Tag Archives: historic preservation

The man who saw canal boats

Posted on by
Reply

Canal boat mural by Laurie Lundquist, Pennsylvania Route 28 retaining wall, Pittsburgh. Photo by David Rotenstein.

I recently met a man who looked at a hillside in a highway corridor and he saw canal boats instead of concrete retaining walls. The man is Jack Schmitt and we met during a walking tour in the Pennsylvania Route 28 highway corridor along the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh. Schmitt is a historic preservation activist who was a catalyst the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) decision to explore alternative approaches to mitigating the impacts of destroying an entire neighborhood along Route 28.

My article on Schmitt and how his work fits into emerging national trends in historic preservation has just been published in the National Council on Public History’s History@Work site. This post digs a little deeper into Schmitt’s advocacy with PennDOT.

My first conversation with Schmitt took place during an Allegheny City Society walking tour in May 2019. We met again in June at a Pittsburgh sandwich shop and I ran an audio recorder during our 90-minute chat. I also had a long history with Route 28 and the historic resources there. The former tannery buildings and the derelict industrial landscape comprised the core of the 1997 Pittsburgh History cover article that I wrote about Pittsburgh’s leather industry. The walking tour, my recent move back to Pittsburgh, and the conversation with Schmitt brought me back to a consequential episode in my professional history.

I wanted to revisit some of my understandings about the Route 28 project with the benefit of the subsequent 20 years of complicated regulatory compliance consulting and my research into how history and historic preservation are produced. This blog post and my History@Work essay are my first steps in this process.

Towards Better Mitigation

Jack Schmitt didn’t think much of PennDOT’s approach to mitigating the Route 28 impacts to historic properties. In fact, he questioned if the agency even had a mitigation plan. And what is mitigation? Mitigation represents the steps a government agency must take to compensate a community for destroying or polluting its natural or cultural resources. Most often mitigation comes in the form of reports and photographs that no one will ever read or see and archaeological excavations. Other times, it’s a flat-out bribe: An agency throws some money for historical research or a museum exhibit and calls it square.

The archaeologist and prolific regulatory compliance critic Tom King knows mitigation and how it is misunderstood and abused. In one of our many exchanges on the subject, King wrote to me in 2018, “Mitigation is widely and incorrectly understood to mean shitty compensation.” Yet, that’s frequently what results from poorly executed historic preservation research work done in coordination with a project that will destroy someplace or something people in some community value.

As a resident of one such community, Schmitt wanted better from PennDOT. Schmitt saw the steep hillside in the corridor as an opportunity. “There was going to be walls on the north side of the road and we tried to get them looking better,” he told me. “They were just going to be poured concrete walls like all the other bypasses.”

Pennsylvania Route 28 retaining wall in Etna, north of Pittsburgh.

Schmitt’s solution was to reach out to the American Canal Society to get the rights to use an image of a canal boat. Schmitt envisioned creating a visual history lesson using the new retaining walls. “As you drove along the highway, you would be passing canal boats with mules and you would get the feeling of what was happening there at one time in history,” he explained.

Canal boat image Schmitt proposed using in Pennsylvania Route 28 retaining walls.

PennDOT balked. What ended up being built were retaining walls using concrete shaped and treated to appear like stones used in Pennsylvania Canal locks. And, one of the five murals depicting images drawn from the corridor’s history did include a canal boat being drawn by mules — it is twice the size of the other murals (see the first photo in this post). Read the History@Work post to learn more about the murals and the artist who designed and executed them.

In the remainder of this post, I’d like to spend a little more time on the concept of mitigation and how folks in the real world (i.e., those who don’t work for state and federal agencies or people who aren’t cultural resource management consultants) see mitigation.

I asked Schmitt if he thought that PennDOT had fulfilled its obligations to comply with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. “I think they tried very hard and they did a lot. I have to give them credit for that,” said. Schmitt concedes that his opinion might be more positive if the historic St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church had not been demolished. The reasons why the church, which was located in the corridor, was demolished are complicated and not fully tied to the road project.

St. Nicholas church demolition, 2013. Pittsburgh Tribune-Review photo.

