Under every stone (or building foundation) in Pittsburgh there seems to be a mob story. It’s no different in the 1500 block of Penn Avenue in the city’s Strip District. The mob history is what caught my attention around the same time that plans became public to demolish the former Federal Cold Storage Company building popularly known as the “Wholey’s Building” for the giant illuminated fish that dominated one facade. Over the past year i have been documenting the building’s history and the lives of the people who owned it and who worked there. As I watched a demolition carefully deconstruct the walls adjacent to a historic bar, I got interested in the bar’s story, too.
Federal Cold Storage Company building demolition, Feb. 2, 2022.
Federal Cold Storage Company building demolition, Feb. 11, 2022.
Federal Cold Storage Company building demolition viewed from the Hill District.
1519 Penn Ave. Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission Historic Resource Survey Form.
Folks can learn more about the cold storage building and the Lucky’s story at a special Lawrenceville Historical Society program Wednesday July 20 at the Carnegie Library on Fisk Street. No more spoilers here. The program is free and open to the public. See you then.
Decatur, Ga., got a new school last week. Sort of: it’s an old city school building with a new name. The City Schools of Decatur voted May 22 to change the name of the city’s only middle school from Renfroe Middle School to Beacon Hill Middle School. The new name went into effect July 1, 2022.
Carl G. Renfroe Middle School, 2018.
A grassroots effort to change the school’s name began in 2020 after I designed a walking tour of Decatur’s erased Black community. The middle school, which is located across the railroad tracks from the former Beacon Community, was one of the stops in the tour created for the 2020 National Council on Public History annual conference (which was cancelled due to the COVID pandemic).
Renfroe Middle School as viewed from across the railroad tracks in 2015.
I conducted the tour intended for the conference virtually and then recreated it several times over the next year for various Decatur community and religious groups. Participants in one of those virtual tours began an online petition to change the school’s name: “Rename Renfroe Middle School To Reflect Decatur Values.”
The petition got more than 700 signatures and the attention of city leaders. In the first paragraph, the petition’s authors cited my walking tour, which included oral history excerpts of people talking about the school’s namesake, Carl Renfroe who was Decatur’s school superintendent between 1959 and 1975.
“Rename Renfroe Middle School To Reflect Decatur Values” petition screen capture.
The petition only cited one of the examples that I used in the walking tour. It was an excerpt of an interview that I had done with a Black man who attended Decatur’s segregated schools (a federal consent decree forced Decatur into compliance years after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case).
Decatur Displaced and Erased Walking Tour screen capture, Renfroe Middle School stop.
The complete entry for the walking tour’s storymap was a lot more detailed and it included an excerpt from an interview with a former civil rights and social justice activist who lived in Decatur during Renfroe’s tenure. William Denton taught education at Agnes Scott College and Atlanta University.
Commerce and West Howard This intersection didn’t exist before the 1960s. It was created during urban renewal when the city of Decatur extended then-Oliver street south to Howard. Visible to the south is carl g. Renfroe middle school. Intersection didn’t exist until urban renewal in 1960s. This is Decatur’s only middle school. It is named for educator Carl G. Renfroe (1910-2004), who was Decatur’s school superintendent (1959-1975). Despite serving after the Brown v. Board of Education case (1954) Renfroe resisted desegregating city schools and is remembered by residents for racially biased decisions and language.
It was an embarrassing situation for me to be sitting during my graduation and the superintendent of the school system, Carl Renfroe, spoke and commented that evening, “we are proud of our nigras,” you know …“we are proud of our nigras” — R.L, Decatur resident and former trinity high school student, February 2018.
I just have to say that that brought to mind a sense of irony because when we were first there, the superintendent, Renfroe, was of the old school and he did everything he could to keep black and white children separated — William Denton, former Decatur resident and civil rights activist, February 2018.
The interview with Denton was one of several that I did with the former Decatur resident over ten years. Denton is one of a dwindling number of people still living who would know about the inner workings of Decatur city government and its schools. He and his wife Barbara were active in their efforts to bring equity to the city’s school system. They also were among the first generation of 1970s community activists who sought to maintain Decatur’s trajectory towards housing and social equity. For years they were among the leaders of the South Decatur Community Council, the precursor to the contemporary Oakhurst Neighborhood Association.
The Dentons agreed with the city’s decision to change the school’s name. Barbara Denton expanded on our earlier conversations about Renfroe:
Regarding the late-great “Renfroe” Middle School and Carl’s role in maintaining school segregation: He advised the Board to gerrymander the school zones in the early 70’s in order to maintain maximum segregation. Bill wrote to him in disagreement. When he failed to respond, Bill informed federal E.E.O. of this action. The Decatur distract thus joined about 80 other Georgia distracts under E.E.O. supervision.
