Introducing a series of story maps that document how Silver Spring, Maryland, became a sundown suburb.
© 2019 D.S. Rotenstein
Creating the Silver Spring Sundown Suburb
Reply
Suburban retrofitting=suburban renewal
To the downtown business interests and their allies, the answer was clear. Well-to-do Americans would return to the center only if the slums and blighted areas were eliminated and replaced by safe, healthy, and attractive middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods. In other words, it would be necessary to raze and rebuild much of the central city …. This was a huge undertaking. To carry it out, the downtown business interests and their allies would have to join the slum clearance movement, which had emerged in the late 1920s and early 1930s as an alternative to tenement house reform.
— Fogelson, Robert M. Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001, p. 319.
Now for giggles, replace “central city” with “suburb” and “slum clearance movement” with “suburban retrofitting.” Isn’t “suburban retrofitting” just another euphemism for the same processes embodied in urban renewal?
Mother Jones in Suburban Maryland: Folklore and History
Photograph shows labor activist Mother Jones in New York City, 1915. Library of Congress photo.
Thanks to the Internet and an endless stream of on-this-day (#OTD) social media posts, ordinary people are never far from history. Such is the case of my friend Glyn Robbins, a UK social justice activist and scholar immersed in housing and labor history and practice. Glyn recently read a post commemorating the anniversary of the death of 20th century labor activist Marry Harris “Mother” Jones (1830-1930).
Mother Jones emigrated to Canada from her native Ireland as a child. As an adult she worked as a schoolteacher and seamstress in Michigan and Chicago. In 1861, Harris married an ironworker and union member George Jones. In the 1870s, she began attending labor meetings and she became increasingly vocal.
Over the next several decades, Mother Jones traveled widely speaking on behalf of workers and supporting their demands for fair wages, hours, and working conditions. For more on Mother Jones, visit the Mother Jones Museum website for a curated collection of links and stories about her life,
“I didn’t know she was buried near you,” he wrote to me on Facebook. “I was told by local labor movement folk that Mother Jones is buried near Silver Spring.” He included a link to an Irish news article titled, “Remembering Irish-born Mary Harris ‘Mother’ Jones on the anniversary of her death.”
Naturally, I got a little curious. I knew that she had spent her last years in the Washington, D.C., area. But, my familiarity with the Mother Jones story didn’t go too deeply into her personal life. My friend’s message got me to thinking: If Mother Jones did die in Silver Spring, where is the site? Was she really buried here? A warm late fall day and some spare time after doing research at the Library of Congress gave me the cover I need to pursue a little extra-curricular research. Continue reading
2018 in review, anticipating 2019
The past year was a consequential one for me personally and professionally. Here are a few highlights from 2018 and some things that I am looking forward to in 2019.
The Talbot Avenue Bridge pop-up museum, April 21, 2018. L-R: Harvey Matthews, David Rotenstein, Rev. Ella Redfield. Photo by Charlotte Coffield.
2018 Is In The Books
- My chapter on confronting erasure in Silver Spring’s history and historic preservation was published the volume, Demand the Impossible: Essays in History as Activism, edited by Nathan Wuertenberg and William Horne, 89–111.
- I spoke about erasure and history at the University of Maryland (African American Studies program) and at several Silver Spring churches.
- I was a speaker in the We Are Takoma series (Takoma, Park, Md.) and my topic was the Silver Spring Sundown Suburb.
- The District of Columbia’s Tenley-Friendship Library branch invited me to speak about African American communities that had developed in and around Tenleytown and Chevy Chase.
- I presented several conference papers: The Delta Symposium (Jonesboro, Ark.), The Vernacular Architecture Forum (Alexandria, Va.), the American Folklore Society (Buffalo, NY), and the DC History Conference.
- I curated the Talbot Avenue Bridge pop-up museum in April.
- I helped plan the Talbot Avenue Bridge Centennial Celebration.