With the church gone and all of the homes, businesses, and industrial sites along with it, I asked Schmitt how people will learn about the community’s history. Schmitt replied, “The people learn about the community through their living memory and their oral traditions. They’re talking about that even now.” The murals, historical markers, and commemorative features at the demolished church site will help.

Former St. Nicholas church site with reproduced grotto, bronze tower base outline, and historical markers, June 2019.

Towards the end of our conversation in the restaurant, Schmitt recounted something he told an individual whose first involvement with the Route 28 project was as a volunteer in the effort to save St. Nicholas. That individual later went to work for an engineering company that does Section 106 work. Schmitt said,

I used to kid him. I said, “You were in historic preservation and now you’re in historic destruction cover-up.” I said, “You make the case for these historic things and then you mitigate them by saying we said this.” I said, “You can’t just say this, put it in a book in the library on the shelf and it doesn’t help the neighborhood to mitigate that terrible loss.”

I think that the murals and other treatments in the Route 28 corridor make great strides towards mitigating the loss of the buildings and the community. Like Schmitt, I have issues with the final results. There’s a lot missing and much of the historical knowledge that informed PennDOT’s decision-making was flawed. I only wonder what might have happened in the corridor had the agency understood what made the place special to the people who valued it. If the agency had understood and fulfilled its obligations under the National Historic Preservation Act, completing the project might have been a whole lot smoother, less expensive, and the mitigation might have been more collaborative, memorable, and meaningful.

Read the complete History@Work post on the murals and creative mitigation: https://ncph.org/history-at-work/community-driven-mitigation/.

© 2019 D.S. Rotenstein

Back to Pennsylvania Route 28

Posted on by
2

In the summer of 1996 I emailed copies of my PhD dissertation to all the members of my committee. My dissertation was about family firms, craft dynasties, and leather tanning in the Catskills and eastern Pennsylvania, c. 1780-1950. Instead of sitting back and waiting to read their comments, I followed up on some research notes I had made about tanneries in the Pittsburgh region. That research ultimately led to several published articles, a couple of Historic American Engineering Record reports, a PBS interview, and several newspaper articles. But those aren’t what this post is about.

At the same time I was researching leather tanning in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, a cultural resource management (CRM) company was doing compliance studies for a highway improvement project in Pittsburgh. The highway project cut through the geographical heart of the space I was researching: Pittsburgh’s North Side and the north shore of the Allegheny River. After I read the CRM company’s report I published a review in my website and shared it with colleagues via various nascent listervs (this was the early days of the Internet before blogs, Twitter, etc.). The original post also was written long before the field of critical heritage studies emerged.

My review and the criticisms of the National Historic Preservation Act compliance stirred up quite a kerfuffle. The fallout included lawsuit threats and a considerable amount of retaliation by the firms involved in the studies and the agencies that reviewed them. Over the years, my website morphed into a blog and the original Pennsylvania Route 28 page ultimately was deleted. The Route 28 research, though, never really disappeared from public view. Every few years I get calls from print and radio reporters with questions about the highway and the area’s history.

I have recently returned to Pittsburgh and to some of my work from the 1990s. New publications and projects are forthcoming, including a recap of a May 2019 walking tour of PennDOT’s mitigation efforts in the Route 28 corridor. But, in the meantime I have decided to resurrect the 1997 web review (with some minor edits).

Carole Ashbridge  talks about the history of the Heinz plant in the Route 28 corridor. Allegheny City Society Lost Allegheny City Murals Walking Tour, May 19, 2019.

Continue reading →

Tastee Diner’s secret historic menu

Posted on by
Reply

Tastee Diner, Silver Spring, Maryland.

It’s well known that the most exclusive restaurants have special menus with items reserved for well-heeled and well-connected patrons. These special people dine on dishes carefully prepared by chefs not line cooks. During its earliest years in business, the Tastee Diner had its own special menu of sorts. Not only that, the Silver Spring, Maryland, eatery also had a special cover charge. Entry and seating were free for white folks; the admission price for people of color was astronomically high: it was the color of their skin.

The Silver Spring Historical Society celebrates the Tastee Diner in its books, blog posts, walking tours, and other public programs. The group talks about the community’s nostalgia for the diner and how Silver Spring mobilized to “save” and move the diner when downtown redevelopment threatened it nearly 20 years ago.

