This program is made possible by all the wonderful people who are members of WQED.

This program is part of WQED Pittsburgh History Series.

Some Pittsburgh is used to call this neighborhood Little Harlem, but most people have always called it the Hill District or just the Hill.

From the 30s through the 50s, the hill thrived, and part o it was one of the most lively, prosperous, and influentia black neighborhoods in America.

We had five theaters, we had drugstores.

We had furniture stores, whatever there was in the city we had in the hill.

The Hill district was for the Pittsburgh area, what Harlem was to New York.

It was a center for music, for art, for literature.

The hill was a thriving, bustling, safe community.

I thought it was the mos exciting place I'd ever been in in my life.

One street ran the entire length of the hill into downtown Wylie Avenue.

Wylie Avenue was the center of all kinds of activity, and it really ran 24 hours a day.

It's the only street in a metropolitan city in America that begins at a church and ends at the jail.

Wylie Avenue represente the heart and soul of the hill.

When the hill was in its heyday, this program i the story of those magic times.

What we're calling Wylie Avenue day.

Just east of downtown Pittsburgh, beyond the Civic Arena lies the neighborhood called the Hill.

Much of what used to be the hill is gone now.

The Civic Arena i where the lower hill used to be, and when you drive through the upper half, you discover a neighborhood struggling to renew itself.

But it wasn't always this way.

When Pittsburgh was the smoky city.

The hill was a jumping off point for immigrants.

Then large numbers of African Americans fleeing persecution in the South and seeking jobs in the industrial Promised Land came to the hill during that period, from the mid 1930s to almost the 1960s.

They created a diverse and powerful black community.

There was practically every kind of business that you would want, especially, to do shopping.

You could buy your schoo clothes and not leave the hill.

You could buy fresh meat.

It was its own world.

It was a unique demographic phenomenon.

I mean, it was unique in and of itself.

The way the various groups lived and worked and interacted with each other was unique.

There were black owned and operated jewelry shops, dry cleaners, doctors and lawyers offices, printing shops, summer camps, and much more.

Yeah, the hill was really jumping.

Open all night.

That's the way most peopl describe the hill in its heyday.

The place really humme and you went along for the ride whether you wanted to or not.

Take, for example, Goode's Pharmacy on the corner of Fullerton and Wylie.

Real good sister Ruth White manage the fountain on opening night.

We opened.

It was going to be open till 11:00 at night, and there's so many people in the store at 11:00, and they kept coming in every time we decided we were going to close.

More people would come in an people were in there all night.

And that's when he decided we might as well throw the key away and just keep the store open 24 hours.

And that's how it became a 24 hour drug store.

The first night Goodes had an unbeatable location.

In fact, the corner of Fullerton and Wylie became know as the crossroads of the world.

Everything happened on that corner.

Stanley's.

It was across the street, and it was, of course, a bar and a nightclub.

Luigi's barbershop was down at the other corner and Crawford Grill number one was at the corne across from Luby's Barbershop.

And people just came and went all the time.

You knew it was never a dull moment in that store at night.

The Hill just wasn't a dull neighborhood.

In fact, the Hill nurtured some great talents Billy Eckstine, Lena Horne, Erroll Garner, Ahmed Jamal, and Mary Louise.

They all lived in the hill at one time or another.

So did jazz great George Benson, George Benson.

I watched George Benson sell papers right there on the corner in front of the drugstore.

He'd come i and he'd say to me, Miss Ruth, would you loan me $0.0 so I can get an ice cream cone?

And I think now when I think o how well he's doing, you know, these are the days that you remember.

Everyone who grew up in the hill in those days has some magic memories of the place.

Louise Evans moved to Pittsburgh when she was nine years old.

From North Carolina, to her, Wylie Avenue seemed like another world.

Oh my.

Yes, I se my people never went to bed and, old man would sit down and play checker until way over into the night, and the people set ou on the stools and hollered back and forth to one another.

And in those days you could sleep on the fire escape.

So many times it would be so hot.

We would get out on the fire escapes and take a sheet of old quil and sleep on the fire escapes.

But I don't know when the people went to bed.

I really don't because I would just last as long as I could, and then I'd wake up and it would be morning with the soot in the nostrils and the, you know, oily skin.

You had soot on you on your face, too.

Jim Henry was born at home here on the corner of Wandless and Webster.

One of his fondest memories is of getting Sunday dinner.

Mrs.

Williams had a live chicken store right on Center Avenue, up from Kirkpatrick, and you'd go in and she'd pick out a chicken and go in the back room.

You'd hear a little noise and she had a big pot of hot water and boom, she wrapped it up in some wax paper.

And that was dinner.

The next day.

Pulitzer Prize winning playwright August Wilson grew up on Bedford Avenue.

I guess my earliest memories are the third or fourth grade coming home from school.

