Frank L. Hewitt Sr. High School?

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Bethesda Beat screen capture.

A new report commissioned by the Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) is getting a lot of buzz. The report was prepared after Montgomery County Council President Nancy Navarro read one of my articles and called for the name to be changed at E. Brooke Lee Middle School. Why? Because Lee was the political boss and real estate speculator behind creating the Silver Spring sundown suburb. The current discussion about Montgomery County’s school names all stems from my 2017 article yet despite many calls and emails from parents, educators, and student journalists since its publication, not a single MCPS official has contacted me.

Among the gems in the new report:

  1. MCPS relied on Montgomery History (formerly the Montgomery County Historical Society) as an expert source. There’s only one problem: Montgomery History continues to produce racist and tokenized histories of Montgomery County.
  2. The report has some serious credibility issues. For example, though the authors recognized that Montgomery Blair’s family owned slaves, they highlighted some mitigating information: Blair’s contributions promoting equity included, “Though Blair had attended Democratic Party national conventions as a delegate in the 1840s, he switched to the Free Soil Party and then the Republican Party as a result of his anti-slavery stance. As an attorney, Blair took on a highly prominent Supreme Court case in 1857 when he represented Dred Scott, an African-American citizen who petitioned for freedom from slavery.” I guess they forgot to read any of the histories documenting Blair’s opposition to the Emancipation Proclamation or his staunch white supremacist position that formerly enslaved Africans needed to live somewhere other than the United States (it was called “colonization”). Yes, Blair hated slavery on moral grounds, but he also didn’t want to have people of African Americans living near him.
  3. For a report produced by a public school system, it’s kind of appalling that they misspelled a few historical figures’ names: C. Everett Koop (spelled “Coop” in the report) and Frederick Douglass (spelled “Douglas” in the report).

Perhaps the most astonishing thing in the entire report was the recommendation that Silver Spring’s Frank L. Hewitt Sr. was a candidate to have a school named in his honor. According to a table appended to the narrative report, Hewitt was an “industrious and gifted businessman” whose contributions to social equity included collaborating with S. Brooke Lee:

Pushed for residence [sic.]  locating in Silver Spring, finding places where people can live in the city. Along with E. Brooke Lee, important in the development of Silver Spring, MD’s modern residential infrastructure.

Yes, Hewitt was industrious. Like Lee, he was a prolific real estate speculator and community builder. He did indeed help found the Silver Spring Armory [segregated] and the Silver Spring National Bank [did not lend to African Americans, as my information to date shows]. As for the many individual house lots and residential subdivisions he sold, Hewitt, like Lee, attached noxious racially restrictive covenants. Here’s an example from a 1908 deed to a lot in R. Holt Easley’s subdivision prohibiting people of African descent from owning or renting it:

And here’s another one, this time executed in 1923:

Yep, let’s scrub E. Brooke Lee’s name and his Blair kin from the facades of Montgomery County’s schools and replace them with “industrious and gifted businessmen” like Frank L. Hewitt.

UPDATE: Read a more substantive review that I provided to several DC area reporters.

© 2019 D.S. Rotenstein

National Park Service documents Talbot Ave. Bridge

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Earlier this year I began collaborating with colleagues in the National Park Service to prepare Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) documentation for the Talbot Avenue Bridge and my report will be archived in the Library of Congress along with archival photos of the bridge.

Read about the project in the latest issue of the Society for Industrial Archeology newsletter.

Naked and Normal: thoughts on writing and historic preservation

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I am teaching a new course on ethnography and community engagement in Goucher College’s Masters in Historic Preservation program. This post is adapted from a discussion item I recently added to the course website.

A 2016 public meeting in Washington’s Bloomingdale neighborhood where gentrification and historic preservation were discussed.

Ethnography is the art of converting dynamic events into [mostly] static accounts, or some such thing, according to the late cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Over the past 30 years, ethnography and ethnographers have looked inward to better understand how we practice our craft. This “reflexive turn” has propelled ethnographic writing and analysis into literary territory and it has created many opportunities to write about people and stuff (artifacts, buildings, stories, etc.) in more creative ways. Continue reading →

Quotable Pittsburgh visitors

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During the nineteenth century, many notable people passed through Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They experienced indelible sights, sounds, and smells. Some of them left contemporary accounts that have formed some of the most iconic historical quotations about the industrial city and its region.

“Smokey Riverside,” c. 1940. Smoke Control Lantern Slides, University of Pittsburgh Libraries.

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The census and resistance

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In 1968, Congress held hearings on the violence that erupted after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s April assassination. Testimony by Rufus “Catfish” Mayfield exposed how fraught the U.S. Census is with regard to communities of color. Mayfield’s candid testimony about how some of Washington’s African American residents responded when the census taker knocked on the door is worth considering as the current U.S. President plays political games with the 2020 Census.

District of Columbia Chairman of the City Council John Hechinger recognized Mr. Rufus “Catfish” Mayfield, who was identified as a “District of Columbia citizen.” Mayfield’s statement began, “Thank you, members of the Council, brothers and sisters. Usually I don’t go with prepared speeches. They say I am an uncut diamond in the rough, but I am letting you know I am going to school and trying to sharpen up and attack things a little harder.”

Mayfield continued,

See, you have robbed the black male of his masculinity and his dignity. And until this is restored, the man has no alternative but to strike out. I tell you now, that you had better take another census on bow many black people are In the District of Columbia, because I know when I was growing up, I got tired of hiding in the bed when the census showed The way it goes now, when the census taker comes around they can have eight children and she is putting one in, the bed and putting another one -In the closet. And that census taker comes in there, “How many children you got?” two. I tell you there  are black people out there.

You know what a judge told me, he said, “Mayfield, this Is coming down to a civil war. But let me tell you something, you people can’t win’ because you don’t have the troops.” I tell you, take another count.

I think that we have to rid ourselves of the go-called classification of black people into categories. There is only one kind of black people, or there should be only one kind of a black person, and that is a proud black person. But the way It goes now, you are classified. It Is upper middle class, middle class, and the lower Negro. (Vol. 2, Rehabilitation of D.C. Areas Damaged by Civil Disorders.: Hearings before the United States Senate Committee on the District of Columbia,Subcommittee on Business and Commerce, Ninetieth Congress, Second Session on Apr. 18, 30, May 20, 28-29, 1968. Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 1968, p. 401)

 

 

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.

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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.

Walt Whitman: 1850s house flipper and gentrifier

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Walt Whitman c. 1855. Photo from the Library of Congress.

One of Washington’s many adopted sons, Walt Whitman is among the most decorated figures in American literature. A lesser-known fact about Whitman is that he wrote one of the earliest descriptions of speculative real estate development, displacement, and gentrification.

Whitman’s essay, “Tear Down and Build Over Again,” was published in the November 1845 issue of The American Review. From the perspective of a housing supplier, he explored urban redevelopment, aesthetics, and the attachments to place longtime residents have.

What makes Whitman’s essay unique besides its early date is that it was written not by a housing reformer or displaced resident, but by an entrepreneur making money from the creative destruction of New York City neighborhoods.

“Let us level to the earth all the houses that were not built within the last ten years,” Whitman wrote in 1845. “Let us raise the devil and break things!” Continue reading →

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