Earlier this week the Silver Spring Historical Society posted on its facebook page, “A local high school student will be utilizing SSHS’s collection of materials about Tastee Diner for a school project.”

Silver Spring Historical Society Facebook page screen capture, October 12, 2018.

I wonder if the historical society will tell the high school student about the diner’s special menu, the one with prices that people of color could never pay. I wonder if this exercise in nostalgia economics will include scholarship by historians who have explored Tastee Diner’s special menu, the one that historian Andrew Hurley wrote about in 2002:

Segregated service was by no means exclusive to diners located in the Deep South. Luncheonettes, coffee shops, and diners in the Middle Atlantic and midwestern states resorted to many of the same practices that prevailed in the old Confederacy. Eddie Warner, for instance, ran a chain of diners in suburban Maryland on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. Warner instructed his employees to notify black patrons that they could not be served inside the diner, but that take-out service was available. Warner made no exception for the African-American cooks and dishwashers he hired periodically. Company policy dictated that they take their meals alone in the back kitchen. Hurley, Andrew. Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture. New York: Basic Books, 2002, pp. 88-89.

Today’s Tastee Diner clientele looks nothing like its Jim Crow-era predecessors. The restaurant is a popular eatery and meeting place for people of all races and cultural backgrounds — mostly. A decade ago, the Tastee Diner faced and overcame allegations that it discriminated against LGBTQ diners. The discriminatory practices leading to episodes between 2009 and 2011 appear to have been abandoned and mostly forgotten. Yet, when I did Black History tours in downtown Silver Spring, people who recalled them made sure that I mentioned them as we met across from the restaurant.

So who is making sure that Montgomery County students using the Silver Spring Historical Society as an educational resource are getting real history, not fake whitewashed history? How are parents and educators to know whether the history lessons about menus and economies at the historic eatery will include the hidden charges not published in the historic menus.

© 2018 D.S. Rotenstein

Housing Opportunities Commission Statement

Posted on by
Reply

Today I delivered a copy of the River Road Moses Cemetery report to the Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission and I entered this statement into the public record.

MONTGOMERY COUNTY HOUSING OPPORTUNITIES COMMISSION
STATEMENT OF DR. DAVID ROTENSTEIN

October 3, 2018

Good afternoon. My name is David Rotenstein. I am a professional historian and ethnographer. I have a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and I have served on the Montgomery County Historic Preservation Commission and other bodies in my capacity as an expert in historic preservation. I also previously was certified as a Registered Professional Archaeologist.

I have transmitted to you today a copy of a report I prepared for the descendant community affiliated with the River Road Moses Cemetery. Copies of the report and a completed Maryland Inventory of Historic Properties form also were provided to members of the descendant community, the Montgomery County Historic Preservation Office, and the District of Columbia Historic Preservation Office.

The report, which contains the results of nearly a year of documentary and oral history research, finds that the River Road Moses Cemetery meets four of nine criteria for designation in the Montgomery County Master Plan for Historic Preservation. The report also finds that the River Road Moses Cemetery site appears to meet three out of four criteria for listing in the National Register of Historic Places as a traditional cultural property.

I am here today to urge the Housing Opportunities Commission to initiate designation proceedings under Chapter 24A of the Montgomery County Code. I also am recommending that the Commission, along with Mr. Harvey Matthews and other members of the dispersed descendant community in Montgomery County and Washington, as well as experts in African American history and folklife and other members of the community, form an advisory committee to determine the best stewardship for the site that also enables HOC to continue fulfilling its mission to provide affordable housing in Montgomery County.

Currently, advocacy for preservation of the cemetery site is vested with a small group of activists associated with Macedonia Baptist Church. That group does not reflect the breadth of the potential stakeholder population associated with a historic property located in Montgomery County, but which for all intents and purposes was a Washington, D.C., institution. Furthermore, based on the site’s history, it appears that whatever the number of actual interments in the cemetery, the majority likely were District of Columbia residents. This is an important site and an important issue and it deserves the utmost care and respect.

I am willing to meet with HOC staff to discuss this statement and the report and I am prepared to answer any questions the Commission may have.

Thank you.

