While researching African American communities in Montgomery County, Maryland, I visited several historic Black cemeteries and photographed the cultural landscapes and grave markers. This slideshow is a sample from that research.
© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein
This summer I am teaching a graduate seminar on ethnography and community engagement for historic preservation. For the the final day of the virtual residency, I will be re-creating the Decatur, Georgia, walking tour that I did for the 2020 National Council on Public History (virtual) conference.
This version will be a little different because our world has changed dramatically since March. The tour focuses on the intersection of racism, municipal planning, and historic preservation. For this iteration I will be using interviews with Decatur residents that I did between 2011 and 2018.
The clips I am using drill down into how the city’s schools have reinforced structural racism, from Jim Crow segregation to efforts to resist integration to racial curriculum tracking. City leaders have weaponized the school system to create an environment that is hostile to Black children and their caretakers.
In the interviews that I did, I collected accounts of real estate speculators threatening grandparents with children in the schools. The city makes it possible for people to file anonymous tips to report children attending the schools who are not living with their parents inside the city limits. People told me about real estate speculators who approached elderly African American homeowners with unsolicited offers to sell their homes. When the homeowners declined the offers, the real estate speculators threatened to report them to the City Schools of Decatur because grandchildren or nephews and nieces were living with them.
Such reports result in removal of the children from the school system and possible fines and criminal charges for the adults.
This brief clip (which isn’t part of the tour) has one woman telling me about the city’s successful effort to purge her granddaughter from the city’s schools.
© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar — attributed to Sigmund Freud
Sometimes a cigar store isn’t a cigar store — #Mobsburgh
In our last #Mobsburgh outing we visited with the Mattes family and got to know Israel Mattes,
The Morning Herald, Monessen, Pa. march 6, 1948.
a former Pittsburgh police officer who became a bootlegger and gambler. Here, we are going to get to know his older brother, Nathan.
In this visit, we also are going to look at an important institution found in organized crime: the front business. Nathan Mattes’s story is an ideal window into how racketeers used “legitimate” businesses to hide or facilitate their illegal enterprises. You see, for a few years, he ran his numbers racket out of a downtown Pittsburgh cigar store. Law enforcement’s efforts in the 1940s to end his operation spanned several years and generated sensational headlines in the city’s newspapers. Continue reading
I recently participated in a Society for Industrial Archeology online program featuring projects with a social justice element. The SIA program titled, “Infrastructure and Social Justice” included a presentation on a Tennessee bridge used during the Trail of Tears and a viaduct in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Infrastructure and racial segregation have a long and fraught history. Railroads and highways frequently created firm boundaries separating racialized spaces. Many cities throughout North America have their “other side of the tracks” or interstate highways that were built to separate Black neighborhoods from white ones. In some places, like Detroit, Michigan; Decatur, Georgia; and, North Brentwood, Maryland, walls and other barricades divided Black space from white space.
Railroad tracks, Decatur, Georgia.
Crivella’s Wayside Inn. Tucked away in the 1000-block of East West Highway near downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, this former restaurant was the scene of non-violent civil rights protests between 1962 and 1965. Montgomery County in 2006 bought the former Crivella’s Wayside Inn. After holding listening sessions with members of Silver Spring’s historic Black community, county leaders worked with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History to collect stories, artifacts, and design exhibits to tell the story of Silver Spring’s Black communities, from colonial plantations and enslavement through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement.
That’s what a journalist writing about a new Silver Spring Civil Rights Museum might have written had there been a museum developed in the former Crivella’s space. Instead, Montgomery County officials demolished the former restaurant and erased its history. This post explores a lost opportunity for Montgomery County to confront its segregationist history and seek reconciliation with its African American residents, past and present. Continue reading
There are 53 public art installations in Silver Spring, Maryland. Only two depict historical figures. One is a mural showing President Harry Truman during a visit to the suburban community. The other is a bronze bust of Norman Lane. Earlier this week, during protests stemming from Minneapolis resident George Floyd’s murder by police, vandals twice defaced the Norman Lane “monument.”
Just Up The Pike, Facebook, June 2020.
Lots of folks know who Harry Truman was. But Norman Lane?
Lane (1911-1987) was an indigent who wandered throughout downtown Silver Spring for much of the 20th century. He was affectionately dubbed the “Mayor of Silver Spring.” In 1991 a local artist dedicated a bronze bust depicting Lane in an alley dubbed the “Mayor’s Promenade” near 8221 Georgia Avenue.
Norman Lane bust, 2017.
Lane was a well-known figure and stories of his exploits are part of Silver Spring’s oral tradition. He was able to walk into many Silver Spring restaurants, get a seat, and eat compliments of the establishment. These same places declined to serve African Americans. Or, if they did, required African Americans to go to back doors for take-out service.
The Norman Lane bust was one of 19 stops along the Silver Spring Black History tours that I gave between 2016 and 2018. I intentionally included Lane’s monument to underscore how effectively Silver Spring has whitewashed its history. While the community celebrates the memory of a colorful character in downtown art and commemorative spaces, there are no similar artworks and spaces dedicated to the community’s notable people of color (African Americans) who contributed to Silver Spring’s history.
