Category Archives: Pittsburgh

There is No Basis in the Law for Demolishing this Historic Building

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In 2023, the Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission unanimously approved an application to demolish a historic building in the city’s Uptown neighborhood. The developer took that decision to the Pittsburgh Planning Commission for approval in an April 2, 2024 hearing. The HRC approval had no basis in law and preservation practice. Despite serious questions raised by my testimony and statements submitted by other parties opposed to the project as proposed, the Pittsburgh Planning Commission voted to approve the project (five affirmative votes, one abstention), including the demolition of Joe Tito’s former garage and beer distributorship.

Visitors attending the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House pop-up museum in April 2022 read text panels next to Joe Tito’s former garage and beer distributorship. The Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission and Pittsburgh Planning Commission have approved this landmarked building’s demolition. Photo by David S. Rotenstein.

Here is the testimony that I submitted:

Lashawn Burton-Faulk, Chairwoman
Pittsburgh Planning Commission
100 Ross Street, Suite 202
Pittsburgh, PA 15219
Email: planningcommission@pittsburghpa.gov

RE: Case DCP-ZDR-2021-12009. 1903 Fifth Ave.

Dear Chairwoman Burton-Faulk,

I am writing to urge the Pittsburgh Planning Commission to deny the application submitted for the construction of 1903 Fifth Ave., a “254-unit transit-oriented mixed use development.” On July 5, 2023, the Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission issued a certificate of appropriateness to the applicant for the demolition of 50% of an individually landmarked City of Pittsburgh historic site, the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House at 1817 Fifth Ave.  The 1903 Fifth Ave. proposal includes demolishing one of two buildings that comprise the historic site: the garage at 1818 Colwell St. that once served during Prohibition as the home for the Tito family’s bootlegging truck fleet and later, after the end of Prohibition, as the Latrobe Brewing Company’s first Pittsburgh beer distributorship.

As the author of the successful City of Pittsburgh historic landmark nomination, I am intimate with the property’s history and its historical significance. I am a professional historian with more than 40 years of experience in historic preservation, including teaching historic preservation at the graduate level and as the former chairman of the Montgomery County, Maryland, Historic Preservation Commission. I have prepared hundreds of historic preservation documents in local, state, and federal proceedings on behalf of project proponents and opponents. While serving in Montgomery County, I was the county’s historic preservation expert witness in zoning and other land use cases. My professional work has appeared in peer-reviewed academic journals, and it is widely cited in professional and academic studies, federal regulatory decision making proceedings, and court cases.

In my professional opinion, the HRC erred in approving the COA for the demolition of the building at 1818 Colwell St. The approval lacked historic preservation justification, i.e., the building is not in danger of collapsing and the owner is not suffering an economic hardship. By approving the demolition of 50% of the landmarked historic site, the HRC set a dangerous precedent that is at odds with established historic preservation practice and law. The former garage/beer distributorship is the only building designed and constructed by the Tito family whose ties to the property make it historically significant. Furthermore, the historic events tied to the former garage/beer distributorship — Prohibition-era bootlegging and the first place where Rolling Rock beer was sold — make for a strong case that it is the more historically significant of the two buildings that comprise the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House. That is not just my opinion; it is the professional, expert opinion, offered by the many respected professionals who offered testimony in the 2021-2022 landmarking proceedings.

Two complete parcels comprise the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House historic site. The site extends from Fifth Avenue to Colwell Street.

The demolition of 1818 Colwell St. would adversely affect the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House historic landmark. The new construction, within the historic site’s boundaries, would compound that adverse effect by introducing incompatible architectural elements (new construction) inconsistent in style, materials, and scale with the historic buildings and setting.

Proposed redevelopment rendering. Source: Pittsburgh Planning Commission submission.
Rendering of proposed re-use of historic brick taken from demolished the former garage/beer distributorship at 1818 Colwell St. Source: Pittsburgh Planning Commission submission.

The proposed demolition and the proposed new construction are not consistent with The Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties. These are the foundational guiding principles that the HRC and other historic preservation regulatory review bodies throughout the United States use to render decisions for proposals involving individual historic sites and historic districts. The Secretary of the Interior’s Standards and Guidelines are federal regulations published at 36 CFR Part 68. In the absence of property-specific guidelines for city-designated properties, Pittsburgh’s historic preservation law requires that the HRC use the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards and Guidelines in rendering COA decisions:

The Commission shall use the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation after a property is nominated for historic designation, until it develops guidelines specifically for a structure, district, site, or object, with recommendations from the community. These Guidelines cover the treatment of all work requiring a building, demolition, or sign permit, and may cover non-permit projects as defined under Exterior Alteration.