The River Road Moses Cemetery’s Lazarus act

Posted on by
Reply

Thank you for sharing your report. It illustrates how exhaustive and extensive your research has been. For me, the connection to both the River Road community and thereby the cemetery has brought about an investigation of sorts into how I am, who I am. — Geneva Nanette Hunter, September 2018

Over the past week I have emailed and delivered copies of the research that I conducted into the history and historical significance of the River Road Moses Cemetery. Located in Bethesda, Maryland, the River Road Moses Cemetery is the final resting place for several hundred formerly enslaved and free people of African descent.

River Road Moses Cemetery site, Bethesda, Maryland.

The work initially was requested by the leadership of Macedonia Baptist Church and its activism partners operating as the “Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition.” At some point in August 2018, the church and its activism partners decided to pursue alternative research strategies in their efforts to preserve the site. Curiously, this so-called coalition never informed me about its decision. After almost a year of documentary research and oral history interviews, I completed the report and transmitted it to members of the descendant community, the District of Columbia Historic Preservation Office, and the Montgomery County Planning Department’s Historic Preservation Office.

The research traces the cemetery’s history and the history of the Montgomery County, Maryland, African American hamlet where it relocated in 1911 from Northwest Washington, D.C. Founded in 1880 by a local subordinate order of a national African American benevolent organization, gentrification and anti-Black land use policies displaced the Washington graveyard and ultimately the entire community where it was established. Half a century later, the same forces erased the River Road community.

The D.C.-Md. Black Borderlands.

Because much of the story takes place in what are now Washington’s Chevy Chase and Tenleytown neighborhoods, there is a substantial amount of research on African American suburbs (planned and unplanned communities) that emerged in these spaces starting in the early 19th century. Collectively, these communities in Washington and Maryland comprise an area I am calling the “DC-MD Black Borderlands.” I introduced this concept earlier this year in a talk hosted by the D.C. Public Library and I will be presenting it in a paper at this year’s D.C. History Conference.

A “lost” 19th century Washington African American cemetery was one of several unanticipated discoveries. The cemetery’s location has now been mapped by the District’s Historic Preservation Office. “Your research adds needed data to the available information on this community,” wrote District Archaeologist Ruth Trocolli.

1899 letter to the proprietors of the Hebbons Cemetery. Courtesy of the District of Columbia Office of the Surveyor.

In addition to the descendant community, I also provided copies of the report to three Bethesda historians whose work first documented the cemetery and the River Road community after Montgomery County embarked on rewriting the sector plan where they are located. I cannot thank them enough, along with the descendant community, and the many archivists in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia who assisted me in this research.

Want to read the report the report? Click the link below:

© 2018 D.S. Rotenstein

 

What’s next with Montgomery Preservation’s historic railroad station?

Posted on by
Reply

A moat? A Trumpian wall?

Montgomery Preservation Inc. building, Silver Spring, Maryland, as seen from the entrance to Progress Place.

Montgomery Preservation Inc. doesn’t exactly have the best reputation in the Washington region as a good neighbor. The suburban historic preservation organization has vigorously opposed the completion of a regional bike trail; not questioned the presence of a fence blocking access to its property from a historic railroad bridge; and, has increasingly developed an adversarial relationship with a new county homeless facility that opened next door to the organization’s headquarters: a historic former B&O railroad station. Continue reading →

An early history of Lyttonsville, Maryland

Posted on by
5

[2019 UPDATE: This post was published in 2017 and the material represents an early stage in my research into Lyttonsville’s history. A more complete history appears in the Talbot Avenue Bridge Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) report completed in July 2019. That document will be available to the public in 2020 via the Library of Congress website.]

INTRODUCTION

Just about the only thing Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission’s Montgomery County Planning Department (M-NCPPC) architectural historians got right in the agency’s history of Silver Spring, Maryland’s, Lyttonsville community was that Samuel Lytton bought some property in 1853. Were it not for a sharp rebuke from longtime residents of the historic African American hamlet, the official history memorialized in a new sector plan would have read that Lytton was a “freed slave.”[1] That early draft historic context contained many factual errors, some of which were corrected before the Montgomery County Planning Board in late 2016 recommended approving the Greater Lyttonsville Sector Plan, which the Montgomery County Council approved in early 2017.

