Tag Archives: Black history

The draftsman

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Louis A.S. Bellinger (1891-1946) was Pittsburgh’s only licensed and practicing Black architect for the entire time that he practiced in the Steel City. My recent NEXTpittsburgh article digs deeper into Bellinger’s biography than the laundry lists of his jobs and buildings penned by historic preservationists. It’s hard to construct a biography of a consequential historical figure who left behind few traces beyond documents in public records and newspaper articles reporting on his work. There is lots more to the Bellinger story and it took some creative sleuthing to patch it together. There are also sidebars to the Bellinger story. This post is about one those: a draftsman who briefly worked for Louis Bellinger in the early 1920s.

The Pittsburgh Courier, Nov. 22, 1924.

My first entry in the Bellinger arc was my 2022 NEXTpittsburgh article about the architect’s younger brother, Walter Bellinger. Walter, along with other family members, followed Louis to Pittsburgh in the early 1920s. Walter went into the family business: the building trades. As a carpenter, he worked on buildings throughout the region before moving to California in the 1950s. Walter’s greatest contribution, however, was helping to build Pittsburgh’s Muslim community. After taking the name Saeed Akmal, he became a founder of Pittsburgh’s First Moslem Mosque.

My second entries in the Bellinger family narrative arc deal with one of Louis’s earliest commissions as a professional architect. In 1920, he designed and built the Central Amusement Park, a Black-owned sports stadium in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. I wrote about the brothers who hired Bellinger, their family’s efforts to get recognition for their achievements, and 21st century erasures by the historic preservation community.

During the 1920s, Bellinger built his small architectural practice and social capital among Pittsburgh’s growing Black entrepreneurial elite. City directories and newspaper articles show that he employed at least one draftsman in his office.

NEXTPittsburgh, April 5, 2023
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Pittsburgh’s Black-Owned Barber Shops are a National Treasure

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Pittsburgh’s Black-owned barber shops are an important part of the city’s history. They are the quintessential African American third spaces: places where business is transacted, information is exchanged, and social ties are maintained. They are places where the built environment meets intangible cultural heritage and they are ripe for a closer examination before the buildings and the people that make them special disappear forever.

Big Tom’s Barber Shop, Centre Ave.

Pittsburgh Planning Director Karen Abrams, at the February 2023 Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission meeting, observed that the city may be filled with sites planners and preservationists don’t know about or have historically ignored. “How we can bring light to some things that have just been not on our radars in the city, that are in predominantly Black neighborhoods,” Abrams said in a discussion of the National Register nomination for a house in Homewood once owned by Pittsburgh barber and gambling entrepreneur William “Woogie” Harris and his wife, Ada.

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Entertainment ecosystems and the Chitlin’ Circuit

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Pittsburgh’s Wylie Avenue and Washington’s U Street have lots of things in common. They both were Black entertainment hubs and African-American entrepreneurial economic engines in their respective cities’ Black strolls. Memphis author Preston Lauterbach eloquently described “the stroll” in his 2012 book, The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll:

Any place with a sizable [Black] population grew a darktown, and each of these [Black] districts centered on a main thoroughfare, a world unto itself. The maestro, in his hep vernacular, called it “the stroll” (p. 51).

But the stroll was only part of a complicated entertainment ecosystem that extended well beyond a city’s corporate limits. Black entertainment entrepreneurs opened satellite facilities in rural communities beyond the earliest suburbs. These places became popular roadhouses and juke joints in the Chitlin’ Circuit with complicated social and economic ties to their counterparts on the stroll.

Bohemian Caverns, U Street and 11th, Washington, D.C.

In 1931, after racial violence broke out at a new Pittsburgh pool, a pair of Hill District entrepreneurs found a partner in Washington, Pa., 30 miles to the south, to open a swimming resort catering to the region’s African Americans. Norris Beach as it was called became a popular Southwestern Pennsylvania stop in the Chitlin’ Circuit with touring national bands stopping to play during the summers that it operated.

The Pittsburgh Courier, May 26, 1934.

Read more about Norris Beach and its entrepreneurs in my new Pittsburgh Quarterly article, Norris Beach: “Swim Where You Will Be Welcomed.”

© 2021 D.S. Rotenstein

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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