Category Archives: Pittsburgh

The right kind of people

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Last week the Pittsburgh Planning Commission agreed with a recommendation forwarded to it by the city’s Historic Review Commission that an 1840s house in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood is eligible for designation as a city historic landmark.

The Ewalt Mansion is a two-story brick Greek Revival home built by an early Pittsburgh resident, Samuel Ewalt. According to historic preservationists, the building is historically significant for its architecture and for its association with important people and events in Pittsburgh’s history.

Ewalt Mansion, March 2020.

Lawrenceville is one of Pittsburgh’s most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. Change and displacement are happening so quickly in the neighborhood that in 2019 the City of Pittsburgh passed a new inclusive zoning law. The law is an experiment and temporary — it expires 18 months from its enactment — and it only covers large developers building at least 20 rental units. The pilot program’s goal is to preserve affordable housing. Affordable housing advocates hailed the new law, which only applies to Lawrenceville. Continue reading →

Landmarks

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Like most other places in North America, historic preservation in Pittsburgh has (at least) two separate and unequal tracks: one for places associated with white history and another for buildings, structures, and sites associated with Black history.

Last week I visited several buildings associated with Black history that are designated under Pittsburgh’s historic preservation law. There are no African-American-themed historic districts in Pittsburgh. A 2006 Young Preservationists Association of Pittsburgh report, “Unprotected Pittsburgh,” identified only three locally-designated properties: The Centre Avenue YMCA, John Wesley A.M.E. Zion Church, and the New Granada Theater.

The Centre Avenue YMCA is a city-designated property. It is being rehabilitated for use as affordable housing. March 2020 photo.

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The unremarkable warehouse: a Pittsburgh Wool photo essay

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Even with its new warehouse, there are no guarantees that Heinz will be able to maintain its manufacturing presence perpetually, and if someday they leave, Pittsburgh will be left with an unremarkable 1990s warehouse — David S. Rotenstein, Society for Industrial Archeology Newsletter, Fall 1999.

I should have put money on that 1999 prediction. Heinz did leave Pittsburgh and the city did end up with an ugly and unremarkable (and now abandoned) 1990s warehouse.

Former Pittsburgh Wool Company site, 2019.

Twenty years ago the Pittsburgh Wool Company building was demolished so that the Heinz company could build a new warehouse to distribute soups and baby food. The demolition marked the end of a historic building and more than 150 years of continuous use of a single site by the leather industry. Since the 1840s, wood (and later brick) tannery buildings had occupied the site on the north shore of the Allegheny River where the Pittsburgh Wool plant was located.

They, like their neighbor to the south, the H.J. Heinz Company, were part of Pittsburgh’s industrial heritage. Yet, in 1999 then-Mayor Tom Murphy cut a deal with Heinz to enable the company to expand its footprint to the north. The deal included the threat that if the company that occupied the property Heinz wanted didn’t agree to leave, the city would use its eminent domain powers to seize the land that had been declared blighted in 1980. The Pittsburgh Wool Company was the entity that needed to move.

In a new PublicSource article, I re-examined the 1999 eminent domain battle through a lens shaped by my recent work on displacement and gentrification. This photo essay documents the Pittsburgh Wool Company site through time.

This is a basic warehouse building undistinguishable from a thousand other buildings in the city — John DeSantis, Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission chairman, July 1999.

James Callery tannery, c. 1889. The Pittsburgh Wool Company occupied the highlighted building from the 1950s to 2000.

A view the Pittsburgh Wool Company, the National Lead Company and surrounding businesses on River Avenue looking to the Allegheny River. Pittsburgh City Photographer, December 20, 1962. Historic Pittsburgh image.

Pittsburgh Wool Company, 1997.

Pittsburgh Wool Company, 1997.

Pittsburgh Wool Company as seen from Pennsylvania Route 28, 1997.

Pittsburgh Wool Company demolition, October 2000. Photo by Elsie Yuratovich.

Pittsburgh Wool Company demolition, November 2000.

Abandoned former Heinz warehouse, Pittsburgh Wool site, October 2019.

The Pittsburgh Wool Company relocated to the Strip District when its historic building was demolished. By 2019, all that remained was a shell company used by the former owner to manage his real estate assets.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

 

 

The Crawford Grill No. 2 and the danger of a single story [updated]

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Introduction

Most Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, residents recognize the building on the northwest corner of Wylie Avenue and Elmore Street as the Crawford Grill No. 2. That’s the name that the most visible business in the building went by for half a century and that’s the name that historic preservationists used in 2019 to nominate the property to the National Register of Historic Places.[1]

2141 Wylie Avenue, Pittsburgh. October 2019.

The Crawford Grill No. 2 isn’t a bad name for the building. It fits, considering how long the nightclub occupied the space. But because historic preservationists have focused on the building’s time as the Crawford Grill No. 2 and the people who owned it between 1945 and 2003, there’s a lot missing from the building’s story. The historic preservation narrative, which closely hews to previously published texts documenting the building’s colorful time as an internationally renowned jazz club, conforms to what the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the danger of a single story.”

The “single story,” according to Adichie, flattens experience and they encourage stereotypes: “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

This post offers some additional storylines to the three-story brick building at 2141 Wylie Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. I need to be up front about how I ended up reading the draft National Register nomination for the property. In August 2019 I began a research project stemming from my work on a book about erasure and gentrification in an Atlanta suburb. I had been studying numbers gambling in urban and suburban areas since 2015.

[A quick primer on numbers gambling offsite source]

Numbers slips confiscated in 1930 by Pittsburgh police in the city’s North Side. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 29, 1930.

Histories of the Hill District became essential reading and I took advantage of local archival resources after moving back to Pittsburgh in 2019. While reading some of the Hill District work I went down a research rabbit hole pursuing questions around the intersection of history and folklore in Hill District vice. The light on the other end of the rabbit hole led me to begin conversations with a university press about a book on the history of Pittsburgh numbers gambling rackets. But that’s a story for another place and another time. The remainder of this post focuses on 2141 Wylie Avenue and some of its other stories.

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2019 Pittsburgh Dirty Dozen Bike Race: a view from Pig Hill

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I covered the 2019 Pittsburgh Dirty Dozen bike race for the Northside Chronicle. I shot photos and videos from the top of Rialto Street (a.k.a., “Pig Hill”) in the city’s Troy Hill neighborhood.

The race took place Saturday October 26, 2019, and it attracted 342 registrants, according to organizer Danny Chew. Founded in 1983 as a low-key ride the first weekend after Thanksgiving, the event now attracts racers and spectators from around the country. In 2016, an accident left Chew partially paralyzed and the $50 registration fee now goes to his rehabilitation. Other changes to the event over the years include moving it back from November to late October to avoid early snows and holiday weekend conflicts. Continue reading →