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 →

Silver Spring Historical Society gets no respect

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Jerry McCoy, founder, president, and 20% of the Silver Spring Historical Society membership recently saw a refrigerator magnet in a local CVS. He took a picture and posted it to the SSHS Facebook page with the caption: “#norespect — feeling disappointed at CVS Pharmacy.”

Jerry’s feelings appear to be hurt because the magnet’s maker didn’t include Silver Spring in the places depicted. Boo-hoo.

What about all of Silver Spring’s African American residents who for decades have complained that McCoy’s whites-only histories and historic preservation advocacy has excluded — erased — the Black experience in Silver Spring and the people who were/are part of it? Add to that, histories, placemaking initiatives, and historic preservation products that uncritically celebrate the white supremacists who founded Silver Spring.

Perhaps folks who want anti-racist histories and historic preservation in Silver Spring should adopt the hashtag, #norespect and share it each time Jerry and his merry band of building huggers posts something.

 

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 →

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

Tiny wins against racist & whitewashed history

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Earlier this year I tweeted about the Montgomery County, Maryland, Parks Department’s whitewashed description of Silver Spring founder Francis Preston Blair’s property. The county owns a small slice of that property and it is called “Acorn Park” for the 19th century gazebo located there. Blair had built the gazebo in the property he had called “Silver Spring.”

https://youtu.be/VUKmmQbxE8g

Most histories produced by the local historical society and county agencies describe Blair’s farm as a “summer retreat” or estate. The Montgomery County Parks Department’s Acorn Park website read, “Blair and his wife Eliza established a 300-acre summer estate called Silver Spring.”

Screen capture from the Acorn Park website taken in early 2019.

I was disappointed that more than a year of lobbying Montgomery County agencies to correct the park’s whitewashed history appeared to have achieved nothing,.

I took to Twitter in April 2019 to ask why Montgomery County’s Parks Department was still describing Blair’s property as a “summer estate.”

https://twitter.com/iVernacular/status/1117737377127182336

Two weeks later and with no direct response to my tweet, Acorn Park’s website was updated with a new description for Blair’s property: “[Blair] established a 300-acre plantation at the spring.

Acorn Park website screen capture, August 9, 2019.

It’s a start. But I’m wondering why the agency removed the direct narrative link to Silver Spring’s founding as a plantation where enslaved people worked, lived, and died to build Blair’s wealth that was then used to build the Silver Spring community. I guess the image of a plantation and the extended Blair’s family white supremacist real estate practices that made Silver Spring a sundown suburb until c. 1970 aren’t consistent with the community’s contemporary image and branding as a liberal and progressive haven.

© 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 →