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.
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.
I began writing about the history of numbers gambling in Pittsburgh in 2020. My earliest articles relied on decades of historical research and writing, much of it focused on the city’s Hill District. After several months of research and doing interviews with community members it became clear that much of that earlier work that I relied upon was incomplete and in some cases just plain wrong.
Unfortunately, some of my work published between 2020 and 2022 also repeats long-held beliefs about chapters in Pittsburgh’s history. One of the most problematic mistakes I made was writing that Pittsburgh gambling entrepreneur William “Woogie” Harris was a barber and that he opened the Hill District’s iconic Crystal Barber Shop. Historians and journalists for decades have written about Harris as a barber and the individual who founded the Crystal Barber Shop.
Crystal Barber Shop, 1950s. Photo courtesy Pittsburgh City Archives.
It turns out that Harris didn’t actually “open” the Crystal Barber Shop; he bought it in the mid-1920s from a master barber named Frank Belt. Belt was a Maryland transplant whose family included an ex-wife, Bessie Simms, and daughter, Madeline Belt. The Belt women were among the best known stage stars during the Harlem Renaissance and I told some of their story in an article published earlier this year.
Recently historians have begun citing my work in their writing on Hill District history. Earlier this week, a new Hill District Digital History Project launched. The essay on the Crystal Barber Shop was more legend than history. It recycled more of the same stories about Harris and his various business enterprises. And, it repeated the error that Harris founded the barber shop.
Crystal Barber Shop entry, Hill District Digital History Project website. Screen capture Nov. 16, 2023.
You really can’t fault the essay’s author or the project’s leaders. Correcting decades of incomplete and incorrect history is a heavy lift. So is owning up to making mistakes that make their way into new historical research and writing. Mistakes like my first work on Hill District history, including the Crystal Barber Shop.
I emailed the history professor leading the new digital history effort with specific concerns about the accuracy of the Crystal Barber Shop entry. He replied,
I went back and looked at the Crystal Barber Shop story with your critiques in mind. In your original email yesterday morning, you wrote, “Woogie Harris didn’t open and operate the shop; he owned the business as a front for his numbers business.” So I went to the original written narrative which includes all citations; ironically, the student used your article in Very Local, which reads, “Harris might have been Pittsburgh’s best-known barber...[he] opened the Crystal Barbershop on Wylie Avenue in the Hill District in the 1920s.”
Guilty as charged. The tainted history that I used found its way into downstream work, from respected local university professors, journalists, and book authors, to my first forays into Pittsburgh numbers history. And now, the new Hill District Digital History Project.
In subsequent emails with the project historian I laid out how I ended up repeating bogus historical facts that had worked their way into established local oral tradition and academic histories. And then I asked him to remove the link to my 2022 article about the Crystal Barber Shop. I suggested linking to later work that reflects my recent research that more correctly recount’s the shop’s history.
I then emailed one of the online news outlets that published one of my articles about the Crystal Barber Shop. I asked, “Please make a correction to my 2022 article.”
“New research shows that Woogie Harris didn’t ‘open’ the Crystal Barber Shop,” I wrote to a Very Local editor. “He bought the business from barber Frank Belt. He also wasn’t a ‘barber.’ My article was based on the decades of writing about Harris.”
The two mistakes that I pointed out in my request for a correction don’t invalidate the entire article. But, they do diminish its capacity as a teaching tool and as a piece of journalism. I have not yet received a reply from the editor and I will update this post once/if I do.
Update (Nov. 21, 2023): I never received a response from Verylocal.com.
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.
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.
The late playwright August Wilson had some pointed opinions about the statue of St. Benedict the Moor mounted atop a church in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District. In 1968, a crane hoisted the 18-foot statue onto the church located at the gateway to the Hill District at an intersection long known as “Freedom Corner.”