She added that she and her husband attended the school board meeting when the school was named for Renfroe:
We were at the Board meeting when the naming of the new middle school was announced. Board member Scott Candler looked directly at us and smirked when he saw our jaws drop. Fait Accompli! I’ll never believe Renfroe deserves credit for a desegregated middle school. Given Carl’s history we think its origin lies in the E.E.O. designation as an obstructionist system.
After the petition went live, accusations started flying about the veracity of the allegations against Renfroe, whom the Dentons said vigorously resisted desegregation.
Oakhurst Neighborhood Association Facebook comment attached to a post about the name change petition.
To allay the claims that the oral history comments about Renfroe were unsupported and/or unreliable, here is the video clip played during the virtual walking tours. Perhaps they can assist Decatur residents in complying with the Facebook comment author’s suggestion to “be smart.”
Historic preservation is where history goes to die. One of its graves can be found in Pittsburgh’s Strip District which was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2014, with a period of significance from 1850-1964.
It’s as if all history ends with the 50-year criterion and consultants can’t see Criteria Consideration G properties or traditional cultural properties (TCPs) right in front of their faces. Like many industrial districts throughout the world, Pittsburgh’s Strip District changed (technology, economics) and nightclubs, restaurants, artists, etc. began moving in. Some of these changes can rightly be called gentrification. Low rents, cool buildings, and a certain vibe attracted entertainment entrepreneurs in the 1980s-1990s. LGBTQ culture developed a strong foothold there, with bars like Cruze on Smallman Street. The bar closed in 2019, displaced by development (there’s now a parking deck at the site). The only evidence of Cruze in the National Register nomination are a couple of Smallman Street streetscape photos that captured the bar’s facade.
Smallman Street streetscape showing Cruze. Strip Historic District National Register of Historic Places Registration Form.
Former Cruze site, June 2022.
The Real Luck Cafe (Luck’s) is another gay bar whose building is a contributing property to the Strip Historic District. Its history is similarly erased in the National Register nomination. Readers looking for the landmark bar’s history will only find a couple of sentences describing the building’s exterior and a mention of the jeweler who owned the building between 1869 and 1890. For a more complete understand of the bar and its cultural context, folks are better off exploring the work of the Pittsburgh Queer History Project, especially the 2014 “Lucky After Dark” exhibition that debuted the same year that the Strip Historic District was listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Another good source would be Dr. Harrison Apple’s 2021 University of Arizona PhD dissertation, “A Social Member in Good Standing: Pittsburgh’s Gay After-Hours Social Clubs, 1960-1990.”
1519 Penn Avenue (Real Luck Cafe) description, Strip Historic District National Register of Historic Places form.
I wonder if Preservation Pittsburgh has evaluated its potential legal exposures created by having the organization’s president Matthew Falcone serving as a Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission member? As Preservation Pittsburgh’s leader, he nominates properties to become City of Pittsburgh historic landmarks. As a commissioner, he debates the merits of those nominations and votes on recommending designation to the Pittsburgh City Council. In 2020, Falcone even nominated, debated, and voted on the designation of his own home.
Preservation Pittsburgh website landing page.
Curiously, Pittsburgh’s historic preservation law makes all of this possible. It created a massive legislative loophole that enables this conflict of interest:
Submission of a nomination by a member of the Historic Review Commission, the City Planning Commission, or the City Council shall not preclude that member from full participation in the review of the nomination nor from voting on the recommendation or designation. (Pittsburgh Municipal Code §1101.03(a)(1)(b).
There’s no doubt that the HRC plays an outsize role in whether properties get landmarked or not. Being the board’s resident historic preservation expert doesn’t help, either. Along with the Planning Commission, the HRC acts in an advisory capacity under Pittsburgh’s historic preservation law. In its final say, the City Council puts great weight on what the two boards recommend.
Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission member Karen Loysen must not have gotten the memo: historic preservation is no longer just about pretty old buildings built by rich (white) men. Over the past 20 years, the field has sought to become more inclusive and people-centered. Loysen, a Pittsburgh architect, seems to be out of touch with current best practices in historic preservation.
Loysen’s unsophisticated and narrow perspective on historic preservation was on display in her statements about Pittsburgh’s Tito-Mecca-Zizza House as it worked its way through the HRC hearing cycle on its way to historic site designation. Though Loysen and her HRC colleagues declined to recommend landmarking the site, on June 7, 2022, the Pittsburgh City Council voted 6-2 to make the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House Pittsburgh’s newest historic site.
Children in the Tito-mecca-Zizza House side yard.