The final Lyttonsville historic context that is now part of Montgomery County’s background materials for formulating everything from development plans in the community to public art for proposed light rail line stations to place making efforts to historic preservation planning is an incomplete and error-filled narrative. Whether it’s the false assertion that Lyttonsville was a “pre-Civil War free black settlement” or the lazy conclusion that agency staff couldn’t find out what happened to Lytton’s property after his death, “It is unclear who owned the property when it was platted as twelve lots,”[2] there are significant issues with the M-NCPPC’s research.

This post explores some of Lyttonsville’s early history up to the turn of the twentieth century and fills in some of the many gaps left by the M-NCPPC staff research that is now Montgomery County’s official historic context for the community.

Samuel Lytton

There are no known images depicting Samuel Lytton.

Samuel Lytton is a historical mystery. He spent about four decades in Montgomery County and left only ephemeral evidence about who he was, how he made a living, and what motivated him to establish a basis for the development of the community that now bears his name.

Government documents give us a glimpse into Lytton’s basic biography. He was a Maryland native who was born c. 1830. In 1849 he married Phyllis Cosbery in Washington, D.C. Phyllis, born in Kentucky, was 20 years Samuel’s senior. It is possible that she was an enslaved member of Francis Preston Blair’s household who came to Washington from Kentucky with the Blair family. The following year a census enumerator documented him as a “laborer” living in Blair’s household in what is now Silver Spring. By the 1860 census, Lytton had established his own household in the four acre tract he had paid white farmer Leonard Johnson $96 to buy in January 1853.[3] Three years later, during the Civil War, Lytton registered for the newly enacted federal draft. The entry identified Lytton as a “colored” farmer who was married. Continue reading →

An erasure primer

Posted on by
3

Two maps of Silver Spring, Maryland, published 80 years apart provide a palpable and accessible example of erasure.

Top: 1933 North Washington Realty Company map of “North Washington”; Bottom: Historic Neighborhoods of Downtown Silver Spring. The dotted line shows the approximate location of the historic African American hamlet, Lyttonsville.

The first map was published in 1933 by the North Washington Realty Company. It shows all of the area the company and community boosters were branding as “Maryland North of Washington.” The promotional map showed the existing street network, community institutions (schools, churches, commercial buildings), and neighborhood names, including areas shaded where the company had investments and plans for new residential subdivisions. Continue reading →

Historic preservation shines a light on a dark past

Posted on by
Reply

In October 2016, the National Council on Public History published an e-book titled Preserving Places: Reflections on the National Historic Preservation Act at Fifty From The Public Historian. The volume is a collection of invited essays that discuss various aspects of public history published to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act.

My essay, “Historic Preservation Shines a Light on a Dark Past,” appears on pp. 18-19.

Historic Preservation Shines a Light on a Dark Past by David Rotenstein on Scribd

Silver Spring’s newest visual junkyard

Posted on by
3

This … is not written in anger. It is written in fury … it is a deliberate attack upon all those who have already befouled a large portion of this country for private gain, and are engaged in befouling the rest. — Peter Blake, Preface to God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape (1964)

Ellsworth Place Mall, Colesville Road and Fenton Street facade, September 2016.

Ellsworth Place Mall, Colesville Road and Fenton Street facade, September 2016.

After more than a decade of false starts involving redevelopment plans and rebranding campaigns, an urban mall in Silver Spring, Maryland, has a new name, new look, and new stores. Ellsworth Place, née City Place, was completed in 1992 in an effort to jumpstart redevelopment in Silver Spring’s central business district. The mall was built as an addition to a historic Hecht’s department store, which was completed in 1947 and which left Silver Spring 40 years later for a new regional mall in nearby Wheaton.

Rebranding City Place involved converting its worn and bland suburban commercial spaces and “re-tenanting,” a process the owner described as attracting more upscale merchants to attract millennials and other new middle class residents moving to Silver Spring.

Montgomery County’s historic preservation law was one hurdle owners had to clear. The former Hecht’s building is a protected county landmark and the Montgomery County Historic Preservation Commission has regulatory jurisdiction over changes to the building’s exterior. Changes like new entrances, windows, and signage.

Ellsworth Place Mall/Former Hecht's, Ellsworth Ave. and Fenton Street facade, September 2016.

Ellsworth Place Mall/Former Hecht’s, Ellsworth Drive and Fenton Street facade, September 2016.

Continue reading →