And as I got older I gradually came to understand that we lived in a mixed neighborhood, a neighborhood has a lot of Syrians, a lot of Italians, blacks.

It was, in every sense of the word, a neighborhood.

People with names at hard times and flu.

Vann I never didn't know what flu venom it but there was a man named Flu.

Vana.

When he was sober, he started.

And you could hardly understan it, but boy, when he got drunk, he sounded like, English Lord.

Would.

There was a man that they called death.

He was very skinny, and it was obvious that he was not well.

But people call him death.

The one legged man with all the keys on his, belt.

And he was, an electrician.

And I don't know why they call him church, because he was the most profane man I've ever heard.

Just.

Every other word it came out of his mouth was a curse word.

Albert Johnson remembers going to the movies.

At that time, they only cost $0.12.

But, boy, you had to really scuffle to get $0.12.

You click the you click the pop bottles and everything else you could do.

Ran errands to get that $0.12.

Mike Flournoy moved to Pittsburgh from Birmingham, Alabama in Birmingham.

He got used to a lot of greenery.

Pittsburgh didn't have any greenery.

And one of my greatest fears was to witness house that sat so close to the street that I had to learn some new skills.

And one of the skills I had to learn was how to avoid automobiles.

Within two seconds after you step outside of the house.

Blac immigrants who moved to the hill from the south faced other challenges too.

The Great Migration reache its peak during the depression.

But many blacks came here during World War One.

Estelle Blanks remembers that in 1917.

Life was hard.

That's the year she followed her husband to Pittsburgh to escape poverty and repression in Lowndes County, Alabama.

But the conditions they found here weren't much better at first.

When he came here, the people were living in some dark floors.

Some of them had sleep on the floor, on the floor, because they have nowhere to stay.

University of Pittsburgh professor Roland Turner says some of the men lived in boxcars on the railroad, literally.

Railroad companies, would string together a bunch of boxcars, cut holes in the cars for windows, and then charge them in $0.05 a night to sleep in it.

And I think Pittsburgh was, second to, you know, on North New Jersey in terms of bad housing at this time and certainly had one of the highest tuberculosis rates.

And then the black community.

Eventually Congress passed legislation to improve living conditions.

And as more and more poor southern blacks arrived and mixed with those blacks who are already here and prospering.

The stage was set.

Black institutions developed that were unrivaled in their scope and bred.

They thrived because, in part because of segregation and racism, discrimination.

There was a world, there were boundaries to that world, primarily established by a white community.

But within that world, people developed institutions that had and own their own character, their own strength, their own, power.

They were truly strong institutions.

One of the strongest institutions in the hill was this newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier.

Its offices were near the top of Wylie Avenue.

The Courier started ou as a small neighborhood weekly.

Elwood Johnson remembers how it quickly became an important paper.

When we were little, if you wanted to find out something abou some other part of the country as far as black people were concerned, the courier was the only source, unless it was something tha impacted on the white community.

Black News was no news.

Under the leadership of its publisher, Robert L Vann.

The Pittsburgh Courier grew into the largest black weekly in America.

There was a Pittsburgh City edition, a national edition, and 14 special regional editions, one for each of the country's major cities.

They didn't have television.

So you read the papers, you went out and bought the paper.

We didn't miss buying The Courier on Thursday.

That's the first thing you want.

You know, if you went to the store, you stopped by the courier.

You read that courier because anybody who was anybody was in that courier, and you knew what they were doing because you read the Courier.

Yeah.

Today, the New Pittsburgh Courier publishes out of these offices on the South side, getting the paper delivered to its readers.

It's pretty routin now, but distributing the paper across the nation in the 30s and 40s was a challenge.

Rod Doss recalls one of the obstacles in the early days of the Courier.

It was very difficult for papers to be sent down south and and placed strategically in a lot of stores.

White companies would often refuse to transpor or deliver a colored newspaper to get the paper out.

The Courier called on the presid the Union of Black men who worked as porters on trains across the country.

He then signed a lot of his porters to make sure that the papers were delivered to strategic points down south, and hence that's how the courier emerge as the leader with the largest amount of circulatio in southern states at that time.

Even though the Courier was a national paper, a lot of its news still came from the bustling Hill and Wylie Avenue.

So did its pictures.

A whole generation of black photographers worked on The Courier.

One of them was Teenie Harris.

You know, I never went to school.

I didn't take no pictures and no photography in school.

I learned all this by just myself.

During his career, Teenie took over 80,000 pictures of black life in Pittsburgh.

But while other photographers could take several different shots of each news event, Teenie only took one.

And one day, when he was covering Governor Lawrence, that earned him a permanent nickname.

They're all out there wit a little 35 millimeter snapping.

And I was sitting back and waiting on them and, and gave them to Lawrence a hunch.

The other fellow.

So here he comes now.

He said he called me one shot.

One shot.

