Where are the pictures?

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I recently took a group of public history students to the Black history exhibits in the redeveloped Beacon municipal center in Decatur, Georgia. Ever since the space opened in 2015, I have described it in conference papers and articles as “Black history under glass.”

It is a sanitized, flattened version of the city’s Black history that does great violence to the city’s history and the people who made it happen. Much of the single story told in the Beacon exhibits derives from the experiences of one person: a tokenized African American woman who made significant civil rights contributions to the city and who became a controversial figure after serving in city government.

The students who accompanied me on the visit earlier this month have been working with a church congregation that was founded in Decatur in the 1860s. It was the oldest Black church congregation in the city before it was displaced in the 1990s. Though their grant-funded project has been widely reported by multiple Atlanta media outlets, it has received no coverage in Decatur-based media (blogs or city publications).

Antioch A.M.E. Church digital history project screen capture. The website is a rich archive of textual, visual, and oral history primary materials.

Their work, and the stories of the multiple generations of church members with whom they have been working, are some of the notable erasures in the Beacon exhibits. They are erasures first brought to my attention in calls and emails I began receiving after the exhibits opened. Many lifelong Decatur residents who grew up in the razed and erased Beacon community contacted me to tell me that the exhibits didn’t tell the their community’s entire story. They were angry that it privileged the story of a single individual, whose experiences didn’t match their own.

Beacon Community story map. Beacon Municipal Center, November 2019.

In the discussion with the public history students, I asked them what they thought was missing from the exhibits. One woman pointed to a graphic illustration of the erased community (a map with historic photos and text panels) and she asked where all the pictures were. Through her work with the historic Black congregation, she and her colleagues knew that there were photos of sites indicated in the map, yet they weren’t represented.

Detail from the Beacon Community story map. The exhibits were completed after the former Antioch A.M.E. church building was demolished. The map doesn’t include a photo of that building or its pre-urban renewal predecessors and it incorrectly tells visitors that the church “is now located on Atlanta Avenue.”

The City of Decatur boasts that the Beacon exhibits, “Preserve the history of the Beacon community and … honor its spirit.” Hardly. The exhibits are another act of racial violence in a city with a long history of racism and anti-Semitism. If the erasures are so evident to undergraduate history students, I wonder what a public forum comprised of former Beacon residents that fully represents the community’s long and rich past might tell city leaders about its cosmetic effort to erase decades of racism.

© 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.

Continue reading →

Where the racketeers played: Squirrel Hill’s gambling joints

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This installment of #Mobsburgh returned to Squirrel Hill with a visit to a pair of gambling clubs.

Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, December 12, 1952. Source: newspapers.com.

Squirrel Hill is a fashionable Pittsburgh neighborhood long associated with the city’s Jewish residents. In the 1920s, first- and second-generation European immigrants accumulated sufficient capital to move away from crowded Hill District tenements and other parts of the city where they had settled. They brought with them European cultural and religious traditions adapted to American urban life. And, they carried new additions to their economic and social repertoires: Organized crime rackets, including bootlegging and gambling.

Two organized crime institutions associated with sports gambling, games of chance, and numbers gambling emerged in Squirrel Hill. The Beacon Club and the Squirrel Hill Veterans Club provided cozy spaces where the city’s racketeers could drink, gamble, eat, and share information. Racketeers from across the region patronized these clubs and the establishments became frequent targets of Pittsburgh law enforcement raids. Continue reading →

Welcome to “Mobsburgh”: Morris Kauffman’s last ride

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Last summer I inadvertently stumbled upon a story about organized crime in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Since August, I have been poring through archival records, historical newspapers, and interviewing the descendants and extended kin of people involved in Pittsburgh’s gambling and bootlegging rackets between 1920 and 1980. As I work my way through this research I will be posting stories in this space: #Mobsburgh.

The first #Mobsburgh story begins far away from Pittsburgh in the U.S. 301 and U.S. 1 highway corridors between Richmond, Virginia, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1933 and 1934, a loosely organized crew committed a string of robberies and murders. They were called the “Tri-State Gang” for the territory (Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia) where they operated.

