Tip for Journalists and Historians: When You Don’t See Blacks in a Community Ask Why — James Loewen, 2016.
My wife likes to say that we failed Fox Chapel. We moved to the Pittsburgh suburb in 2019 and we always knew it was a temporary stop. Our move back to Pittsburgh after leaving exactly 20 years earlier allowed us just one day to find housing. Fox Chapel was a familiar suburb, in many ways like Silver Spring, Maryland, and Decatur, Georgia. Just a few miles away from our 1990s home, its housing stock includes more modest brick Cape Cods, Colonial Revivals, and ranch houses with spacious yards and lots of trees. Not all of the homes there are manorial estates with brick and stone mansions.
And, like Decatur and Silver Spring, Fox Chapel was a sundown suburb, a place with a history defined by exclusion.
Fox Chapel was the whitest place I think I’ve ever lived. Unlike Silver Spring and Decatur, there wasn’t any collective effort to hide behind false white progressive liberal cloaks. We knew that our tax dollars wouldn’t be going to any municipally-sponsored racial reconciliation projects. We didn’t expect any Decatur Dinners or Community Conversations (Decatur flavor) or Community Conversations (Montgomery County flavor). Efforts like those do little to repair communities. They are, as I wrote for Next City in 2017, taxpayer-funded cosmetic efforts.
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.
The fireworks have started over my recent NEXTpittsburgh op-ed about the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation’s National Register of Historic Places nomination for a house historic preservationists have dubbed the “National Negro Opera Company House.”
One local historic preservation group complained that my op-ed didn’t give them enough credit. Another hurled threats.
While the preservationists have been circling their wagons and firing their defensive shotguns, none of them has bothered to ask me a few basic questions. One no-brainer is, “What other factual errors in the NRHP nomination are there besides the ones laid out in my article?” I first suggested to PHLF that there were issues with the NRHP nomination as early as the first week in January. Another is, “Why does it matter?”
PHLF is doubling down on its position that the NRHP nomination was defensible and accurate work. A PHLF spokesperson told me in the interview I did with him for the article, “We absolutely stand by it.”
PHLF reiterated its stance in communications with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, the state agency that reviews National Register nominations before forwarding them to the National Park Service for a final determination and listing. “We stand behind [the PHLF consultant’s] work 100%,” wrote PHLF’s education coordinator in a February email to the state.
And yet, no one among the preservation crowd is curious about what led me to read the NRHP nomination and to the Hill District living room where I interviewed the 95-year-old woman quoted in my lede: Mrs. Dolores Slater. Nor are they interested in why I made such a fuss about the lack of oral history in the NRHP nomination. It’s not like PHLF didn’t have the money to do oral history — the National Park Service awarded the organization $41,378 to do oral history and the NRHP nomination.
Ever wonder what the smallest unit a 7-story concrete cold warehouse can be reduced to? Crumbs, apparently. Crews have gone from carting away boulder-sized concrete debris from the former Federal Cold Storage Co. site to running it through a milling machine and creating massive mounds of historic building crumbs. It looks like they’re reaching the end of the demolition phase. Demolition began in early November 2021 ….
Former Federal Cold Storage Co. building demolition, Pittsburgh, Pa., January 6, 2023.
Former Federal Cold Storage Co. building demolition, Pittsburgh, Pa., January 6, 2023.
Former Federal Cold Storage Co. building demolition, Pittsburgh, Pa., January 6, 2023.
For a complete rundown on this spectacular demolition operation and the building’s history, check out this November 2022 virtual program hosted by the Society for Industrial Archeology:
Historic preservation is where history goes to die. One of its graves can be found in Pittsburgh’s Strip District which was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2014, with a period of significance from 1850-1964.
It’s as if all history ends with the 50-year criterion and consultants can’t see Criteria Consideration G properties or traditional cultural properties (TCPs) right in front of their faces. Like many industrial districts throughout the world, Pittsburgh’s Strip District changed (technology, economics) and nightclubs, restaurants, artists, etc. began moving in. Some of these changes can rightly be called gentrification. Low rents, cool buildings, and a certain vibe attracted entertainment entrepreneurs in the 1980s-1990s. LGBTQ culture developed a strong foothold there, with bars like Cruze on Smallman Street. The bar closed in 2019, displaced by development (there’s now a parking deck at the site). The only evidence of Cruze in the National Register nomination are a couple of Smallman Street streetscape photos that captured the bar’s facade.
Smallman Street streetscape showing Cruze. Strip Historic District National Register of Historic Places Registration Form.
Former Cruze site, June 2022.
The Real Luck Cafe (Luck’s) is another gay bar whose building is a contributing property to the Strip Historic District. Its history is similarly erased in the National Register nomination. Readers looking for the landmark bar’s history will only find a couple of sentences describing the building’s exterior and a mention of the jeweler who owned the building between 1869 and 1890. For a more complete understand of the bar and its cultural context, folks are better off exploring the work of the Pittsburgh Queer History Project, especially the 2014 “Lucky After Dark” exhibition that debuted the same year that the Strip Historic District was listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Another good source would be Dr. Harrison Apple’s 2021 University of Arizona PhD dissertation, “A Social Member in Good Standing: Pittsburgh’s Gay After-Hours Social Clubs, 1960-1990.”
1519 Penn Avenue (Real Luck Cafe) description, Strip Historic District National Register of Historic Places form.
I wonder if Preservation Pittsburgh has evaluated its potential legal exposures created by having the organization’s president Matthew Falcone serving as a Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission member? As Preservation Pittsburgh’s leader, he nominates properties to become City of Pittsburgh historic landmarks. As a commissioner, he debates the merits of those nominations and votes on recommending designation to the Pittsburgh City Council. In 2020, Falcone even nominated, debated, and voted on the designation of his own home.