City of Pittsburgh code of ordinances §1101.02(g)

I also want to address the stakeholder engagement process that occurred as the 1903 Fifth Ave. project was working its way through the HRC. In the Development Activities Meeting held Jan. 17, 2023, several representatives from Hill District community groups (Registered Community Organizations) noted that they were unable to comment on the proposal because the applicant had not engaged with them and had not provided sufficient information to render informed opinions. None of these organizations were parties to, or participated in, the three HRC hearings held in 2023 prior to the HRC approving the COA. In fact, after the March 19, 2024, Planning Commission briefing for this project, the Hill CDC published this statement in its weekly newsletter March 23, 2024: “The Fountain Residential team has not engaged with the DRP, the Hill District’s unified and comprehensive community review process. As such, we have been unable to provide community feedback or offer support or guidance on the project.”

Hill CDC newsletter, March 23, 2024.

The HRC erred in approving the COA for the 1903 Fifth Ave. project. The Planning Commission should take that into account, along with the serious allegations that the applicant failed to adequately engage stakeholders and the RCO concerns about the proposed project’s potential to contribute to gentrification pressures in one of the city’s most marginalized communities. There is compelling evidence that this proposal is not consistent with the City of Pittsburgh’s historic preservation law, that it is inconsistent with community planning objectives (published in the 2017 “Uptown West Oakland EcoInnovation District” plan), and that its approval is not in the public interest. For these reasons, the Planning Commission should deny this application.

©2024 D.S. Rotenstein

Historic Preservation Contributes to Black Trauma

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Buried deep inside my recent Pittsburgh City Paper cover story is a little bit about historic preservation:

In his 1984 memoir Brothers and Keepers, John Edgar Wideman, the award-winning Pittsburgh-born author, made the prison the setting for his brother’s incarceration and a central character.

“Western Penitentiary sprouts like a giant wart from the bare, flat stretches of concrete surrounding it,” Wideman wrote. To Wideman, Western Penitentiary punished its inmates and their loved ones by dehumanizing them.

Wideman’s take on the prison captures the sentiments held by Black Pittsburghers: revulsion, not nostalgia. Compare that to the efforts by white historic preservationists who sought to protect the landmark which in 2022 was listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

The conflicting views of the impending demolition underscore the need to better understand history holistically and equitably. They also speak to how Pittsburgh preserves its Black history landmarks: the jail at one end of Wylie Ave. is a tourist attraction with a brass plaque, and the church at the other end is condemned.

Former Western Penitentiary (2023).
Condemnation notice affixed to the John Wesley AME Church (2020).

The Pittsburgh preservationist who was pushing to save the former Western Penitentiary is the same one who fought to preserve the Civic Arena. Constructed in the Lower Hill District, the Civic Arena and its sprawling parking lots replaced hundreds of mostly Black owned and occupied homes, businesses, churches, and recreational spaces.

The Pittsburgh Civic Arena and the Lower Hill District. “The Changing City: Report of the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh.” Pittsburgh City Archives.

Wait, what? Yep, the same white preservationist dude who 15 years ago wanted to force the city to preserve one of the most painful reminders of urban renewal and displacement wanted to keep the hulking reminder of mass incarceration. At best, it’s tone deaf. At worst, it’s a reminder of the white supremacy and classism that continues to dominate historic preservation.

© 2024 D.S. Rotenstein

Black History Month 2024

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NEXTpittsburgh screen capture, Feb. 26, 2024.

Throughout February, NEXTpittsburgh has been featuring my articles about Black history in Pittsburgh. NEXT originally published most of them in 2023:

That’s a lot of Black history content published throughout the year. Let’s see if I can boost those numbers in 2024.