- My article on erasure and historic preservation in Decatur, Georgia, was accepted for publication in a special issue of the Journal of American Folklore dedicated to historic preservation.
- I wrote blog posts for the Activist History Review, New Directions in Folklore, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
- I completed a one-year project documenting Bethesda’s River Road Moses Cemetery and presented the results to the descendant community and to government agencies in Montgomery County and the District of Columbia.
- My article, “Erasing and Reclaiming History: A Delta Photo Essay,” was published in Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies.
- I completed archival research projects for clients in Georgia, Montgomery County, Washington, and Wisconsin.
- I was invited to be on a master’s thesis committee for Goucher University historic preservation student.
- Finally, I finished four years of comparative data research for my book on erasure and displacement in Decatur, Georgia. This research on how Silver Spring produces history and historic preservation led to the Talbot Avenue Bridge work and to the programs on erasure and the Silver Spring Sundown Suburb done as part of the Invisible Montgomery project.
Big Plans for 2019
- The year begins with two articles out for review in academic journals. They both deal with erasure and racialized history and historic preservation.
- I will be revisiting my work on leather and meatpacking in Pennsylvania, including work on two encyclopedia articles and another article on Pittsburgh’s leather industry.
- I will be hunkering down and finishing the Decatur book.
- After being out of the academe for nearly a decade I will be hitting the bricks looking for some adjunct teaching gigs.
- I will be doing more fieldwork in the Mississippi River Delta region.
- I am working with colleagues planning the 2019 American Folklore Society meeting in Baltimore.
Happy New Year and best wishes for a healthy and prosperous 2019.
— David
Party ice
Tomorrow is the first day of winter. I can’t think of a better way to mark the transition than to cobble together a little post about ice.
Ice freezer, 7-11 store, Silver Spring, Maryland.
Party ice is the product you can buy in the freezers outside of convenience stores or inside supermarkets. This bulk ice product hails from a time before home refrigeration and convenience stores. Before mechanical refrigeration, ice was imported from New England and Canada to Mid-Atlantic and Southern states. At first, it traveled by boat; later, refrigerated rail cars carried the large blocks harvested from northern lakes and ponds.
In the Washington metropolitan area, ice arrived via the Potomac River. In the nineteenth century, large ice warehouses were built in Alexandria, Virginia, and Georgetown in the District. By the turn of the twentieth century, the ice industry had adapted to mechanical production methods and new transportation systems. Ice manufacturers began specializing production lines to meet demands from household consumers, businesses, and industry.
Party ice is a twentieth century product that originated in community ice distribution networks created by ice entrepreneurs. Ice was produced in plants and packaged for sale according to local health codes. In Alexandria, Virginia, the Mutual Ice Company dominated the industry. Founded in 1900 on the riverfront, the company eventually moved to the Potomac Yard rail yards where it built a large ice plant.
Mutual Ice Company logo.
The Mutual Ice Company produced bulk ice for sale to local Alexandria consumers and it iced railroad cars passing through the city that were filled with perishable freight: meat and vegetables. Consumers could get ice delivered to them or they could buy it at one of seven “ice stations” that the company built throughout the city. These operated between 1924 and 1955. After that, the company continued selling ice at its plant and in grocery store freezers until it stopped making ice in 1969.
Former Mutual Ice Company ice station (2008), Alexandria, Virginia. Photo by David Rotenstein.
Oliver Ashby Reardon obituary photo. Credit: Legacy.com.
In 2008, I interviewed O. Ashby Reardon (1928-2011). Reardon’s family had established an ice wharf in Alexandria in the 1850s and he was the Mutual Ice Company’s last president. He attended the U.S Naval Academy and served for eight years in the U.S. Navy. Reardon returned to Alexandria after being discharged and he began working in his family’s ice plant. Reardon served in several executive positions with the firm until it closed in 1969. The following year the company changed its name to Mico, Inc., and continued to do business as a holding company for several of the older firm’s subsidiary enterprises.