Pittsburgh was a bit far afield for the gang, best known for hijacking cigarette trucks out of North Carolina and for robbing postal facilities in Washington, D.C., and Richmond. Yet, their crime spree extended to Pittsburgh in 1934 when the body of one of the gang members was found behind an apartment building in the city’s emerging Jewish neighborhood, Squirrel Hill.

Wendover Apartments, Squirrel Hill, December 2019.

The Baltimore evening Sun, May 23, 1934. Source: newspapers.com

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Ghosts and gangsters: 1129 Ridge Avenue, “America’s Most Haunted House”

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Screen capture, 13 Creepy Pittsburgh Ghost Stories, www.pittsburghbeautiful.com

While researching organized crime in Pittsburgh I stumbled upon a colossal haunted house story. My work documenting the history of a Pittsburgh family with two generations of bootleggers and numbers racketeers inadvertently led me to 1129 Ridge Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Northside neighborhood. The family I am researching was associated with the family that owned 1129 Ridge Avenue for more than 30 years.

By the last decades of the twentieth century, stories attached to the property had earned 1129 Ridge Avenue the dubious title, “America’s most haunted house.” This post, which began as an article for a community newspaper, documents how a modest 1880s home became fodder for decades of contemporary legends. Continue reading →

Where did the Decatur survey go?

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Sometime in 2019 the City of Decatur, Georgia, deleted from the municipal website its 2009 citywide historic resources survey and all of the study’s supporting materials: a comprehensive narrative report, maps, and forms for all of the properties surveyed. Visitors to the city’s website can read and download the 1982 Decatur Town Center Plan, a 2004 Greenway Plan, a 2002 MARTA Station Study, city council meeting agendas and summaries, and lots of colorful publications touting everything that makes “Decatur Greater.”

What visitors to the city’s website can no longer read and download is the costly study completed in 2009 that fully erased the city’s Black experience along with every single historic property important to Decatur’s African American community.

It may be that Decatur city officials are embarrassed by the racist survey. I doubt that’s the reason — city officials have vigorously defended it since 2012 when I began writing about the survey’s shortcomings.

February 22, 2012 email from then-Decatur Historic Preservation Planner Regina Brewer to David Rotenstein.

City officials may be embarrassed that the survey failed to meet even the most basic requirements for such surveys established by the Georgia Historic Preservation Division, the state historic preservation office. Though city officials never informed residents and taxpayers, the 2009 citywide historic resources survey couldn’t even be entered into the state’s master survey files because the city’s consultant completed, and the then-historic preservation planner approved, a deficient product.

January 2019 memorandum requesting that the Decatur City Commission approve an application for federal grant funds to complete a new historic resources survey.

Details about the deficient 2009 survey were revealed earlier this year when the city’s new historic preservation planner requested approval to seek federal grant money to fund a new citywide historic resources survey. The Decatur City Commission on January 22, 2019, voted unanimously to submit the grant application.

Buried deep inside the grant application that the City of Decatur submitted to the state, which administers the federal grant program for the National Park Service, is the admission that a new survey is needed to correct the deficiencies in the 2009 study: “The City of Decatur’s previous historic resources survey in 2009 did not use Georgia Historic Resources Survey Forms, so HPD does not have copies of the collected data. At that time, HPD requested that the correct forms be used in order to integrate the information into their inventories. That is the City’s intent with the updated survey.”

City of Decatur’s 2019 Historic Preservation Fund CLG Survey & Planning Grant Application. Copy received from the City of Decatur under Georgia’s Open Records Act.

The City of Decatur didn’t get the $15,000 it requested in its application. According to the same document, city officials expect to spend $55,000 on the new survey.

In September, I wrote to the city’s new historic preservation planner after I received a copy of the grant application. I asked, “Can you tell me if HPD approved the application?”

“They did not,” she replied.

Curious about updates to Decatur’s historic preservation planning documents, I visited the City’s website. Previously, the complete 2009 historic resource survey documents had been posted in the Historic Preservation Commission’s “Historic Decatur” page. I wrote to City Manager Andrea Arnold asking why they had been deleted. I received no response.