Roscoe Nix. Source: Montgomery County Volunteer Center.
At the Norman Lane site, I talked about Roscoe Nix (1911-2012), the Alabama native and World War II veteran who worked in the U.S. departments of Labor and Justice. Nix frequently is credited with being a pioneer in Montgomery County civil rights history.
Nix served on the Maryland Human Rights Commission as its executive secretary in the 1960s; he was the first African American elected to the Montgomery County School Board (1974); and, he was the Montgomery County NAACP chapter president from 1980 to 1990.
Roscoe Nix Elementary School, 2017.
Though Montgomery County named an elementary school (several miles outside of downtown Silver Spring) for Nix in 2006, there are no monuments, markers, etc. commemorating the events in 1962 that launched Nix’s civil rights career. Nix’s contributions are invisible and the site where he cut his civil rights activism was demolished more than a decade ago.
In early 1962, shortly after Montgomery County enacted a public accommodations law, Nix and several of his white and African American coworkers went to a local restaurant in downtown Silver Spring for lunch. Nix was one of more than 600 Department of Labor employees whose offices had moved to Silver Spring the year before.
Silver Spring at the time was a “sundown suburb” and about 150 to 200 African Americans were among the agency employees relocated to Silver Spring in October 1961.
The Washington Post, October 17, 1961.
The Washington Post in October 1961 noted,
Silver Spring has a very small Negro population and a recent study by the Montgomery County Human Relations Commission showed that some eating establishments will accept Negro patronage and some will not.
The same Post article noted,
While a few of the Negro employes [sic.] are on the professional level a majority hold clerical jobs.
That 1961 move set the stage for civil rights actions over the next five years that helped remove many of the remaining Jim Crow barriers in downtown Silver Spring.
Between April and August 1962, at least four episodes of racial discrimination were documented at Crivella’s Wayside Inn on East-West Highway. Roscoe Nix was the first to file a complaint filed under the county’s public accommodation law.
Baltimore Afro-American, May 5, 1962.
The restaurant was the site of several sit-ins and street demonstrations in 1962. Over the next four years, additional complaints and litigation were filed against Crivella’s alleging
Chicago Defender, February 18, 1963.
civil rights violations. The demonstrations were widely covered by Black and white newspapers and they attracted such notables as Washington-based Julius Hobson, a leader in the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE).
Roscoe Nix’s activism got it all started.
Meanwhile, as Nix was trying to get a meal in one of Silver Spring’s restaurants, Lane was able to get seated in most establishments he entered and he was served — the food was complimentary. In segregated Silver Spring, most businesses wouldn’t take Roscoe Nix’s money and he was unwelcome in their establishments. Lane, who had no money, found comfort and nourishment throughout the community.
A Silver Spring alley was renamed to commemorate Norman Lane’s life.
I can only speculate at this point why Norman Lane’s monument is being vandalized during this period of protest and unrest over white supremacy. I hope it’s because some folks in Silver Spring recognize the irony in the community’s commemoration of a homeless white man instead of a Black civil rights leader.
Slide from “Silver Spring: A Sundown Suburb in the Capital Beltway” by David Rotenstein.
© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein
Welcome back to #Mobsburgh.
Israel Mattes was born in Russia and he arrived in Pittsburgh in 1906, along with his mother and four brothers. Abraham Mattes, Esther’s husband and Israel’s father, had come to the city three years earlier. Within 20 years, Israel and his younger brother Nathan became two of the city’s best known Jewish racketeers. Two other brothers, Ben and Sam, also had brushes with the law. This post explores Israel Mattes’s short life and tragic death in a dark Squirrel Hill parking garage. Continue reading
Stories circulated for years in Pittsburgh about the exploits of a Jewish gangster known as “Kid” Angel. During the 1920s and 1930s, Angel and his gambling exploits were legendary. “Over town there’s a lad who has been active around the bookie shops where the race track fans pick the horses,” wrote Post-Gazette investigative reporter Ray Sprigle in 1936. ” [Harry] Angel is his name, but everyone knows him as Kid Angel.”
The corner of Centre Avenue and Arthur Street in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, April 2020. In the 1920s, Harry “Kid” Angel had a billiards hall and gambling den at this location.
This visit to #MobsBurgh re-introduces Kid Angel to Pittsburgh readers. Continue reading
Independence Day fell on a Friday in 1930. That day Pittsburgh newspapers reported that a new greyhound racing track would open in the evening with a slate of nine races planned. The Guyasuta Kennel Club had rented a portion of the National Amusement Park Company’s leased property (known as National Park) between Aspinwall and Blawnox and built a dirt track and grandstands. Over the next 24 hours, the track, which was backed by Pittsburgh numbers racketeers, would find itself featured in newspaper articles across the region for a series of opening day mishaps and the betting taking place out in the open.
