Snapshots from a year in journalism and public history

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What a year. I did a lot of writing about a diverse array of subjects, including housing, social justice, orphanages, ethnic clubs, books about Pittsburgh and its suburbs, and crime — lots of crime. I had the good fortune to meet many wonderful people willing to tell me their stories. The editors who published my work helped me to bring those important stories to readers, some of whom became collaborators on future stories. None of what I accomplished in 2024 would have happened without their help.

I was humbled by the amount of trust so many people placed in me and the risks some of them took to collaborate with me to help tell their stories. One woman whose former neighborhood is being destroyed by her local government turned the tables on me in a conversation we had in August in her mother’s suburban living room.

“How did you get into doing this particular type of work,” she asked me.

“What do you mean,” I replied.

The woman explained:

She’s talked to 100 people. No one’s ever come to talk to her before. Not once. Not once, certainly not twice.

So what intrigued you to dig, to delve?

After more than 20 years of trying to get the attention of local, state, and federal officials, civil rights organizations, and journalists, I was the only reporter who didn’t walk away from her mother’s story.

The woman’s statement underscores how much my experience in public history and ethnography informs my journalism.

Off the printed page and device screens, I did several public programs, including a community history talk celebrating the South Side Carnegie Public Library branch’s centennial and two programs for the Jewish Association on Aging’s Weinberg Terrace residents.

Through Steel City Vice, my public history engagement experiment, I began leading organized crime history walking tours in Pittsburgh’s South Side neighborhood. Though the route and script were constant, each tour was different because of the people who participated. Some of the people who took the tour had family members who were in numbers gambling or themselves participated in the culture. A retired vice cop took one of the tours and added fleshed out my narratives in some colorful and unexpected ways.

South Side by the Numbers walking tour, June 2024.
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Displaced But Not Erased: A Documentary about Black History in Decatur, Georgia

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Piedmont University film student Jarrett Ray produced a documentary film about his family’s hometown: Decatur, Georgia. Jarrett reached out to me to let me know about the film. I asked him about it and here’s what he wrote:

For my film capstone, I decided to do a documentary on the history of the Beacon community in Decatur. The inspiration came from my father, who is also from the community, but growing up, he never shared in depth details on where he was from.

The documentary is posted on YouTube.

The film’s title is a nod to the 2020 walking tour that I designed for the National Council on Public History:

Acorn Park Revisited

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In 2017, I organized events aimed at persuading Montgomery County, Maryland, leaders to tell a more accurate and inclusive story in a Silver Spring park. The events generated some media buzz and I wrote several articles and a book chapter about them. In the end, though, nothing happened.

Protesting Invisibility, Acorn Urban Park, Silver Spring, Maryland, June 2017.

Or did something change?

Acorn Park and the adjacent Silver Spring Memory Wall still tell a whitewashed and exclusionary story. Nothing has changed there. But beyond the park, scholars, journalists, and residents now describe Silver Spring as a sundown suburb. Local planners have incorporated my research into new policy documents on creating equity in Montgomery County.

Earlier this year, a Baltimore planner published a podcast episode, “Story Shift: Acorn Park.”

Screenshot from Acorn Park podcast (October 2024).

Podcaster Zoe Roane-Hopkins recounted the park’s history, including its new chapters added in 2017. Her observations about the park in 2024 speak volumes to how effective my efforts were: they raised awareness, but accomplished nothing in terms of changing the narrative in the park:

In 2017, the Maryland National Capital Parks and Planning Commission was solicited in public feedback for improvements to Acorn Park and in response, local nonprofit Impact Silver Spring and showing up for racial justice, Montgomery County joined together to stage a protest at Acorn Park to highlight the continued lack of visibility for black folks through public art in the park.  They called for an increase in accurate representation in stories in public art and proposed suggestions to do this at the Acorn Park site …

… When I visited Acorn Park for this episode, there was no evidence of any moves to rewrite the narrative of this little green space to be more representative.

Zoe Roan-Hopkins, Story Shift: Acorn Park

The changes are small, but positive. Perhaps one of these days, Montgomery County will get around to scrubbing off some of the whitewash.