Is It Time To Tear Down A Bootlegger’s Home and Garage? [UPDATED]

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Last year the Pittsburgh City Council voted to designate a former bootlegger-turned-brewery executive’s home as a historic landmark. Joe Tito became a booze and gambling kingpin during Prohibition. He built an empire from his 1817 Fifth Avenue home and a brick garage. Both buildings comprise the city-designated historic site. At a January 17, 2023, development activities meeting, Uptown Partners of Pittsburgh, the community development corporation that sponsored the historic landmarking, announced that it supported demolishing the garage. It would be replaced by one of two buildings in a $70 million redevelopment project.

Site plan shared during the Jan. 17, 2023, Development Activities Meeting. The blue rectangle denotes the 2022 historic site boundary.

Located at 1818 Colwell Street, Tito built the garage in 1922 to house his family’s fleet of trucks used to move bootleg whiskey and beer throughout the region. After Prohibition ended, Tito and his brothers bought the Latrobe Brewing Company. They converted the garage into the brewery’s first Pittsburgh beer distributorship. It’s where they first sold Rolling Rock beer in 1935.

Continue reading →

The draftsman

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Louis A.S. Bellinger (1891-1946) was Pittsburgh’s only licensed and practicing Black architect for the entire time that he practiced in the Steel City. My recent NEXTpittsburgh article digs deeper into Bellinger’s biography than the laundry lists of his jobs and buildings penned by historic preservationists. It’s hard to construct a biography of a consequential historical figure who left behind few traces beyond documents in public records and newspaper articles reporting on his work. There is lots more to the Bellinger story and it took some creative sleuthing to patch it together. There are also sidebars to the Bellinger story. This post is about one those: a draftsman who briefly worked for Louis Bellinger in the early 1920s.

The Pittsburgh Courier, Nov. 22, 1924.

My first entry in the Bellinger arc was my 2022 NEXTpittsburgh article about the architect’s younger brother, Walter Bellinger. Walter, along with other family members, followed Louis to Pittsburgh in the early 1920s. Walter went into the family business: the building trades. As a carpenter, he worked on buildings throughout the region before moving to California in the 1950s. Walter’s greatest contribution, however, was helping to build Pittsburgh’s Muslim community. After taking the name Saeed Akmal, he became a founder of Pittsburgh’s First Moslem Mosque.

My second entries in the Bellinger family narrative arc deal with one of Louis’s earliest commissions as a professional architect. In 1920, he designed and built the Central Amusement Park, a Black-owned sports stadium in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. I wrote about the brothers who hired Bellinger, their family’s efforts to get recognition for their achievements, and 21st century erasures by the historic preservation community.

During the 1920s, Bellinger built his small architectural practice and social capital among Pittsburgh’s growing Black entrepreneurial elite. City directories and newspaper articles show that he employed at least one draftsman in his office.

NEXTPittsburgh, April 5, 2023
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“She died in that house”

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“She died in that house,” Dolores Slater told me in a January 2023 interview. I had asked her about Ada B. Harris, beloved Pittsburgh numbers banker William “Woogie” Harris’s widow, and the house at 7101 Apple St. that historic preservationists have dubbed the “National Negro Opera Company House.” 

There’s no doubt that the Apple Street house is one of Pittsburgh’s most important Black history landmarks. What is in question, however, is how (and by whom) that story is being told.

Where Ada Harris died is important for lots of reasons. In a new NEXTpittsburgh op-ed, I laid out some of those reasons. I also illustrate some significant issues with the high profile National Register of Historic Places nomination where a consultant to the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation wrote that Ada Harris had moved out of the home five years before her death.

In my op-ed, I offered some primary documentary sources where PHLF’s consultant might have gotten more accurate information about Ada Harris, etc. Of course, the PHLF consultant who researched and wrote the nomination didn’t have to go to all the trouble tracking down legal records, etc. to learn where Ada Harris died. She could have read Ada Harris’s front-page obituary published Nov. 18, 1972, in the New Pittsburgh Courier: “Mrs. Harris, whose husband amassed great wealth as a business man in the Hill District … died at their home, 7101 Apple St.”

The New Pittsburgh Courier, Nov. 18, 1972.

Of course, my op-ed is about much more than bad facts and omissions. It’s also about exclusion and an obsolete approach to historic preservation (and public history). As one of my collaborators told me, “That’s part of my family history … It affects people I know.” Perhaps that’s something that preservationists should keep in mind when writing about real people.