In May I will be doing a virtual program about the Guyasuta Kennel Club and its place in Pittsburgh History. The program will take place on two successive Wednesday evenings, May 13 and May 20:
Participants must register to receive the Zoom link and login instructions. Continue reading
Between 1996 and 1999, I spent many hours inside the Pittsburgh Wool plant taking photos and talking with the company’s owners, Jeff Kumer and his father, Roy (1908-2004). I pored over the company’s voluminous business records, looked at photographs, and recorded several hours of audio interviews with the Kumers and several of their workers.
Pittsburgh Wool Company as seen from Pennsylvania Route 28, 1997.
The company occupied a four-story former tannery building. The interior had been divided into specialized spaces related to the work done there. For example, the second floor dedicated to wool pulling, drying, and baling. The upper floors were used to store pelts (in later years).
Pittsburgh Wool Company, HAER No. PA-572, Sheet 5.
In the company’s later years, all of the raw materials entered and left the plant via the first floor. Lamb pelts entered and pickled lamb skins and baled wool left. The first floor included washing vats for the pelts and metal tables where depilatory was painted on the skins to loosen the wool for pulling.
Jeff Kumer (left) and Keith White (right) painting and folding pelts, February 2000.
Once the wool was removed on the second floor, the skins were dropped through holes in the floor into large rotating drums on the first floor where they were pickled before being sent to tanneries.
Lamb skins after pulling being dropped into a hatch in the second floor above a rotating pickling drum on the first floor. The people observing include a documentary film crew and Heinz History Center staff. February 2000.
Pickle drum, first floor, Pittsburgh Wool Company.
Most of these spaces were documented in detail in 2000 for the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER). The measured drawings and my narrative report are archived at the Library of Congress. If you want to learn about the technology and material culture of wool pulling, those are the places to get your fix.
Pittsburgh Wool Company, HAER No. PA-572, cover sheet.
But if you want to learn about the people who kept the company going for more than half a century after the Kumer family bought it, you’ll be left feeling unfulfilled by the HAER documentation. I had always intended to write something more detailed about the business and its people but real life kept getting in the way.
Pittsburgh Wool Company office (highlighted), Pittsburgh Wool Company, HAER No. PA-572.
The office was one of the undocumented spaces inside the Pittsburgh Wool Company building. In the HAER drawings it’s simply represented as a box along the River Avenue facade. Yet, inside that box there were two offices: an outer office that served as a reception area and an inner office where the Kumers had their desks. They both worked in view of a portrait of the company’s founder, W.P. Lange.
Roy (seated) and Jeff Kumer inside the Pittsburgh Wool Company office, 1997.
Off to the side was another room that the Kumers used as a kitchen. The HAER architects didn’t draw plans for these spaces and I never took any pictures of them. Now, more than 20 years later, it’s one of the fieldwork mistakes that I will always regret.
Pittsburgh Wool Company, HAER No. PA-572, Sheet 5. The office is in the lower right.
Inside those spaces Roy Kumer worked his magical calculations to determine precisely how many pelts the company needed to buy from particular meatpackers around the nation. “I give credit to my dad for this,” Jeff Kumer told me in 1997. “He worked out his own book keeping process that he would be able to predict from year to year, when that month’s production came along from that particular plant.”
The telephones inside the offices connected the Kumers to a global network of meatpackers, textile mills, and leather tanners. Their files documented more than a century of institutional knowledge.
The business spaces seem like the most obvious to have mapped and more fully documented and they should have been. But so too was the kitchen. That’s where each day Jeff and Roy would adjourn mid-day to eat lunch together. I fondly recall the days when I was doing research in the plant when Jeff would invite me into the kitchen for some soup and a sandwich.
On August 5, 1999 I did my fourth interview with the Kumers inside the building. By that time a deal had been hammered out for the neighboring Heinz Company to acquire the Pittsburgh Wool Company property after a contentious battle that included a threat by the City of Pittsburgh to use eminent domain to seize the property. Sometime in the next year, the old tannery building was to be demolished to be replaced by a new Heinz warehouse.
Jeff Kumer and I sat in the kitchen where I asked my questions with a tape recorder sitting on the table between us. I returned to the plant two other times. The first was in February 2000 to witness a final run of pelts through the plant for a documentary produced by the Heinz History Center as part of the mitigation package agreed upon the year before. The second time was in the summer of 2000 when I drove from Charleston, West Virginia, to Pittsburgh to collect a few artifacts that Kumer wanted to give me before they were to vacate it prior to its demolition.
Pittsburgh Wool Company demolition.
One of the artifacts Kumer gave me was completely unrelated to the pulling of wool or processing of skins. It was a cream-colored ceramic soup bowl from the company’s kitchen. It’s an ordinary earthenware bowl with no maker’s marks or other markings. I have kept it on a shelf in all of the home offices I have had since then.
Soup bowl, Pittsburgh Wool Company.
I wish that I had asked questions about the kitchen and the Kumers’ attachment to it. I also wish that I had done a more complete job documenting the non-industrial spaces inside the plant. Over the years since I first set foot inside the Pittsburgh Wool Company building in 1996, I have learned a lot about space and its many uses. Those spaces were integral to the company’s history and they represented a critical social part of the Pittsburgh Wool Company’s story that isn’t preserved in documents, photographs, or the interviews with the people who worked there.
© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein