MobsBurgh in the suburbs

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North Meadowcroft Avenue in Mt. Lebanon, south of Pittsburgh’s city limits, is a quiet tree-lined suburban street. In 1965, the street became ground zero for testimony before a U.S. Senate committee investigating federal agency surveillance practices. Joseph “Frank” Grosso was racketeering kingpin Tony Grosso’s older brother and he was living in a home near the southern end of the street and around the corner from a home where his younger brother had lived in the 1950s. Cresson O. Davis was the Internal Revenue Service’s chief investigator in Pittsburgh and he lived five blocks north of the Grossos.

Frank Grosso had owned the stone-faced home since the 1930s. Davis was renting a ranch home that has had only two owners since it was built about 1952. There’s nothing remarkable about either home in a subdivision filled with period-revival and ranch houses. Neither house blares “the mob lives here” nor “fed in residence.” Perhaps that’s what made the street an attractive place that brought both men — on opposite sides of the law —together.

Former Grosso home.

Former Davis home.

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Decolonize Decatur

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In 2015, the City of Decatur, Georgia, opened a new Black history “museum” in the Beacon Municipal Complex, the site of two historic African American schools the city demolished two years earlier. The Champion, a DeKalb County newspaper, reported on the complex opening: “The center is built on the site of the historic Black Herring Street, Beacon Elementary and Trinity High Schools. The center includes a museum that features exhibits on the history of the Beacon community.”

There’s much to be said about the “history” presented in the “museum.” The City is proud of its efforts to “preserve” Black history. “Decatur has taken steps in recent years to preserve the history of the Beacon community and to honor its spirit,” one City website proclaims. Some Black residents, however, are outraged by the many gaps and errors in the City’s story told at the Beacon complex.

The Beacon exhibits are the culmination of a century of displacement and erasure that began with the creation of a Black ghetto in downtown in the first decades of the 20th century. It continued with successive stages of slum clearance and urban renewal between 1940 and 1970. And, it continues today with large-scale public-sector redevelopment projects and gentrification. Perhaps no document better illustrates the ways that the City of Decatur has erased Black people and Black history is the 2009 citywide historic resources survey. Nowhere in the voluminous study do the words “Black” or “African American” appear. The survey furthermore found no Black history sites worthy of landmarking and preservation.

Historic Black schools being demolished in Decatur, 2013. A text panel inside the redeveloped Beacon complex reads, “The former school buildings that now house the Beacon Municipal Center are one of the few remaining landmarks of the Beacon neighborhood.”

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Zapped! Pittsburgh microwave sites

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Last Fall I was driving around taking pictures of mobster graves and sites associated with organized crime history in Pittsburgh when I spotted an old microwave tower on a hilltop. It was breaking the horizon in an otherwise ordinary suburban landscape. Nearby, as is common with many first- and second-generation microwave towers building in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were radio and television broadcast towers and cellphone towers.

Former AT&T microwave tower site, December 2020. It is flanked by a television broadcast tower (Sinclair Broadcasting) and a monopole (cellphone).

I have long had an interest in the history of telecommunications history infrastructure: towers and antenna sites. The old microwave tower in Pittsburgh’s North Hills was easily recognizable from a distance as a type built by AT&T during the company’s first microwave network buildout. Towers like these were built on hilltops and mountainsides throughout the United States to create a line-of-sight antenna network carrying voice, television, and data at the speed of light. Continue reading →

The mobster next door

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Silver Spring, Maryland, is one of several suburbs just across the District of Columbia state line where racketeers operating in the nation’s capital lived and had satellite operations. It is an unincorporated area that abuts Northwest Washington in a sprawling county that until the 1950s was mostly agricultural. Suburbanization attracted throngs of government workers moving to the District of Columbia as well as Washingtonians moving away from Blacks buying homes in previously segregated all-white neighborhoods. Sam Morgan was one of several District racketeers who ended up in the suburbs. This is his story. Continue reading →

The wiretap truck

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In the early 1960s, law enforcement officers from the FBI and the IRS descended on Pittsburgh to investigate organized crime figures and corrupt public officials on mob payrolls. Federal agents used confidential informants, private company records, and electronic surveillance to make cases against such mob leaders including numbers bosses Tony Grosso, Kelly Mannarino, and Meyer Sigal. They also pursued Pittsburgh police beat officers who collected payoffs for their supervisors, including Assistant Police Superintendent Lawrence J. Maloney.

Lawrence J. Maloney, pictured in 1948 when he led a special racketeering investigations unit. Source: historicpittsburgh.org.

Congress in 1965 authorized an investigation into the administrative procedures in federal agencies related to how they collect information on citizens. A subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee had a $150,000 budget to investigate federal agency procedures that might imperil citizens’ constitutional rights to privacy. Continue reading →

Thomas Mellon: Segregationist and White Supremacist

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In 2020, public historians and preservationists were all atwitter after the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced the Monuments Project: a five-year, $250 million effort to create more honest commemorative landscapes in the United States. The foundation’s namesake, Andrew W. Mellon (1855-1937), was an early member of a Pittsburgh industrial and financial family whose ranks include bankers, lawyers, judges, and politicians. Andrew’s resume includes banking; distilling; and stints as the U.S Secretary of the Treasury and Ambassador to the U.K.

The Mellons and the institutions associated with them have long been hailed as cornerstones in American history. Yet, how well do the Mellons fare when their ties to slavery, segregation, and white supremacy are examined? In 2019, Inside Philanthropy explored this question in a blog post by Julie Travers:

For example, a recent $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the College of William and Mary is one example of how a funder can approach the legacy of slavery within the humanities. It will support research and education pertaining to the college’s history with enslaved people. During my research for this article, I discovered that several Mellon family ancestors enslaved people, which raises interesting questions about how a foundation can approach this issue in its own history.

The foundation declined the blog post author’s request for comment. The philanthropy article includes some solid research, but I question why it arbitrarily limited its examination of the Mellons to slavery. What about the family’s roles in American society after the Civil War? There’s a whole lot of territory left unexplored, including mortgage lending discrimination and other structural racism reinforcing discriminatory practices that the family’s financial interests promoted.

The Mellons are American heroes. That evidence is abundantly clear in their hometown, Pittsburgh, where the commemorative landscape is filled with monuments to them: place names, a park, public art, buildings, and even a university.

In these days of truth and reconciliation, can the Andrew Mellon Foundation accomplish its goals to reshape the American commemorative landscape and “recalibrate” narratives about our shared national past without first taking ownership, telling the truth, about its namesakes? I don’t think so and one episode from the family’s history underscores why.

Andrew inherited his wealth and status from his father, Thomas Mellon (1813-1908). Thomas Mellon began his career practicing law in Pittsburgh in the 1830s. In 1859. Allegheny County residents elected Thomas Mellon as a judge in the county’s Court of Common Pleas. He served for a decade before retiring in 1869.

Shortly before Mellon left the bench, he participated in a case involving the application of an attorney who wanted to join the Allegheny County Bar to practice law in the city. George B. Vashon (1824-1878) was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. His father, John Vashon, had served in the War of 1812 and became a wealthy Pittsburgh entrepreneur and nationally prominent abolitionist.

Advertisement for John Vashon’s business, Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette, June 26, 1832.

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Prayer chapels

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Prayer chapels. These two rural roadside buildings competed for passersby’s souls. One belongs to a church, the other was a nightclub.

two "chapels"

The church was built in 1867 and it served farmers and coal miners. The nightclub dates to at least 1931. It served the same crowd in addition to travelers and city dwellers. New owners converted the nightclub into apartments after World War II. Some locals found that very convenient.

“I got married in the church across the street and you could do your wedding over there and honeymoon across the street,” one man told me earlier this year. The life-long resident, in his eighties, quickly added, “I did not do that, but I’ve heard different ones talk about it.”

I asked another longtime resident if the nightclub across the street, with its liquor and dancing, ever caused any friction with the church. “Oh it’s Methodist. I mean we’re Methodist. We’re Scottish. We drink. We dance. It’s not like it was, you know, Baptist,” she explained.