Harris couldn't afford to us more than a single frame of film and a single flashbulb to capture his subject.

Then he'd popped the use flashbulb into his pocket to make the point.

I just have to snap you like it's not.

You grab the ball and put my so I can.

I used to play basketball, you know.

Besides national issues, the Courier devoted sections to sports, religion, cooking in the home and the society.

Sing along while 11 clubs for women and men wer an important part of that scene.

In the 40s these back issues of The Courier listed over 50 different organizations for women.

A woman could join the Aurora Reading Club, the Pittsburgh Pioneers, or group called the ducks.

There were clubs for men, too.

Some of them gre out of business relationships, like the Black Professional Association.

But one of the most well known and influential clubs in the hills started purely for fun the frogs.

It's still around today.

David Washington and Perc Garland are two of its members.

Well, there's the limited place you can go for social affairs.

You couldn't have a social affair in downtow Pittsburgh or any of the class A establishments or restaurants or hotels or anything.

So it was a special community that blacks had to establish.

The frogs, the name stands for friendly rivalry often generate success.

Have been meeting for dinner once a month since the early 1900s.

They were famous for Frog Week, a summer week of parties, dances, concerts, games, and the Frog Formal.

People would come from California and Chicago, down south from all points of the country to be here for Frog Weekend, and it was a very, very, very fine affair and was well behaved.

It was very nice affair.

It was just about the nicest thing that you could attend.

Most of the frogs were also members of another larger men's club, the La Windy Club.

The La Windy Club had its own three story building near the corner of Wylie and Fullerton.

Had great deal of camaraderie.

And everyone you knew there was was interesting.

If ther were black celebrities in town, you would probably end up rubbing elbows with them at the LA window.

Count Basie and Duke Ellington were regulars.

Frank Bolden, a reporter fo The Courier, remembers one night the LA wind earned its place in the history of jazz.

Duke Ellington, you sit in that one night, he was in there playing, and we had gumdrops there with us, and we gone gumdrop.

That's Earl Garner.

His nickname was gumdrop.

You get him to play all night for a bag of gumdrops.

Then later, we went around a little in the club, and Duke sat there until seven in the morning.

He finished the composition.

I let a song go out of my heart.

He finished it right down low in the club.

I loved his song Go Out of My Heart.

It was the sweetest, mellow thing.

I know I lost having a night out on the social scene.

Looking good from head to toe.

There was no place to get that done.

Done better than Ed Lasalle's Alana Graves, who's demonstrating the finger wave here on Lasalle's.

It was a salon and beauty college.

And while owner's sisters worked for, they remember what she wanted to do for young black women to teach some of, especially our girls, the colored girls with what we would call at that time to be able to do something els besides housework for the white people, wanted them to be able to work for themselves.

She was the first one to have, black and white students in her school.

And so many students went on to their own business in a still operating today.

The sales didn't discriminate when it came to students or customers, white or black.

You could get the latest styles at Lasalle's.

Of course, that might mean you had to get wired into this contraption that permanently, then had to be wrapped on little rods.

And electricity was used a certain amount of time to sit the wave in the permanent.

No one was never electrocuted, no.

According to a 1936 beauty supply catalog, this was the ideal of beauty for blacks.

If you believed it, then you bought chemicals, relaxes and what they called fade creams to give you that light, bright and almost white look.

Many advertisers successfully played upon the myth that the wider you were the more beautiful you looked.

But by this time, many of the Hills residents had their own ideas about black beaut and held contests to prove it.

These women ar competing in the miss VPA beauty pageant sponsored by the Black Professional Association.

It ran for a full week and culminated with a swimsuit competition and talent show.

Albert Johnson remembers ho much everyone enjoyed the pitch.

All the young fellas looke forward to the beauty pageant.

That was the beauty crown of Pittsburgh.

It was the one that everybody shot for to get into this pageant.

You had to be sponsored by a club or a business.

If they had a pretty waitress in the group, or they had a pretty employee who had some talent, that was the person who woul represent their their business.

It was a lot of fun.

The pageants, the frogs and the private clubs were the height of sophistication in the hill.

But the really big event was just the opposite.

The summer picnic.

There were games.

All of the games were competitive.

Manual games.

There were races.

There was a prize drawing, and there was something for everybody.

It was a real fun country picnic.

And the Hill district would practically be vacated.

The picnic started early and lasted well into the night.

There were all kinds of entertainment.

Big band concerts, dances and talent shows like this exotic South Seas revue.

Most of the events at the summer picni were in Sully's Pool in South Pa Things got a little crowded at times but it was Sally's or nothing.

It was the only pool where blacks were admitted.

Now, at that time there was a large pool, a very, very large pool at South Park, which African-Americans were not allowed to go in.

So in fact, the if you tried to go there, chances are that you would end up in the hospital, if not dead.

Yet, despit discrimination and segregation, most people have fond memories of the picnics and the good times they had there.