©2023 D.S. Rotenstein

A visit to the Pittsburgh eruv

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Introduction

The Fern Hollow Bridge collapsed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the pre-dawn hours of Friday January 28, 2022. The structure had carried Forbes Avenue across a steeply sloped stream valley on the eastern edge of Frick Park. Constructed in 1901 and replaced in 1973, the Fern Hollow Bridge and Forbes Avenue comprised a large segment of the Pittsburgh eruv’s northern boundary. Stone walls, some laid by masons and another the sheer face of a steep hill, carried the boundary to the bridge’s approaches. Then, using metal poles and then light poles along the bridge’s spans, the eruv boundary crossed from west to east. When the bridge fell that cold winter morning, Pittsburgh residents lost critical transportation and spiritual infrastructure.

Forbes Avenue entrance to Frick Park and approach to the Fern Hollow Bridge, December 2022. Photo by David S. Rotenstein.

Pittsburgh has had an eruv since 1986. The Pittsburgh eruv originally wrapped around the city’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood, an area with many synagogues, Jewish day schools, and stores catering to Pittsburgh’s large Jewish community. Later expansions added several nearby neighborhoods and institutions serving Jews, including universities (Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, Carlow University, and Chatham College) and several hospitals. The Fern Hollow Bridge is located in an expansion area added in the early 1990s. Currently, the Pittsburgh eruv covers 6.7 square miles with an approximate 16-mile perimeter.

Eruv Map.jpg: Maps showing the Pittsburgh eruv boundary prior to a 2022 expansion and the Fern Hollow Bridge location. Adapted from https://www.pittsburgheruv.org/eruv-map.

A city marked by three rivers, many stream valleys, and steep topography, Pittsburgh has 446 bridges in its city limits. Though the investigation into the cause of the Fern Hollow Bridge collapse is ongoing, preliminary assessments point to deferred maintenance and a significantly deteriorated substructure. A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigation in the months after the collapse revealed that the Fern Hollow Bridge was one of many in the city and region rated poor and potentially dangerous.

It took less than a year for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation to design and rebuild the Fern Hollow Bridge. Just before it reopened, I reported on the eruv and the bridge collapse for NEXTpittsburgh, a local online news outlet. This post expands on that reporting.

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Pittsburgh’s Black-Owned Barber Shops are a National Treasure

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Pittsburgh’s Black-owned barber shops are an important part of the city’s history. They are the quintessential African American third spaces: places where business is transacted, information is exchanged, and social ties are maintained. They are places where the built environment meets intangible cultural heritage and they are ripe for a closer examination before the buildings and the people that make them special disappear forever.

Big Tom’s Barber Shop, Centre Ave.

Pittsburgh Planning Director Karen Abrams, at the February 2023 Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission meeting, observed that the city may be filled with sites planners and preservationists don’t know about or have historically ignored. “How we can bring light to some things that have just been not on our radars in the city, that are in predominantly Black neighborhoods,” Abrams said in a discussion of the National Register nomination for a house in Homewood once owned by Pittsburgh barber and gambling entrepreneur William “Woogie” Harris and his wife, Ada.

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Imagine if this was your family

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Just imagine if this was your family and all this had been published over a period spanning nearly 20 years.

2007 City of Pittsburgh historic site nomination completed by the Young Preservationists Association of Pittsburgh (PDF p. 9).
“National Opera House” website, January 2023 screen capture.
January 3, 2023, Facebook exchange, with corrections that were also emailed per the FB request.
“National Opera House” website, March 7, 2023, screen capture.

For reference:

  • Ada B. Harris died in 1972 (not 1975)
  • The Slater family name is not spelled “Slator.”
  • Vicki Battles Fox is Woogie and Ada Harris’s granddaughter (not their “niece”).
  • Marion Slater was Woogie and Ada Harris’s daughter. She inherited the property from her mother, Ada B. Harris.

For further reading: “She died in that house.”

Public Participation Without the Public and Without Participation

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Yesterday’s Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission discussion of the National Register of Historic Places nomination of the William A. “Woogie” and Ada Harris House was billed as an opportunity for public comment.

Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission Feb. 1, 2023, agenda. Note the reason for including the “Woogie Harris House”: “for public comment.”

With no public notice (beyond listing on the HRC agenda posted on the city’s website) and no notification by the city’s historic preservation community, community groups, and other stakeholders, the 10-minute discussion was a master class in public participation minus the public and minus participation.