Most folks still alive who remember the nightclub are in their eighties and nineties. They were children with children’s memories of a place they could not go to. But, they could hear the music. One man, now 80, explained, “They wouldn’t let me over there. I mean I heard the music. I went to that church, you know, that’s the church that I went to as a kid.” His family moved away when he was about eight.

The nearest city is about six miles away. For much of the time the nightclub operated, entrepreneurs from the city and another a little farther up the highway rented the building where they hosted bands and served refreshments, liquid and solid. There was dancing and some history was made. But if you’re driving down the highway, there isn’t much there now to catch your eye and your interest. Yet, if you’re persistent enough the stories will flow and the juxtaposed buildings might just inspire you to dig just a little deeper ….

© 2021 D.S. Rotenstein

 

Performative security on Capitol Hill

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Back in 2015 I wrote an article about security at the Library of Congress. I am reposting the article here because it is relevant to the January 6, 2021, insurrection that took place at the U.S. Capitol.

Capitol Hill, 2018.

The Library of Congress is America’s national library. It also may be the only library in the United States where getting into one of its Capitol Hill buildings is a lot like trying to board an airplane. Security protocols that once emphasized preventing loss by theft now appear more focused on keeping weapons and bombs out.

Since Timothy McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995 and the 9/11 attacks, security at the Library and elsewhere in the federal ecosystem has been dialed up to high. Between 1995 and the aftermath of 9/11, streets in the federal core were closed and new gates, bollards, and industrial-sized planters protect building exteriors. Many Washingtonians believe that the city has been turned into an armed camp. Continue reading →

About that art

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In 2017 I was deep in oral history interviews with residents of Lyttonsville, a historically Black community in Silver Spring, Maryland. I had just organized a public event meant to draw attention to murals that erase the Black experience and uplift the stories of white supremacy.

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

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

Shortly after the event in Acorn Urban Park, a lifelong Lyttonsville resident mentioned a photo collage she saw in a Silver Spring bank branch. She asked if I had seen it and I replied that I had not. I asked her to describe it for me.

The woman explained that it showed Black folks in Silver Spring who “never existed” in her community. She said that like the murals in Acorn Park, it creates a false sense of history by placing Black people in spaces in a time when and where they never would have existed. I asked her what was so troubling about the image. She replied,

It could be [bank] is making a statement about American history in a special way.  However, it is strange to have a beautiful photo there in the midst of Silver Spring’s history.  When I went to the bank and saw it, I was shocked, but so pleased because most photos of my people are not shown in the public.

Bank photo collage, photographed in 2017.

After our initial conversation, I went to the bank to photograph the collage. After seeing it for myself, I then exchanged emails with the Lyttonsville resident who brought it to my attention:

I wish I knew who the people were because it looks like a photo from the early 1900’s.  I don’t know that the photo in that day was color.  I have seen photos of our race like this, but always black and white.  My grandmother and grandfather would have dressed like this.  So, it is authentic, but I don’t know who they are or where they are from.
Dressing up has always been very important to African Americans, until the 60’s.  Even when they were enslaved, a head covering for women was very important.  Should they have escaped to freedom, they were going to dress.  The hats in this photo are authentic and so is the pose.  This had to be a church portrait or something important connected to “family.”

There is a fine line between appropriation and celebration. Nostalgia runs deep in Silver Spring and in many communities. It’s tempting to exploit nostalgia to connect national brands with the communities where their branches are located. But what are the impacts of haphazardly selecting images and throwing them together in a visually appealing presentation that has no connection to reality or to the people in the community?

The Silver Spring Historical Society frequently posts about nostalgia-laden murals in the community.

 

The Stardust: Pittsburgh’s mob outpost in Vegas

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The Stardust Hotel and Casino opened in 1958. Its owners included Cleveland racketeers Moe Dalitz, Morris Kleinman, Ben  Rothkopf, and Samuel Tucker — leaders of Cleveland’s so-called “Silent Syndicate” of Prohibition-era bootleggers turned gambling entrepreneurs. Pittsburgh resident Milt Jaffe also had a stake in the Stardust. Jaffe was the MobsBurgh connection to the Cleveland and Chicago mobs.

Stardust hotel and casino postcard, c. 1960s.

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