City of Decatur website screen capture, “Historic Resources Survey.”

Perhaps some Decatur residents or local journalists might have better luck getting answers from city officials regarding the deletion of the 2009 historic resources survey.

UPDATE:

More than a year after first emailing the Decatur city manager about the survey I tried again. Here is her reply:

Here we are rolling up on three years since the survey disappeared and two years after the city manager wrote that the survey would be restored to the city website and it’s still MIA.

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 →

Historic Preservation and Folklore: Dismantling Preservation’s Diversity Deficit

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Historic Preservation and Folklore: Dismantling Preservation’s Diversity Deficit
By David S. Rotenstein
Panel, Historic Preservation and Public Folklore: Successes, Challenges,
and Failures in Responding to Community
American Folklore Society 2019 Annual Meeting, Baltimore, Maryland
October 17, 2019

INTRODUCTION

I began exploring displacement, gentrification, and erasure eight years ago this weekend. My unanticipated trip down this research road began when I spent all of Wednesday October 19, 2011, documenting the demolition of a small home in Decatur, Georgia. That led me to inquire about the property’s history. What I learned there led to questions about the neighborhood’s housing history and where the suburban neighborhood’s African American residents were going. Those queries moved me to ask how history and historic preservation are produced in that neighborhood; in the city of Decatur; and, in comparable suburbs throughout North America.[1]

Along the way, through two states and the District of Columbia, and nearly 200 interviews later, I met lots of people whose families have called Decatur, Silver Spring, Maryland, and Washington home for generations. I befriended people like Veronica, Charlotte, Patricia, Harvey, and Elmoria who navigate spaces where their stories have been erased and marginalized. They are places where the histories of white supremacists have been memorialized in commemorative landscapes and historic preservation plans. My friends will die in these places never knowing what it is like to be fully part of the communities they call home. Continue reading →

Ephemera: Barbershop

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The editor of a monthly Pittsburgh neighborhood newspaper recently asked me to cover a benefit being held at a local cafe. The benefit was to raise money for a customer battling stage 4 brain cancer.

Naturally, I had to ask about the building’s history. The owners proudly told me that the building they lovingly rehabilitated in 2017 was used for more than a century as a barbershop. One of them even described the meticulous research he had done to confirm what nearby residents had told him.

Advertisement, Pittsburgh Daily Post, November 2, 1912.

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A son of Moses in Pittsburgh’s North Side

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Introduction

Moses Order logo, c. 1887.

I first “met” Henry White in 2017 while researching a suburban Washington, D.C., cemetery. White was a founder and the namesake of White’s Tabernacle No. 39 of the Ancient United Order of Sons and Daughters, Brothers and Sisters of Moses. Henry (sometimes called “Harry” in historical records) was born c. 1847 in North Carolina. By the late 1870s, he was married and living in an African American hamlet in the District of Columbia established by free Blacks in the 1830s.

Henry White and his wife, Clara, had several children during their marriage. After Henry died, one of their children moved to Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. Henry White left no diaries or photographs and he died intestate. His traces in the historical record are slim, but compelling. While searching for information that would help me to understand Henry White and his time in Washington, I found a 1930s legal case in which his kin were named as defendants in litigation brought to clear the title to properties in the former hamlet where Henry and Clara raised their children. Among the briefs and depositions were papers filed by William Miles White, a resident of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. He was the same “Miles White” who was just a few months old in June of 1870 when a census enumerator visited Henry and Clara White’s rented Tenallytown (Tenleytown) home.

I finished the cemetery research and its results were presented in a report submitted to the descendants of the people associated with the White’s Tabernacle cemetery and agencies in Montgomery County, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. William Miles White and his life in Pennsylvania became an open question to follow up on later. Later arrived in 2019 when we moved back to Pittsburgh.

Like his parents, Miles White left few traces in the historical record. But also like his father, what evidence he did leave raises some intriguing questions about where he lived and how he fit into complicated racialized urban and suburban landscapes. This post is a step towards answering those questions. Continue reading →