We spoke about a lot of things in the two interviews, including party ice. The Mutual Ice Company initially sold fifty- and twenty-five pound bags of ice at its plant while twelve-pound bags were sold in a dozen vending machines placed in small wood frame shelters built inside the plant and delivered to locations throughout the city. Self-serve ice chests, according to Ashby Reardon Jr., were “made by the Lear Company that were just sitting out there in front of an entrance to the gas station where you could go in and buy some ice and then take it out and put it in your car.” Continue reading
Is the Purple Line a pig in a poke?
Purple Line construction sign.
Some Montgomery County, Maryland, residents think they’ve been sold a pig in a poke as far as the Purple Line is concerned. Early on, they enthusiastically supported the 16-mile light rail project linking Langley Park and Bethesda. But after construction started and some of the short- and long-term impacts began appearing, their opinions changed.
Whether it’s the observant Jews who will lose a key walking route to synagogue or the homeowners whose new neighbors include piles of cut trees, trash, and vermin, one thing has become clear ever since construction began in 2017: the new light rail line has a bigger price tag than Maryland transportation officials told people during nearly 30 years of planning.
“Under any circumstances where construction is taking place, you have to expect a level of inconvenience for a window of time,” said Leslie Herrera, a Silver Spring resident whose house abuts the Purple Line corridor in Lyttonsville. Once a big Purple Line advocate, Herrera has soured on the project.
She cites the piles of cut trees, trash, and animals, and unresponsive Purple Line officials as the reasons. “I’ve been to all of the meetings but one and it’s generally the same. It’s generally the same. They say they’ll get back to you. You call, no answer. No call back,” she said while standing near a clear-cut lot next to her home.
Cut trees, debris piles, and trash in the Purple Line clearcut corridor behind homes along Pennsylvania Avenue in Silver Spring’s Lyttonsville neighborhood.
Holy Holstein
New York Times screen capture, December 2, 2018.
This terrific New York Times photo became a meme and went viral on the Interwebz. It shows what appears to be a gargantuan Holstein cow — Knickers — dwarfing an adult human.
The accompanying article is a funny piece that digs into the photo and how it’s misleading, i.e., folks who have never gotten up close and personal with a Holstein probably don’t know how big they are in real life. Most cityslickers’ only experiences with Holstein cattle come from Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream art, and the burgers we eat, They know very little about cattle and Holsteins in particular. The NYT article and the folks who know my “thing” with cattle who have shared the image reminded me that I haven’t written much lately about livestock and leather tanning. I think it’s time to fix that situation.
Pittsburgh History cover, Spring 1997 issue, featuring my article on the history of Pittsburghs leather industry.
I spent a lot of years researching and writing about tanning, stockyards, and the interconnected meatpacking and meat byproducts industries. While researching Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s tanneries in the mid-1990s I encountered one of those people whose names eerily fit the jobs they do. You know, Mr. Butcher the butcher. Or, Mr. Macro the math teacher. Here in the DC suburbs I always chuckled when I saw a Peed Plumbing truck.
This fun little post is about a Pittsburgh tannery owner named Alexander Holstein (1812-1895). Holstein came to Pittsburgh from Bavaria. He arrived in New York in 1836. Within a decade, he appeared in Pittsburgh city directories as a saddler and harness maker with a shop in Wood Street in the city’s downtown. Wood Street was near the confluence of the Allegheny, Ohio, and Monongahela rivers. Its proximity to to the rivers and to the later Pennsylvania Canal made it an ideal location to become Pittsburgh’s earliest leather tanning district. Hides, tanbark, and water were easily obtained. The same transportation routes made it possible to ship the finished leather not sold locally to eastern markets. Continue reading
A Pittsburgh flashback
Pittsburgh 2018.
Back in 1992 I was working as an archaeologist for a Philadelphia-based consulting firm. I had been spending a lot of time that summer in Southwestern Pennsylvania doing research to write a regional historic context for a large transportation project.