Preservation Pittsburgh website landing page.
Curiously, Pittsburgh’s historic preservation law makes all of this possible. It created a massive legislative loophole that enables this conflict of interest:
Submission of a nomination by a member of the Historic Review Commission, the City Planning Commission, or the City Council shall not preclude that member from full participation in the review of the nomination nor from voting on the recommendation or designation. (Pittsburgh Municipal Code §1101.03(a)(1)(b).
There’s no doubt that the HRC plays an outsize role in whether properties get landmarked or not. Being the board’s resident historic preservation expert doesn’t help, either. Along with the Planning Commission, the HRC acts in an advisory capacity under Pittsburgh’s historic preservation law. In its final say, the City Council puts great weight on what the two boards recommend.
My first experiences with the Pennsylvania History Code (Title 37 of the Pennsylvania Statutes) happened in the late 1980s. I was in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania and working as an archaeologist. My employers had lucrative regulatory compliance contracts: working for agencies and private sector entities required to comply with federal and state laws. These laws (the National Historic Preservation Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Pennsylvania History Code) required parties receiving federal and state funds, permits, and licenses to identify historic places, evaluate their significance, and resolve adverse effects to them introduced by the projects triggering regulatory compliance.
Until 1995, compliance with the Pennsylvania History Code meant doing intensive and costly archaeological surveys and excavations. At the time, Pennsylvania’s state archaeologist had a thing for deeply buried prehistoric sites. Consultants had to prove to his satisfaction that they had dug deep enough and used the appropriate technical expertise to reach soils deeper than what the first Native Americans who lived in Pennsylvania ever walked upon. That meant very deep holes and hiring expensive soils science specialists called geomorphologists.
I remember cursing the state archaeologist many times as I dug or supervised the excavation of neat square holes — sometimes using backhoes and other heavy machinery because the soils were so deep — to identify sites that dovetailed with his research interests. Some of my most vivid archaeology fieldwork memories involve working in subfreezing cold temperatures with negative windchill numbers to meet project deadlines and the state archaeologist’s obsession with so-called Paleo sites.
The author standing in an excavation unit in December 1990. Note the mattock pick (on the surface) used to break up the frozen river bottom soil
Back in late 1990 I and a colleague excavated a deep test unit in temperatures so cold that the dirt re-froze between the excavation unit and the screen being used to recover artifacts — if any were to be found. It was so cold that we had to use a mattock pick (typically used for breaking rock) to excavate in the usually fine river bottom soil because it was frozen. We then had to wait in the cold for the geomorphologist to arrive to tell us what we could see for ourselves: there was no archaeological site where a Weis supermarket was going to be built.
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 Ankara was a popular Pittsburgh nightclub and restaurant. Located just outside the city limits on Route 51 in Pleasant Hills, it opened in 1946. For more than 20 years, the Ankara fed and entertained Pittsburgh residents. Its floor shows, dancing, and ice revues were part of the city’s nightlife golden era. The Ankara, though, was mob owned and operated.
Ankara nightclub souvenir photo cover.
Charles Jamal was a Turkish immigrant who bounced around North America in the years before World War II. He named his new Pittsburgh nightclub for the city in his homeland. Jamal’s organized crime ties beyond the club remain opaque. In 1952, muckraking journalists Jack Lait and Mortimer Lee described Jamal, “a Turk who runs the swank Ankara nightclub” as one of Pittsburgh’s “big boys” in the county outside the city limits, in their survey of American organized crime, U.S.A. Confidential.
You can read more about the Ankara and Jamal in this August 2020 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article. This post digs into the crime family that was closely associated with Jamal and the Ankara from the time the club opened until the early 1960s: Nathan Mattes, et al. MobsBurgh previously featured Nate Mattes and his brother, Irwin, a..k.a., Pittsburgh’s “Big Six” of Gambling. This time around we’re going to highlight the nightclub’s Miami Beach, Florida, namesake, the Ankara Motel.
“805 was a burner. Where the hell is Jakie Lerner?” That’s how aging racketeer Sam Solomon responded to University of Pittsburgh history graduate student Rob Ruck in 1981 when the latter asked him about a big numbers gambling hit from 1930. Ruck interviewed Solomon for a dissertation (and later book) on Black sport in Pittsburgh, Sandlot Seasons.
In the dissertation and book Ruck didn’t flesh out Lerner’s identity. Also left unsaid was why Lerner might be important in any discussion of Pittsburgh’s organized crime history. Not a fan of unanswered questions, I went looking for Lerner and I found him buried in a suburban Jewish cemetery. Along with his grave, I also found a criminal career spanning more than 60 years and several states. Lerner, it seems, was one of Pittsburgh’s most notable racketeers. He also was misogynist and, as one relative told me, an asshole for whom “describing him as a scoundrel would be a compliment.”
Jakie Lerner’s gravesite, Shaler Township, Pennsylvania.
Charles Jamal was a Turkish immigrant who bounced around North America in the years before World War II. He named his new Pittsburgh nightclub for the city in his homeland. Jamal’s organized crime ties beyond the club remain opaque. In 1952, muckraking journalists Jack Lait and Mortimer Lee described Jamal, “a Turk who runs the swank Ankara nightclub” as one of Pittsburgh’s “big boys” in the county outside the city limits, in their survey of American organized crime, U.S.A. Confidential.