Why did we care?

Because, well, after all, we didn't have anything else.

We enjoyed ourselves because at that time it was in the 30s, 40s and 50s.

So this was all right as far as we were concerned.

It was in the 40s, really, when they had the picnics at Sally's Grove.

It was a very, very, very good I have a very good memory of the picnic, and I really.

Words can't do justic to the fun that everybody had.

The Hill had picnics and parties, but the real center of social life was the church and the hill, as always had many distinguished churches.

These scenes were shot outside of Ebenezer Baptist Church in the 1940s.

That church at the top of Wylie Avenue is John Wesley A.M.E.

Zion.

There's also Mother Bethel, said to be the oldest congregation of color west of the Allegheny.

Bethel was the sit of many civil rights meetings, and the Hill has supported many other congregations and denominations like Warren United Methodist and Centra and Monumental Baptist churches.

Another well known hill church is Saint Benedict the Moor, the first blac Catholic church in Pittsburgh.

It stands just a few blocks from Wylie Avenue at Center in Crawford.

On its 100th anniversary.

The parish celebrated with this special service.

I know that we had a mayor.

Fathe Louis Villon, the priest here.

now, grew up in the hill.

You came to the church for any and everything.

You came on Sunday, you know, for your prayers.

You came on Saturday nights for the dances you came through the week, for education.

That's where you met your future spouse.

That's where you picked the the, the children that your kids played along with.

That's where you got guidance and advice.

That's where you got material help.

Everyone is welcome at Saint Benedict the Moor these days.

But that wasn't always true.

In the 30s, the bishop excluded whites from the congregation because a number of white were more drawn to the warmth, the closeness, the service, the activity going on, and the fact that the church was, very poor, that the bishop thought that that would be, not conducive to the independence of the black church.

And so we forbid white to come in and be members of it.

When you look at the hill from downtown, one of the first things you see is the statue on top of the church.

It was erected in 1965.

Today, it's the subject of some controversy.

The statue's hands and face are white, but Saint Benedict, the church's namesake, was black.

When the statue originally went up, the hands and face were black.

He's been up here for 25 years, and the paint has simply worn off.

I would be more than happy to restore the face and hands to the original black color, except no contracto that we've ever brought around has been willin to crawl all the way on up there and try to paint the fac and hands to the original black.

In addition to churches, picnics, parties, and pageants, Wylie Avenue was also abuzz with businesses, some of which flourished because of the sorry fact that blacks were ofte not welcome outside of the hill.

As Douglass King remembers at that time, they couldn't g in any, most anywhere sit down and eat.

It was very busy.

Even an Isalys chang that we had here in Pittsburgh, the ice cream place.

I remember when I was a kid, we could not eat.

We could go in and get an ice cream but we couldn't sit down in them in the ice and the ice cream cone.

We had to go outside and take it out with us.

You were unwelcome downtown.

So you didn't go.

Women could not go downtown and try on dress.

You had to buy things without trying them on.

And as far as men were concerned, there were a lot of stores that didn't even want you in the store.

But things were different along Wylie Avenue.

In that time, black people needed white people or Jewish people at time or whatever, and they needed us to because we had what money we had, was spent with them.

Practically every sho owner had a tab, for families.

And once payday came, I guess that was one of the things your father or mother did was go around and and pay on or pay off some of the tabs that they had accumulated between paydays.

Johnson Studios was one of the businesses that thrived in the Hill.

It was run by Luther Johnson Senior, a commercial photographer, with the help of his son, Albert Johnson.

He'll never forget one of the things his father filmed the Black Professional Association annual parade.

Every year, it threaded its way through the crowded streets of the hill and ended up on Wylie Avenue for a neighborhood parade.

It was one of the biggest parades in the city.

In fact, it might have been the biggest parade in the city for a neighborhood parade.

The pride was there.

You were always happy to see the representation of all of the things that you had work for.

Most businesses had some kind of float.

Here's the one for the courier, and that one belongs to Johnson Studios.

There are lots of stories about the businesses behind these floats.

Take this one, for example the Owl Cab Company in the 30s and 40s.

Black owned cabs were only allowed to pick up passengers in blac neighborhoods if they got cut.

Picking up someone downtown.

The driver was arreste and the cab company was fined.

Here's a float for a business that made it big with pies.

Nesbitt.

When you were looking for good meal and a special dessert, the hill had a lot to offer in the way of restaurants.

One of the most well known was at the corner of Wylie and Junilla Nesbitt's pie shop.

It was the class restaurant.

If you wanted to eat in a nice environment, that was the place to go.

The dinner menu featured main courses like Nesbitt's crispy, moist and delicious fried chicken and his mouthwatering, juicy on inch thick slab of roast beef.

And one thing was for sure you wouldn't leave without trying.

One of the pies Nesbitt's made famous.