© 2024 D.S. Rotenstein

Joe Tito’s Hill District

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Joseph “Joe” Tito was a bootlegger, numbers banker, and brewery executive. He was close friends with William A. “Gus” Greenlee. During Prohibition, the pair dominated illegal rackets throughout the city. They also made Negro Leagues baseball history as owners of the Pittsburgh Crawfords and Greenlee Field. After Prohibition ended, Tito and his brothers introduced one of Pennsylvania’s most iconic brands, Rolling Rock beer.

Joe Tito (standing, rear right) in an undated family photo. Tito’s parents are seated in the middle row: Rosa (second from the left) and Raphael (second from the Right). Photo courtesy of Richard Tito.

Born in 1890, Tito was the oldest of eight children Raphael and Rosa Tito had after arriving in Pittsburgh from their native Italy. The Titos lived in an extended family enclave on Gazzam Hill near the intersection of Kirkpatrick Street and Fifth Avenue. 

Gazzam Hill as seen from Pittsburgh’s South Side, 2024.
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Stanley’s Tavern

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Stanley Williams was a restaurateur and nightclub owner who left an indelible imprint in the Hill District and in Pittsburgh history. He and his two brothers, Alexander and Charles, had emigrated from Barbados. Stanley and Alexander Williams owned and operated the city’s first Black-owned professional sports stadium, the Central Amusement Park.

Stanley, born in 1900, was the youngest Williams brother, and arrived in Pittsburgh at age 13. According to one 1955 Pittsburgh Courier profile, he came to Pittsburgh to study dentistry at the University of Pittsburgh. Instead, he entered the entertainment and hospitality industry. Before striking out on his own, Stanley went to work with his older brothers running a pool hall in the basement of Burke’s Hall (later, the Rhumba Theater).

Between 1926 and 1933 Stanley worked as a waiter and he tried his hand running several businesses with his brother Charles and other Hill District entrepreneurs. These included a Wylie Avenue confectionary and pool hall.

In 1933, he opened Stanley’s Inn, located in rented space at 1506 Wylie Ave. Ads in the Courier touted the new cabaret as “The classiest early dawnin’ place in town” with “hot-cha music” and “delicious food.” Alvin Austin, a dentist by day and nightclub crooner by night, provided the soundtrack. “Plenty of zip and bang and rhythm,” the Courier reported “… the kind of music that goes with 3.2 [beer].”

Original Stanley’s Tavern location at 1506 Wylie Ave. Gus Greenlee had bought a pool hall in the M.J. Farrell Building basement in the early 1920s. Stanley acquired the business from Greenlee about five years later and he operated the pool hall until opening the nightclub in 1933. Photo courtesy Pittsburgh City Archives.
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A stroll through Schenley Farms

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Last month we signed up for a walking tour of Schenley Farms, a historic subdivision in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood. A local historic preservation group organized the tour and charged participants $20 per ticket; a Schenley Farms resident led the tour. Full disclosure: I’m a veteran walking tour consumer and I design and lead tours professionally. We had low expectations going into the tour and 90 minutes after it began and we walked away in disbelief that it was much worse than we anticipated.

This isn’t the place to pile onto an amateur tour guide or the tone-deaf and obsolete historic preservation organization behind the tour. Instead, it’s where I want to reflect on what was in the tour and what was missing.

What the tour had was lots of celebratory history about the wonderful white real estate developers, architects, and homeowners whose names are indelibly attached to the neighborhood. These included former university presidents, food company executives, and a popular amusement park founder.

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Today on City Cast Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh’s racist real estate history

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I’m on today’s City Cast Pittsburgh talking about racism and real estate. One of the takeaways from my PublicSource reporting was that unlike other places, so far the only racial and ethnic exclusions that I have identified in Pittsburgh area deeds exclude Black people from buying and renting homes. All of the deeds with racially restrictive deed covenants that I sampled for the PublicSource investigation were limited to people of African descent.

Racially restrictive deed covenant filed in 1940 for a Sewickley subdivision.
Racially restrictive deed covenant filed in 1929 for a McCandless Township subdivision.

These examples from Erie, Pennsylvania, and the DC suburbs show a laundry list of racist, anti-semitic, and xenophobic exclusions.

Deed filed in Erie County, Pennsylvania, in 1924 with racial and ethnic exclusions.
Deed filed in Montgomery County, Maryland, in 1947 with racial and ethnic exclusions.

I make the point in the City Cast podcast that Pittsburgh’s racially restrictive deed covenants underscore the metropolitan area’s historical and contemporary racism that led to Southern Black migrants dubbing Pittsburgh the “Mississippi of the North.”

