Delta Cultural Center, a unit of the Arkansas Department of Heritage.

Fort Curtis, April 2017.

Fort Curtis, October 2017.

Ft. Curtis, October 2017.

Centennial Baptist Church was designed by congregant and African American architect Henry James Price. Begun in 1895 and completed ten years later in 1905, the church was designated a National Historic Landmark for its association with Dr. Elias Camp Morris (pastor, 1879-1922) and as an African American religious institution. When the building originally was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1987, it was in “good” condition and it also was historically significant for its Gothic Revival architecture. The church has been closed for 20 years because the building is deteriorating.

Centennial Baptist Church, October 2017.

Centennial Baptist Church, October 2017.

Centennial Baptist Church, October 2017.

Centennial Baptist Church and interpretive panel, October 2017.

© 2019 D.S. Rotenstein

Party ice

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Tomorrow is the first day of winter. I can’t think of a better way to mark the transition than to cobble together a little post about ice.

Ice freezer, 7-11 store, Silver Spring, Maryland.

Party ice is the product you can buy in the freezers outside of convenience stores or inside supermarkets. This bulk ice product hails from a time before home refrigeration and convenience stores. Before mechanical refrigeration, ice was imported from New England and Canada to Mid-Atlantic and Southern states. At first, it traveled by boat; later, refrigerated rail cars carried the large blocks harvested from northern lakes and ponds.

In the Washington metropolitan area, ice arrived via the Potomac River. In the nineteenth century, large ice warehouses were built in Alexandria, Virginia, and Georgetown in the District. By the turn of the twentieth century, the ice industry had adapted to mechanical production methods and new transportation systems. Ice manufacturers began specializing production lines to meet demands from household consumers, businesses, and industry.

Party ice is a twentieth century product that originated in community ice distribution networks created by ice entrepreneurs. Ice was produced in plants and packaged for sale according to local health codes. In Alexandria, Virginia, the Mutual Ice Company dominated the industry. Founded in 1900 on the riverfront, the company eventually moved to the Potomac Yard rail yards where it built a large ice plant.

Mutual Ice Company logo.

The Mutual Ice Company produced bulk ice for sale to local Alexandria consumers and it iced railroad cars passing through the city that were filled with perishable freight: meat and vegetables. Consumers could get ice delivered to them or they could buy it at one of seven “ice stations” that the company built throughout the city. These operated between 1924 and 1955. After that, the company continued selling ice at its plant and in grocery store freezers until it stopped making ice in 1969.

Former Mutual Ice Company ice station (2008), Alexandria, Virginia. Photo by David Rotenstein.

Oliver Ashby Reardon obituary photo. Credit: Legacy.com.

In 2008, I interviewed O. Ashby Reardon (1928-2011). Reardon’s family had established an ice wharf in Alexandria in the 1850s and he was the Mutual Ice Company’s last president. He attended the U.S Naval Academy and served for eight years in the U.S. Navy. Reardon returned to Alexandria after being discharged and he began working in his family’s ice plant. Reardon served in several executive positions with the firm until it closed in 1969. The following year the company changed its name to Mico, Inc., and continued to do business as a holding company for several of the older firm’s subsidiary enterprises.

We spoke about a lot of things in the two interviews, including party ice. The Mutual Ice Company initially sold fifty- and twenty-five pound bags of ice at its plant while twelve-pound bags were sold in a dozen vending machines placed in small wood frame shelters built inside the plant and delivered to locations throughout the city. Self-serve ice chests, according to Ashby Reardon Jr., were “made by the Lear Company that were just sitting out there in front of an entrance to the gas station where you could go in and buy some ice and then take it out and put it in your car.” Continue reading →

Holy Holstein

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New York Times screen capture, December 2, 2018.

This terrific New York Times photo became a meme and went viral on the Interwebz. It shows what appears to be a gargantuan Holstein cow — Knickers — dwarfing an adult human.

The accompanying article is a funny piece that digs into the photo and how it’s misleading, i.e., folks who have never gotten up close and personal with a Holstein probably don’t know how big they are in real life. Most cityslickers’ only experiences with Holstein cattle come from Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream art, and the burgers we eat, They know very little about cattle and Holsteins in particular. The NYT article and the folks who know my “thing” with cattle who have shared the image reminded me that I haven’t written much lately about livestock and leather tanning. I think it’s time to fix that situation.

Pittsburgh History cover, Spring 1997 issue, featuring my article on the history of Pittsburghs leather industry.

I spent a lot of years researching and writing about tanning, stockyards, and the interconnected meatpacking and meat byproducts industries. While researching Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s tanneries in the mid-1990s I encountered one of those people whose names eerily fit the jobs they do. You know, Mr. Butcher the butcher. Or, Mr. Macro the math teacher. Here in the DC suburbs I always chuckled when I saw a Peed Plumbing truck.