Today.

People still look hungry when you ask them about his strawberry, pumpkin and coconut custard pies.

And then there was the almost legendary sweet potato pie.

Sweet potato pie is one of the best pies in the world.

It's made out of sweet potatoes or yams.

It's like a custard pie.

Except for the fact tha it's heavier than a custard pie.

And there's nothing that tastes like it.

Another thing that made Nesbitt special was George Nesbitt.

He's the one in the suit.

He was a personal fella, and he was a Booker T. Washington devotee.

He figured it.

Blacks needed an economic base.

He preached it all the time.

A few blocks down the street at 1411 Wylie Avenue was another successful black business.

McAvoy's jeweller.

Here's Mr.

McAvoy work.

And here's Mrs.

McAvoy waiting on a customer.

They worked hard together to make McAvoy a success.

Hard work paid off for other businesses, too.

Since 1947, William Pryor has been making fur coats in this shop near Wylie Avenue.

This is his son, William Pryor Jr.

And this is his grandson, William Pryor, the third.

When I was my grandson's age, 19 years old, I was one of th fastest operators in the East.

The person that taught me was one of the fastest.

And of course, I improved on what he did.

So.

So here I am today, enjoying it.

Bill's speed and skill with these sewing machines helped him survive at the height of segregation in Pittsburgh.

He remembers it as a time when colored people weren't allowed to compet with white people for most jobs.

It was even harder for businessmen at that time.

Speaking of the colored people of Pittsburgh, you weren't accepted downtown.

And there were very, very few jobs that were available.

And no, no space at all available.

Some discrimination was prohibited, but it usually popped up in a subtler form.

It was a law against refusing space to merchants like Bill based on color.

It was also a way around it.

And one of the ways, instead of telling, you know, they just raised the price so you can't pay it.

And that way I'm not discriminating.

I just charge you $150 for what costs 30.

To get around the segregation.

Black businessmen had to be creative.

Bill Pryor was typical.

Many coat buyers wouldn't buy from a black business.

They went to the fashionable white owned stores downtown where black people weren't allowed to shop.

But these stores recognized the quality of Bill's work.

So they sent the orders on to him.

He would actually make the coat.

Then the store would sew on their own labels.

A lot of the person that didn't patronize me at that time, they would take their stuff into town.

And then, almost before they got back home, I should say I would be called the, Bill, come and this is what I want you to do.

And I would make it and and, do it and return it to them.

And this is how I survived.

Until I could have my retail business.

Every facet of life along Wylie Avenue was influenced in some way by segregation and discrimination.

Just as the Hill had its own business and social life, it also had its own brand of police.

Take a close look at this unit of Hill police marching in this parade.

Almost all of them were over six feet tall.

The one in front was Pittsburgh's first black police lieutenant, Jim Robinson.

Now look towards the back row.

Second in from the left.

That's Oliver Mason on the street.

They called him two gun Mason.

Oliver Mason.

It shoots you about 8 or 9 times.

Did it hurt?

You were allowed to carry one.

If I was supposed to be.

Nothing over 45.

All over here at two magnums.

One time, they called him in on the carpet of carrying a machine gun.

Nobody knew where he got it from.

All the rest.

I always say you know, you know, good dead.

He didn't believe given him a chance to kill him.

He said if they weren't doin wrong, they wouldn't get shot.

But as tough as Oliver Mason was in keeping order on the streets of the Hill.

He took care of its residents in other ways, too.

He had in his car from the trunk of his car was full of bicycle parts and bicycle tools.

And he used to ride along, and he saw a kid with a bike.

He would stop him and oil the bike up, tighten i up, and maybe he saw something wrong with the pedals are bad.

He'd take the pedal on, pu a new pedal on, free of charge.

He'd just do this.

He just loved to to help the kids.

He was respected as one of our better police.

And if Mr.

Mason told you know, you don't do it.

And you didn't do it.

Strange that, the wonderful things that blacks have done down through the years, nobody mentions them and may not remember.

Just like they didn't exist.

There was not a policeman in Pittsburgh had ever been, as far as I know, in the history that I've read in Pittsburgh, that could compare with Oliver Mason.

The Hill was a different place than violent crime and burglary were relatively rare.

This was the atmosphere that existed in the Hill at that time.

You didn't have to worry about somebody knocking in the head or robbing you or, jumping on you, insinuating that you had no business on the hill or anything like that.

This didn't exist at that time.

People were not afraid to come to the hill, but there was illegal activity along Wylie Avenue.

After hours, clubs, prostitution and the numbers.

The numbers gam was like an unofficial lottery.

Controlling the numbers racket was lucrative.

And the men who wrote the numbers became the Hills financial tycoons.

They also became the Hill's folk heroes.

We had two people that we had to depend on in those days, and that was the ministers and the number writers, probably the most honest and trustworthy people that ever came through the Pittsburgh area, where your numbers writers and, for the Hill district, the numbers writers were not organized crime.

