Category Archives: Pittsburgh

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.

St. Benedict the Moor

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The late playwright August Wilson had some pointed opinions about the statue of St. Benedict the Moor mounted atop a church in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District. In 1968, a crane hoisted the 18-foot statue onto the church located at the gateway to the Hill District at an intersection long known as “Freedom Corner.”

Wilson told interviewer Dinah Livingston in 1987:

… all the white people are gone, so it’s all Black. And they name the church Old Holy Trinity St. Bridget St. Benedict the Moor. After much discussion about the matter, they decided to just name it St. Benedict the Moor. And they put up this stature of St. Benedict. The church sits on the dividing line between the downtown and the Hill District—and they had the statue with its back turned to the Blacks and its arms opened to the downtown. Every single person in the neighborhood … noticed that and felt insulted that we got a Black saint and he’s turned his back on us and opened his arms up to the white folks downtown.

Livingston, Dinah. “Cool August: Mr. Wilson’s Red Hot Blues.” In Conversations with August Wilson, edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Mary C. Hartig, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006, p. 46

St. Benedict the Moor statue as seen from Centre Avenue and Roberts Street in the Hill District.
St. Benedict the Moor statue facing towards downtown Pittsburgh.

© 2023 D.S. Rotenstein

The Community Builder

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I can remember seeing this book, Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir, on bookstore shelves while living in Atlanta in the 1980s and 1990s. For whatever reason I never bought it or read it. That all changed a few months ago after I began researching a “forgotten” Pittsburgh Negro Leagues ballpark and the people involved in its development, etc. It turns out that Louis Bellinger (1891-1946), the only licensed and practicing Black architect in Pittsburgh between 1919 and his death in 1946, designed and built the stadium in 1920. And, he built Greenlee Field a dozen years later. This book is a memoir of the extended Bellinger family and their lives in South Carolina. Louis left Charleston in the teens and ended up in Pittsburgh in 1919. His father and brothers joined him by 1926. But it’s not just a window into the architect’s life. It also offers a glimpse into the life of Walter Bellinger (1901-1965), Louis’s younger brother.

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The Invisible Syndicate

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It’s not too late to register for Tuesday evening’s program, The Invisible Syndicate: Pittsburgh’s Jewish Racketeers, 1920-1980. It’s at the New Light Congregation in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood. The program is free but registration is required. Details at this link: https://newlightcongregation.org/events/new-light-lecture-series-the-invisible-syndicate-pittsburghs-jewish-racketeers-1920-1980/.

Like New York City, Cleveland, and Detroit, Pittsburgh has a significant Jewish organized crime history. Eastern European Jews living in the Hill District collaborated with other immigrants — Southern Blacks and Italians — to create informal economies in a city where racism, antisemitism, and generalized xenophobia erected barriers to good jobs, housing, and financial institutions. A small group of Hill District Jews went into bootlegging during Prohibition and then gambling. By 1930, a loosely organized Jewish syndicate occupied a top tier of Pittsburgh’s vice underworld. This presentation explores the social history of Pittsburgh’s less violent counterpart to Cleveland’s “silent syndicate” and Detroit’s “Purple Gang.” These Jewish vice entrepreneurs helped to create some of Pittsburgh’s most enduring brands, including the Pittsburgh Steelers, and were integral to the city’s early entertainment sector as theater and nightclub owners. The program’s arc begins in the Hill District and ends in Squirrel Hill where the invisible syndicate’s leaders had their homes and gambling clubs.

Come for the stories and the history. Who knows, you might even find out how Meyer Sigal got his nickname!

The generous mobster

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By many accounts, Pittsburgh-raised gambling entrepreneur Jakie Lerner was a very generous man — when the odds were in his favor. Like many of his peers who relied on betting in one form or another to make a living, Lerner had his ups and his downs.

Jakie Lerner

When he was up, he liked to give friends and relatives gifts. He gave them dogs, cashmere sweaters, and jewelry. Lots of jewelry.

Last month I interviewed the daughter of another Pittsburgh gambling entrepreneur, a smalltime numbers operator who plied his trade in the city’s Strip District. He was friends with Lerner and Lerner’s daughter was friends with the woman, then about 10 years old. Lerner was a frequent visitor to their Millvale home during the summers he spent in Pittsburgh visiting from Tucson. Lerner caught up with friends and relatives, gambled, and checked in on the Hill District numbers rackets he oversaw remotely from Arizona.

In the interview with the Strip District numbers man’s daughter, she told me about one memorable 1950s visit by Lerner to their home. Lerner had bought a gold watch for his own daughter and he showed it to the friend’s daughter, asking if she liked it.

The young girl swooned. Seeing her reaction, Lerner gave her the watch and said he’d buy another for his daughter. Still living in Tucson, Lerner’s daughter told me in interviews in 2019 and 2020 that her father had given her jewelry. After speaking with the woman raised in the Strip District and Millvale, I texted Lerner’s daughter and asked if she recalled getting a watch from him in the 1950s.

“He did buy me several watches through the years but this one might’ve been a Hamilton that had diamonds around it. I still have the watch I don’t wear it,” she replied.

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A little Pittsburgh demo porn

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Just a reminder that the Lawrenceville Historical Society program on the former Federal Cold Storage Co. building and Lucky’s bar is next week. There’s lots to cover, from ice entrepreneurs to mobsters to Pittsburgh’s gay community. One fun part of the program will be discussing the documentation over the past year of the cold storage company building’s demolition.

https://youtu.be/dghHr-BeF4M

For a deeper dive into the Federal Cold Storage Company building, check out the new Society for Industrial Archeology newsletter. Not a member? No problem, copies will be available at the program.

Historic preservation is about people

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Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission member Karen Loysen must not have gotten the memo: historic preservation is no longer just about pretty old buildings built by rich (white) men. Over the past 20 years, the field has sought to become more inclusive and people-centered. Loysen, a Pittsburgh architect, seems to be out of touch with current best practices in historic preservation.

Loysen’s unsophisticated and narrow perspective on historic preservation was on display in her statements about Pittsburgh’s Tito-Mecca-Zizza House as it worked its way through the HRC hearing cycle on its way to historic site designation. Though Loysen and her HRC colleagues declined to recommend landmarking the site, on June 7, 2022, the Pittsburgh City Council voted 6-2 to make the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House Pittsburgh’s newest historic site.

Children in the Tito-mecca-Zizza House side yard.

The landmark nomination that I prepared in 2021, in collaboration with Tito, Mecca, and Zizza family members, included many historical family photos. These pictures show the Victorian home over the span of several decades, lovingly used by the families. The photos also provide invaluable snapshots in time that show how some elements of the historic home have remained unchanged and how other elements were altered or replaced in the late 20th century. They are an invaluable asset any historian or architectural historian would be eager to have to make the case for a property’s historical significance.

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