Listen to the complete City Cast podcast here:

There is No Basis in the Law for Demolishing this Historic Building

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In 2023, the Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission unanimously approved an application to demolish a historic building in the city’s Uptown neighborhood. The developer took that decision to the Pittsburgh Planning Commission for approval in an April 2, 2024 hearing. The HRC approval had no basis in law and preservation practice. Despite serious questions raised by my testimony and statements submitted by other parties opposed to the project as proposed, the Pittsburgh Planning Commission voted to approve the project (five affirmative votes, one abstention), including the demolition of Joe Tito’s former garage and beer distributorship.

Visitors attending the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House pop-up museum in April 2022 read text panels next to Joe Tito’s former garage and beer distributorship. The Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission and Pittsburgh Planning Commission have approved this landmarked building’s demolition. Photo by David S. Rotenstein.
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Black History Month 2024

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NEXTpittsburgh screen capture, Feb. 26, 2024.

Throughout February, NEXTpittsburgh has been featuring my articles about Black history in Pittsburgh. NEXT originally published most of them in 2023:

That’s a lot of Black history content published throughout the year. Let’s see if I can boost those numbers in 2024.

So Long John Hamilton

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Our 10-year-old basset hound decided that we were getting up this morning at a little before five. I opened Facebook on my phone while moving between the bedroom and giving our 17-year-old cat her morning medicine. The first post that I saw was one from Hannah, a woman we met 10 years ago while we were living in Georgia. Back then, she had recently lost another dog and had come to one of my programs on gentrification in the city where she lived to look for answers about why her neighbors acted the way they did.

Hannah’s post referred to her dog John Hamilton in the past tense.

Our pets are our family and sometimes our friends’ pets become important, too. I cried this morning when I learned that the dog Hannah adopted a decade ago had died. I know that it won’t be nearly as much as how Hannah will miss John Hamilton, but I will miss her posts about him and her photos of him accompanying her on her many adventures.

Hannah is one of the best things that happened to us in the aftermath of moving to Decatur, Ga. She is one of the few good people in a city of more than 20 thousand. It’s tempting to think that most people are “good” everywhere, but there are some places on this planet where a majority of the people are bad because of their actions or their inaction: silence in the midst of evil is complicity and betrayal. Decatur is such a place filled with bad people, brightened in spots by people like Hannah.

At the program Hannah attended in March 2014, she recounted the recent loss of her dog Heidi. Hannah told me in an interview the following week:

People haven’t noticed that Heidi died. Like why doesn’t anybody ask about my dog? When the two gay guys walk with their three dogs and somebody’s missing, I ask. Uh oh, where’s the other one?

Nothing.

Then a couple of times I’ve noticed that like – now I’m a aware of it and so I say something extra nice and they’re surprised.

Hit by the loss of her dog and the sense of disconnection from her neighbors, Hannah embarked on a mission to create connections, community.

I decided that I was just going to kill them with kindness and say “Hi.” Usually I don’t like the “How are you?” I say, “Hey there.” They’ll either say nothing or “How are you?”

And then I decided that I know and I feel guilty about neighbors that are very close that I have not met and so I don’t bake cookies anymore because I’m a vegan so I’ve made my own homemade deodorants, a lavender scent and tangerine scent, to pass out to those neighbors. And I have a little recipe card with my name and my phone number – not my email – and the ingredients of the deodorant and I’m introducing myself to people. And I get super nervous but I still do it. It’s really fun, though.

She joked about what she should call her project: “It’s really just meet the neighbors but maybe the, ‘Hi, hey there club.’ It’s just me in it.”

Hannah now lives thousands of miles away from Decatur and the city’s social pathologies. I wrote about how we met and her experiences for the History News Network in a 2015 article titled, “Doing Public History: This Is What Success Can Look Like.” Back then, I had to use a pseudonym to protect her from retaliation by her neighbors, the bad people, and in the article I called her “Susan.”

In a way, our pets sparked a friendship. Had it not been for Heidi, I never would have met John Hamilton in Hannah’s small apartment and I never would have met Hannah and learned her touching story.

I hope that John Hamilton was greeted at the Rainbow Bridge by our own Hannah (1998-2012), Emily, Zeke, Ziggy, Emerson, Rufus, Clyde, and Flagler.