Wilson told interviewer Dinah Livingston in 1987:
… all the white people are gone, so it’s all Black. And they name the church Old Holy Trinity St. Bridget St. Benedict the Moor. After much discussion about the matter, they decided to just name it St. Benedict the Moor. And they put up this stature of St. Benedict. The church sits on the dividing line between the downtown and the Hill District—and they had the statue with its back turned to the Blacks and its arms opened to the downtown. Every single person in the neighborhood … noticed that and felt insulted that we got a Black saint and he’s turned his back on us and opened his arms up to the white folks downtown.
Livingston, Dinah. “Cool August: Mr. Wilson’s Red Hot Blues.” In Conversations with August Wilson, edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Mary C. Hartig, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006, p. 46
St. Benedict the Moor statue as seen from Centre Avenue and Roberts Street in the Hill District.
St. Benedict the Moor statue facing towards downtown Pittsburgh.
I can remember seeing this book, Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir, on bookstore shelves while living in Atlanta in the 1980s and 1990s. For whatever reason I never bought it or read it. That all changed a few months ago after I began researching a “forgotten” Pittsburgh Negro Leagues ballpark and the people involved in its development, etc. It turns out that Louis Bellinger (1891-1946), the only licensed and practicing Black architect in Pittsburgh between 1919 and his death in 1946, designed and built the stadium in 1920. And, he built Greenlee Field a dozen years later. This book is a memoir of the extended Bellinger family and their lives in South Carolina. Louis left Charleston in the teens and ended up in Pittsburgh in 1919. His father and brothers joined him by 1926. But it’s not just a window into the architect’s life. It also offers a glimpse into the life of Walter Bellinger (1901-1965), Louis’s younger brother.
Like most other places in North America, historic preservation in Pittsburgh has (at least) two separate and unequal tracks: one for places associated with white history and another for buildings, structures, and sites associated with Black history.
Last week I visited several buildings associated with Black history that are designated under Pittsburgh’s historic preservation law. There are no African-American-themed historic districts in Pittsburgh. A 2006 Young Preservationists Association of Pittsburgh report, “Unprotected Pittsburgh,” identified only three locally-designated properties: The Centre Avenue YMCA, John Wesley A.M.E. Zion Church, and the New Granada Theater.
The Centre Avenue YMCA is a city-designated property. It is being rehabilitated for use as affordable housing. March 2020 photo.
Most Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, residents recognize the building on the northwest corner of Wylie Avenue and Elmore Street as the Crawford Grill No. 2. That’s the name that the most visible business in the building went by for half a century and that’s the name that historic preservationists used in 2019 to nominate the property to the National Register of Historic Places.[1]
2141 Wylie Avenue, Pittsburgh. October 2019.
The Crawford Grill No. 2 isn’t a bad name for the building. It fits, considering how long the nightclub occupied the space. But because historic preservationists have focused on the building’s time as the Crawford Grill No. 2 and the people who owned it between 1945 and 2003, there’s a lot missing from the building’s story. The historic preservation narrative, which closely hews to previously published texts documenting the building’s colorful time as an internationally renowned jazz club, conforms to what the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the danger of a single story.”
The “single story,” according to Adichie, flattens experience and they encourage stereotypes: “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
This post offers some additional storylines to the three-story brick building at 2141 Wylie Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. I need to be up front about how I ended up reading the draft National Register nomination for the property. In August 2019 I began a research project stemming from my work on a book about erasure and gentrification in an Atlanta suburb. I had been studying numbers gambling in urban and suburban areas since 2015.
Numbers slips confiscated in 1930 by Pittsburgh police in the city’s North Side. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 29, 1930.
Histories of the Hill District became essential reading and I took advantage of local archival resources after moving back to Pittsburgh in 2019. While reading some of the Hill District work I went down a research rabbit hole pursuing questions around the intersection of history and folklore in Hill District vice. The light on the other end of the rabbit hole led me to begin conversations with a university press about a book on the history of Pittsburgh numbers gambling rackets. But that’s a story for another place and another time. The remainder of this post focuses on 2141 Wylie Avenue and some of its other stories.