Earlier that year, both of Pittsburgh’s newspapers were impacted by striking delivery drivers. One of the papers, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, didn’t want to fade into obscurity in these waning days of analog publication and delivery. To try and keep attention focused on itself and on the news, the Post-Gazette hired town criers to stand in downtown Pittsburgh and read the news. It was more public relations stunt than news delivery, but it sounded like a really interesting story that also appealed to the historian and folklorist in me.
Besides working as an archaeologist and finishing my Penn PhD coursework, I also was writing for several newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer. One day I called my editor and told her that I had been spending a lot of time just south of Pittsburgh and I pitched writing a story about the town criers. She liked it and she gave me the green light to run with my idea. Late one morning, I hopped in my car after grabbing my reporter’s notebook and tape recorder and headed north, from the Monongahela River Valley to downtown Pittsburgh. The Inquirer published my article on Pittsburgh’s town criers on September 1, 1992.
© 2018 D.S. Rotenstein
Creative mitigation Silver Spring style
Mitigation is the term of art used to describe how federal agencies prefer to resolve adverse effects to historic properties. More jargon, I know. Yet, mitigation is a fact of life for every American who lives in an old place. This post is about mitigation and the Talbot Avenue Bridge in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Historic properties are buildings, structures, objects, and sites that are determined eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act requires agencies to identify properties eligible for listing in the National Register before a proposed action like a new road, bridge, railroad, pipeline, or power line is built. If eligible properties are identified in an area that will be impacted, agencies are required to evaluate what effects the action will have on the properties. Effects range from complete demolition to partial alteration to the introduction of visual impacts. It’s a complicated thing.
Pittsburgh Wool Company, before demolition(1998) and during demolition (2000). The Pittsburgh Wool Company was the last wool pullery in the United States. A historic business founded in the early 20th century, it occupied a former tannery building constructed in the 1880s.
If the proposed action is found to adversely affect historic properties, i.e., alter the characteristics that make them historic (important), then the agencies are required to resolve the adverse effects. The process, from the identification of historic properties to determining why they are historically significant to resolving adverse effects to them, is a legally-mandated consultation process. In other words, people living in and around the historic properties must be consulted at every step along the way.
Work inside the Pittsburgh Wool Company prior to demolition.
Oftentimes, this consultation never happens. Or, it happens in a perfunctory and highly limited way that is inconsistent with the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. As a result, mitigation all too often simply involves a transaction in which the federal agency or its state and local partner (or private sector entities like telecommunications firms) buys the right to demolish something old and historic.
Pittsburgh Wool Company mitigation products: Heinz History Center exhibition (left) and Historic American Engineering Record drawings (right).
This compensation (sometimes derided as bribery) involves more perfunctory actions: completing a community historic resource survey, funneling money to a local museum, writing reports that no one will ever read, etc. Once the mitigation is decided upon, the agency is free to demolish the old building or structure.
This is what happened with the Talbot Avenue Bridge. The bridge was determined eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places and a mitigation plan was developed to resolve the adverse effects introduced by the construction of the Purple Line light rail line.
Purple Line Community Advisory Team, Talbot Avenue Bridge Design Meeting, August 30, 2018.
Purple Line Community Advisory Team, Talbot Avenue Bridge Design Meeting, August 30, 2018.
The bridge was determined historically significant for its associations with the railroad; the adverse effect is demolition; and, the mitigation was the completion of more documentation prior to demolition.
Talbot Avenue Bridge, September 22, 2018.
Two years ago, Silver Spring residents learned more about the bridge’s history and its ties to local African American and civil rights history. Since then, folks have taken things into their own hands by raising awareness of the bridge’s history and by appropriating the bridge for public programs. These programs have included community meetings, a pop-up museum, and a centennial celebration festival that attracted more than 200 people on a warm fall afternoon in 2018. And beyond the space, we can include the composition of a song to commemorate the bridge, the production of a documentary video, and the various visual artworks that have been created among grassroots mitigation created.