The landmark nomination that I prepared in 2021, in collaboration with Tito, Mecca, and Zizza family members, included many historical family photos. These pictures show the Victorian home over the span of several decades, lovingly used by the families. The photos also provide invaluable snapshots in time that show how some elements of the historic home have remained unchanged and how other elements were altered or replaced in the late 20th century. They are an invaluable asset any historian or architectural historian would be eager to have to make the case for a property’s historical significance.
Last week, the Silver Spring Historical Society (Silver Spring, Maryland) invited its Facebook audience to share stories about a donut shop. The society (which really isn’t a society; it’s four boomer building huggers) is short on history and steeped in nostalgia that celebrates the white supremacists who “built” Silver Spring and erases Black history. This post accepts the historical society’s request for “specific memories” of the site.
If only Pittsburgh had a functioning historic preservation law and a more sophisticated historic preservation advocacy community. A few weeks ago I was in the city’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood to plan for my upcoming Squirrel Hill by the Numbers walking tour dates and I noticed that the facade of 1926 Murray Avenue was missing. It had been there last winter.
Former Beacon Club (1928 1/2 Murray Ave., left) above “H&R Block” and former Squirrel Hill Veteran’s Club (right, 1926 Murray Ave.) in 2019.
I had first encountered the block where the building is located in 2019. I had begun doing interviews for my research into the social history of numbers gambling in Pittsburgh. The Beacon Club, one of Pittsburgh’s most iconic and infamous twentieth century gambling clubs, had been located next door at 1928 1/2 Murray Avenue. Many of the people I interviewed early on and later described the club’s significant roles in Pittsburgh’s underworld history, Jewish history, and Black history.
Today, the Pittsburgh City Council heard testimony related to the nomination of the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House as a City of Pittsburgh historic site. My written testimony (below) supplemented the 2021 nomination report I prepared and my oral testimony delivered during the hearing.
Tito House Historic Site Nomination Bill No. 2022-0190 Pittsburgh City County Hearing April 20, 2022
Testimony of Dr. David Rotenstein
For the record, my name is David Rotenstein and I am writing as the author of the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House historic site nomination report.
In 2009, I interviewed a woman who spent her first decade of life in a suburban home that her parents bought in the 1930s. The home was located in a residential subdivision that had racially restrictive deed covenants attached to all the homes. African Americans were prohibited from buying or renting homes there.
1940s family photo.
When I interviewed the woman (who is now 78) in the fall of 2009, she told me that her family had a live-in domestic. She only knew the woman’s first name and the nickname that she and her brother called the woman. My oral history collaborator had several family photos that showed the Black woman with the family over several years in the 1940s and early 1950s. But, my collaborator didn’t recall any personal details about the woman who helped raise her.
I exhausted all of the archival records available to me at the time to try and locate the African American woman’s full name and any surviving biographical information about her. I struck out. Everywhere. I had consulted every known resource except for the 1950 U.S. Census population schedules. At the time, they were not scheduled for a public release until April 1, 2022 — today. This morning I got out of bed, let the dogs out, grabbed some coffee and made tea for my wife, and rushed into my office. I fired up my web browser and surfed over to https://1950census.archives.gov/ and typed the family’s name into the search field. A few seconds later, I had the woman’s name I had waited 13 years to learn.
She was invisible (to me) no more.
Stay tuned for more about this journey.
1936 racially restrictive deed covenant for the subdivision where the family lived.
I recently spent a couple of days in Silver Spring, Maryland. A filmmaker brought me back there to be interviewed for a documentary she is making about Black history in the DC suburb.
Yesterday morning I revisited Silver Spring’s “Heritage Trail” — a group of nine eight historical markers placed throughout the central business district. Researched and designed by the Silver Spring Historical Society, the markers tell a nostalgic and whitewashed version of Silver Spring’s history. That history omits Black history and it celebrates the stories of the segregationists who created dozens of residential subdivisions with racially restrictive deed covenants and who owned the downtown businesses that discriminated against Blacks.
One of the historical society’s markers is located at the corner of Georgia Avenue and Bonifant Street. Across Georgia Avenue, there is a newly opened Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen. The restaurant opened in a storefront once occupied by a well-loved Indian restaurant.
Silver Spring Heritage Trail marker across the street from a new Popeye’s restaurant.
In 2020, when local media announced the new Popeye’s location, the president of the Silver Spring Historical Society made the rounds on social media complaining about the new restaurant. He and his classist comments quickly became fodder for Twitter ridicule.
As I was photographing the marker across from the Silver Spring Popeye’s it hit me: wouldn’t it be a terrific idea if the restaurant honored the Silver Spring Historical Society’s “contributions” by introducing a new menu item? It would be made with all white meat and served on white bread with mayonnaise. They could call it The Jerry.