You know, the numbers writers were not criminals.

Okay.

The numbers writers, where you're on call in your cousin Joey.

And, it went all across again, the ethnic lines.

It's interesting to not that the police or the Killjoys and Blue, as we call them, rarely arrested people that were engaged in numbers.

They were hard on, shoplifters and street fighting and crap games in the middle of the street, things like that, but never numbers because it meant so much to unemployed people.

See, one penny could win you $7.

Two of the most famous numbers writers were Woogie Harris Yona Woogie's Crystal barbershop, and Gus Greenlee, who owned the Crawford Grill, among other things.

If you talk to 100 peopl about Gus and Woogie, 99 of them will have very favorable things to say about them.

They were that kind of, individuals.

They were dynamic.

They were generous.

They were compassionate.

But they made their money in illegal, illegal business.

The numbers they in fact, it's alleged that in 1925, when Gus Greenlee came to Pittsburgh, he brought the numbers with him.

Some of our professionals and doctors and lawyers set up their offices with loans from them.

And remember, there wasn't anything, in my opinion, anything wrong with it.

When the banks wouldn't loan your money, they were illegal, but they still had them.

And I mean, they made a lot of money.

They were respected.

They were.

Because I'll tell you why.

They did a lot of good for the community.

They were not men who made money and kept it in their pocket.

The Digitarians, as they were called, put their money into civic events, political campaigns and helped neighbors in hard times.

But they may best be remembered for fostering the developmen of America's favorite pastime.

Gus Greenlee built his ow ballpark called Greenlee Field.

His team was the Pittsburgh Crawfords, along with the Homestead Grays, another local Negro team.

They soon carved a name for themselves and baseball lore.

They beat every team in sight.

And, we used to stop off at the grill night just to sit and talk with them.

And that's where the story originated.

Satchel Paige said that cool, cool Papa Belle was so fast that he could turn the switch at the light and get him before the light went out.

But that didn't impress me as much as the one Oscar Charlton said that slow said when he was coming up, he was so fast that he would hit a single down the right field line and the ball would hit him as he rounded first, going to second base.

Now that's really motoring.

Pittsburgh Crawfords were known around the nation.

Both they and the Grays were prominently featured in the national editions of the Pittsburgh Courier.

The Crawfords in the Grays provided a recreational outlet for the hill.

Look how dressed up everybody was for the games.

That's Gus Greenlee in the stands.

They had the skill to compete, probably with anyone, but they really put on a show and the home run hitter was intimidating.

And he got up there like Mike Tyso with an intimidating expression.

Third baseman might get up and do a dance before swinging at the ball.

It was a form of entertainmen as well as watching good sport.

The Negro Leagues had great players.

They sometime played in the big league parks.

And every now and then they played against white major leaguers and usually won.

To me it was it was a great time.

We didn't realize how great it was at the tim that we lived through that.

But, it was a great time.

The heel also turned out for the sport of boxing.

There were Golden Glove fights and world championships.

The 1951 heavyweight championship fight between Jersey Joe Walcott and his or Charles was at Forbes Field.

It drew the largest fight crowd in Pittsburgh history, but the local boxers were still the favorites.

Charlie Burley was probably on of the best boxers of all time.

I know that Fitzie refused to f him, and I also know Sugar Ray Robinson refused to fight him.

He could box.

He was an excellent boxer.

There was a time, if you had to find someone, and he wasn't taking in a boxing match or a baseball game.

Chances are he would be hanging ou at a barbershop on Wylie Avenue.

Hey hey hey, hey, what's going on?

Today Archie's place on Fifth Avenue is a descendant of those barber shops.

This is the owner of the head barber Archie Crate.

Our class of about classified barbers job as tops.

He might not.

He might not be rich, bu he sure has got a classic job, because everybody got to take his hat off to whether you like it or not, you got to take his hat off.

When Archie was starting out as a barber, he worked in one of the most famous shops on the hill, Willkie Harris's Crystal Barber Shop.

Do you see all the celebritie from every every which way from all over the world.

Everybody knew him and they would come in.

You got to see a lot of folks.

You never would have seen.

You know, ordinarily, today's haircut may look different from the 40s, but Archie sees a lot of similarities.

They got different names for the two bases.

The same haircut like to hang with.

That's the old haircut.

Now they got it.

They call it the boxes Ain't nothing but the hangers.

We used to laugh at folks with them, and now this one got to be popular.

That's what it is.

Check it out.

See how you like that.

Other styles are gone, though.

There used to be a homemade mixture for straightening your hair called Conklin.

If it wasn't used right, it would burn your scalp so badly you would end up temporarily bald, white potatoes and bread and laugh.

And you made it together in Greece.

And during that time, people wasn't too slick on doing.