This fun little post is about a Pittsburgh tannery owner named Alexander Holstein (1812-1895). Holstein came to Pittsburgh from Bavaria. He arrived in New York in 1836. Within a decade, he appeared in Pittsburgh city directories as a saddler and harness maker with a shop in Wood Street in the city’s downtown. Wood Street was near the confluence of the Allegheny, Ohio, and Monongahela rivers. Its proximity to to the rivers and to the later Pennsylvania Canal made it an ideal location to become Pittsburgh’s earliest leather tanning district. Hides, tanbark, and water were easily obtained. The same transportation routes made it possible to ship the finished leather not sold locally to eastern markets. Continue reading →

A Pittsburgh flashback

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Pittsburgh 2018.

Back in 1992 I was working as an archaeologist for a Philadelphia-based consulting firm. I had been spending a lot of time that summer in Southwestern Pennsylvania doing research to write a regional historic context for a large transportation project.

Earlier that year, both of Pittsburgh’s newspapers were impacted by striking delivery drivers. One of the papers, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, didn’t want to fade into obscurity in these waning days of analog publication and delivery. To try and keep attention focused on itself and on the news, the Post-Gazette hired town criers to stand in downtown Pittsburgh and read the news. It was more public relations stunt than news delivery, but it sounded like a really interesting story that also appealed to the historian and folklorist in me.

Besides working as an archaeologist and finishing my Penn PhD coursework, I also was writing for several newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer. One day I called my editor and told her that I had been spending a lot of time just south of Pittsburgh and I pitched writing a story about the town criers. She liked it and she gave me the green light to run with my idea. Late one morning, I hopped in my car after grabbing my reporter’s notebook and tape recorder and headed north, from the Monongahela River Valley to downtown Pittsburgh. The Inquirer published my article on Pittsburgh’s town criers on September 1, 1992.

© 2018 D.S. Rotenstein

Housing Opportunities Commission Statement

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Today I delivered a copy of the River Road Moses Cemetery report to the Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission and I entered this statement into the public record.

MONTGOMERY COUNTY HOUSING OPPORTUNITIES COMMISSION
STATEMENT OF DR. DAVID ROTENSTEIN

October 3, 2018

Good afternoon. My name is David Rotenstein. I am a professional historian and ethnographer. I have a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and I have served on the Montgomery County Historic Preservation Commission and other bodies in my capacity as an expert in historic preservation. I also previously was certified as a Registered Professional Archaeologist.

I have transmitted to you today a copy of a report I prepared for the descendant community affiliated with the River Road Moses Cemetery. Copies of the report and a completed Maryland Inventory of Historic Properties form also were provided to members of the descendant community, the Montgomery County Historic Preservation Office, and the District of Columbia Historic Preservation Office.

The report, which contains the results of nearly a year of documentary and oral history research, finds that the River Road Moses Cemetery meets four of nine criteria for designation in the Montgomery County Master Plan for Historic Preservation. The report also finds that the River Road Moses Cemetery site appears to meet three out of four criteria for listing in the National Register of Historic Places as a traditional cultural property.

I am here today to urge the Housing Opportunities Commission to initiate designation proceedings under Chapter 24A of the Montgomery County Code. I also am recommending that the Commission, along with Mr. Harvey Matthews and other members of the dispersed descendant community in Montgomery County and Washington, as well as experts in African American history and folklife and other members of the community, form an advisory committee to determine the best stewardship for the site that also enables HOC to continue fulfilling its mission to provide affordable housing in Montgomery County.

Currently, advocacy for preservation of the cemetery site is vested with a small group of activists associated with Macedonia Baptist Church. That group does not reflect the breadth of the potential stakeholder population associated with a historic property located in Montgomery County, but which for all intents and purposes was a Washington, D.C., institution. Furthermore, based on the site’s history, it appears that whatever the number of actual interments in the cemetery, the majority likely were District of Columbia residents. This is an important site and an important issue and it deserves the utmost care and respect.

I am willing to meet with HOC staff to discuss this statement and the report and I am prepared to answer any questions the Commission may have.

Thank you.

Montgomery County Historical Society BOOM exhibit is a dud

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If I were mounting an exhibition to tell the story about Montgomery County, Maryland, in the 1950s, there would be lots of material from which to choose: the Cold War, suburbanization, and civil rights would certainly be in the mix. But how would I choose to tell the story about the Black experience in Montgomery County during that eventful decade?

One place I wouldn’t look for inspiration is the Montgomery County Historical Society’s exhibit, BOOM: The 1950s in Montgomery County. My latest article in The Activist History Review tackles the exhibit’s deficiencies.

There are many stories about African American entrepreneurialism, education, consumer choice, housing, religious life, and sports that would be solid candidates for some sort of exhibit featuring artifacts, texts, and photographs. How would I select the most compelling stories to tell? Continue reading →