Converting abandoned infrastructure into festival space. Talbot Avenue Bridge, September 22, 2018.As these events were unfolding, I was invited to participate in a “diamond session” panel on historic preservation at the 2018 American Folklore Society meeting in Buffalo, New York. Diamond sessions are like pechakucha for folklorists. Each presenter is limited to showing only 21 slides that are precisely timed to be visible for only 20 seconds. The objective in these sessions is to move the focus off of the speaker and to spur discussion.
My AFS presentation was titled, “More than Old Metal and Wood: The Talbot Avenue Bridge.” The abstract published in the meeting program book reads:
For 99 years, the Talbot Avenue Bridge carried cars, bikes, and pedestrians across railroad tracks in Silver Spring, Maryland. The bridge connected two very different neighborhoods: a historically Black hamlet and a Sundown suburb that developed around racially restricted residential subdivisions. Though eligible for the National Register of Historic Places as an engineering structure associated with the B&O Railroad, historians neglected to explore the bridge’s social history. This presentation demonstrates what happened when the bridge’s links to Jim Crow segregation were revealed to white residents, the press, and local government officials.
The video below is a rendering of the presentation.
© 2018 D.S. Rotenstein
Tastee Diner’s secret historic menu
Tastee Diner, Silver Spring, Maryland.
It’s well known that the most exclusive restaurants have special menus with items reserved for well-heeled and well-connected patrons. These special people dine on dishes carefully prepared by chefs not line cooks. During its earliest years in business, the Tastee Diner had its own special menu of sorts. Not only that, the Silver Spring, Maryland, eatery also had a special cover charge. Entry and seating were free for white folks; the admission price for people of color was astronomically high: it was the color of their skin.
The Silver Spring Historical Society celebrates the Tastee Diner in its books, blog posts, walking tours, and other public programs. The group talks about the community’s nostalgia for the diner and how Silver Spring mobilized to “save” and move the diner when downtown redevelopment threatened it nearly 20 years ago.
Earlier this week the Silver Spring Historical Society posted on its facebook page, “A local high school student will be utilizing SSHS’s collection of materials about Tastee Diner for a school project.”
Silver Spring Historical Society Facebook page screen capture, October 12, 2018.
I wonder if the historical society will tell the high school student about the diner’s special menu, the one with prices that people of color could never pay. I wonder if this exercise in nostalgia economics will include scholarship by historians who have explored Tastee Diner’s special menu, the one that historian Andrew Hurley wrote about in 2002:
Segregated service was by no means exclusive to diners located in the Deep South. Luncheonettes, coffee shops, and diners in the Middle Atlantic and midwestern states resorted to many of the same practices that prevailed in the old Confederacy. Eddie Warner, for instance, ran a chain of diners in suburban Maryland on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. Warner instructed his employees to notify black patrons that they could not be served inside the diner, but that take-out service was available. Warner made no exception for the African-American cooks and dishwashers he hired periodically. Company policy dictated that they take their meals alone in the back kitchen. Hurley, Andrew. Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture. New York: Basic Books, 2002, pp. 88-89.
Today’s Tastee Diner clientele looks nothing like its Jim Crow-era predecessors. The restaurant is a popular eatery and meeting place for people of all races and cultural backgrounds — mostly. A decade ago, the Tastee Diner faced and overcame allegations that it discriminated against LGBTQ diners. The discriminatory practices leading to episodes between 2009 and 2011 appear to have been abandoned and mostly forgotten. Yet, when I did Black History tours in downtown Silver Spring, people who recalled them made sure that I mentioned them as we met across from the restaurant.
So who is making sure that Montgomery County students using the Silver Spring Historical Society as an educational resource are getting real history, not fake whitewashed history? How are parents and educators to know whether the history lessons about menus and economies at the historic eatery will include the hidden charges not published in the historic menus.
© 2018 D.S. Rotenstein