They didn't know how to grease the hair, and they stick i right on the hair and your head, the hair plaster your head, yo wash your hair, the whole thing come out like the scorched earth.

I'm telling you, some of the people in Archie's place remember when Wylie Avenu was the place to go on a date.

Friday and Saturday night used to be on occasion, you know, everybody would have on their Sunday best to go out to bars all over the HIll and the girls would look beautiful.

And if I was there, I won't say they look beautiful, but they look real nice.

You used to be able to walk in a bar.

If you wanted a drink, you could be your money on the bar and go to the bathroom.

Come back and still be there.

When you come back, the most important thing was getting the girl out of a mother and father house, because you had your own options when you once you did that.

One of the most popular options was to go out dancing, and one of the most popular steps was called tracking.

You put your hand on your hip, then you track it.

You know, tracking, tracking my blues away.

You put your hand on your hip.

You think that's a go cross?

It looks something like this.

Wylie Avenue had plenty in the way of nightlife.

The stars really came out at night on the hill.

Just about anybody who was playing music at that time came here.

I know Jack Graham, Jack McDuff, who played the organ, and, and Birdie's Place, George Kirby, Billy Eckstine, everybody who was anybody who came to town came to the Crawford Grill, Joe Louis, all of those people came, came into the area.

Lena Horne quite a few of them would come in in through that are because this was home for them.

People came from all over town and the theaters up here.

We had a lot of the white people, in fact, 99% white and all the nightclubs, there were 99% white.

I mean, they came up for service and evening and we might relate to Wylie Avenue as you would in some parts of New York, like in Harlem.

He's not exaggerating.

In this photo taken in Pittsburg Billy Eckstine and Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine big band ofte played here, featuring musicians like Art Blakey John Coltrane and Dexter Gordon.

And here's Cab Calloway in town for an engagement.

There were private clubs and big time entertainers.

It had the reputation that between New York and Chicago, that was, the place to be.

You had to either go to Chicago or to New York to find more.

Big bands like Artie Shaw, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington would play downtown and then head to an after hours club in the Hill.

The Crawford Grill number two was a jazz Mecca in the 50s, and the Musicians Club was also a favorite hangout.

We had, Tommy Dorsey there, one night playing trombone against tw trombone players locally here, and after the session he went up to grill.

The food was so good he overindu CI Oliver, who had formerly played with Jimmy Lansford, he took him right up there good as drugstore and Bill good mixed him up a concoction to settle his stomach, and he never forgot him.

They always remember it.

A drugstore in Pittsburgh had saved his life, so he claimed he's just over aged.

Sarah Hardy, along with her husband George on the celebrity cafe.

She says that back then, nightlife was the chief form of entertainment.

People used to bar hu they'd start down at the grill.

Number one down and deep.

Wylie worked their way u to Stanley's at Fordham Street, come up to our place and wor their way on up to Heron Avenue.

That was a Saturday night ritual.

Well, Art Blakey worked for us, and that's before he got on big time.

He used to play a plac called Ex-lax and Lime or Beans, and I was on the third floor and had this brass bed, and the bed would just jingle and heavy.

He hit the drums.

I know exactly what he was playing.

Henry Belcher's a tap dancer.

He performed in some of those floor shows at the celebrity.

That's him on the right.

Still dancing today.

He says Pittsburg was a valuable training ground.

Before taking your act on the road, people was telling us you should go to New York, you should go to New York.

But I told them I say, no, you're not really trying on New York because you go to New York and if you're not ready, you coming back from New York, right?

Failures They capitalized on the Mahatma Gandhi craze and named themselves the Three Mahatma Gandhi's.

After working the Pittsburgh club circuit for a couple of years, Henry got to live his dream of performing at the world famous Apollo Theater.

That week.

They had the battle of dances.

They had us on the bill with the four step brothers.

They was nationally known all over the world.

But we were.

We held on anyway.

But, after that, I mean, we were considered New Yorkers.

And everywher we went then across the country, we were from New York, we wasn't from Pittsburgh.

1948.

This was the music everyon strain to hear, because this was Mary Dees theme song.

Mary Dee was WHOD radio's hottest DJ WHOD called itself the Station of Nations because each 15 minute block of programing was dedicated to one of Pittsburgh's ethnic roots.

But there was no black show.

Mary Dee figured it was high time for that to change and approached Hodes manager.

He told her if she could get some people to advertise for them so that they could pay her salary, then they would give her the job once she came back.

And she had those people in, right after that, she got so many different advertiser that they gave her a short time.

And after that, Mary had like three, 3 or 4 hours.

Mary took her roving microphone into the community.

She did a morning show with her brother, Mal Goode, who later became the first black correspondent for ABC news, and a show with her daughter called Teenage Express.

Moving around with the little D she had moving around with Mary Dee and she broadcast from the window and she had the, you know, if she was in the window and the kids, you know, Chimney High School was up the street and Herron Hill were there, and in the afternoon you would see all these kids around it when the watching her.

And if if they had put their name up there, she'd say their name on the radio.

And that was the greatest thing for them.

Mary Dee popularized black music to a larger audience, but perhaps Mary Dee' most enduring gift to Pittsburgh was the name she gave to th corner of Fullerton and Wylie.

Mary said, if you come up here to this corner, it's a crossroad where you can go from Stanley's to goods to the after hours, but and never miss a beat.

And that's how she name it crossroads of the world.

And people did come from everywhere.

And.

This is what the crossroads of the world looks like now.

The parking lot for the Civic Arena was built over it.

But even today, Florence Bridges is still flooded by memories.

When she stand where the crossroads used to be, there was so much vitality.

There were people everywhere.

On that corner was goods, pharmacy.

There was the musicians club.

The Washington clubs were over there.

The veranda clubs.

Right.

There was an old theater called the Rhumba Theater.

It was a marquee theater.

It was i didn't even have a ticket agent.

You'd pay your money and then you would you would go in, they would wave you.

And nobody ever admitte they went to the Rhumba theater.

Everybody went in like spies but they would have the movies after everybody else had the movies.

And you would go in and when your eyes became accustomed to the dark, you look around you see everybody you ever knew.

The Rhumba theater and everything else in the lower heel was doomed the day the city opened this urban redevelopment office in the late 50s, as they tore down th theaters, businesses and housing and entire way of life began to come apart.

Wylie Avenue days were coming to a close.

Of course that just destroyed everything.

So the urban renewal always means Negro removal.

It doesn't help us in it.

It might help the city, but doesn't help that minorities at all.

This is one of the most devastating things that ever happened to the black community was the tear out the law, heal the way it was done.

There was no consideration given to where the black people were going to go.

What was going to happen to black businesses?

Thousands of people were displaced just to build the Civic Arena, all of Wylie Avenue below Crawford Street.

The part that went to the jail was destroyed.

Well, I tell you, it was a sad feeling and I see it all in buildings going up.

The Jewish people went one direction, the Italian people in another direction, and the poor colored people didn't have much choic to go over wherever they could.

Those people who were uprooted with businesses and people who had homes, I doubt if they were compensated for what they gave up and what they lost.

The wrecking crews knocked down the economic base that fueled the hill.

At the same time, the bonds of segregation and discrimination were loosening as people were forced out o their homes, they left the Hill.

Living conditions for those who remain started to slide.

Kayl lived in the hills since 1945.

The people whom I kne have been moved out, driven out, bulldozed out, sent elsewhere.

The problem is elsewhere was any place they could find elsewher hadn't been prepared for them.

So those wonderful new buildings, with their glittering facades really were, as I said, monuments.

The destruction of a community.

The demolition might have gone further, but the hill fought back and held the line at Crawford Street, this corner outside Saint Benedict.

The more a church became the rallying point, people started calling it Freedom Corner.

The community took a stand here and said, you will no longer take away our housing to put up commercial development.

Development will stop her until there's housing provided.

From that point on, every parade, every protest, anything of social significanc in the city has always started right here on Freedom Corner, at the steps of the church.

Then in 1968, after the death of Martin Luther King, the Hill, along with other neighborhoods across the nation, was ravaged by riots.

We were on our way to church that Sunday morning.

It was Palm Sunday I never forget, and I was pregnant with my youngest.

And, it was just terrible seeing these places torn up and seeing people running with shoes and clothing and food tha they weren't going to use, and, I think that was just the end of businesses Local people didnt start to act You know how it is.

Once it starts, everybody gets into it.

But local people didn't start to act, but in anger and anger, you do a lot of things that you don't do in your rational.

See, they were bitter about unemployment and about the wa they were being mistreated here.

The riots devastated the Hill.

By the time the fires burned out, Wylie Avenue days were only a memory.

While those of you that never seen it really missed something, because the Hill at that time was a very, very, very fine place to be.

Brackets.

Religion, lawyers, doctors and the best economic progress we ever had occurred right there.

The Wylie Avenue brings back pleasant memories.

People were poor but I don't think that they knew they were poor because they were enriched in so many other ways.

People were willing to share what little bit they might have had.

I missed the real miss, or the genuine miss of the Hill distric and the people who were there.

They were real.

They were people who cared about you.

They were people who were concerned about you.

It was like a family.

The Hill was just a real sweet and nostalgic part of my life.

I would wish tha everybody could have had a hill to have grown up in.

Oh, when you smiling?

When smiling.

The whole world smiled with you very long.

When you laughing and when you laughing.

The sun comes shining through.

What were you crying?

Me bring on the rain.

Don't laugh, you're lying.

Be happy again.

Keep on smiling.

Keep on my knee and the whole world.

Smile with you.