Architectural historian, authored book with Dan Rooney
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Carol J. Peterson, who traced the individual histories of 1,940 Pittsburgh houses and co-authored a North Side history book with the late Steelers owner Dan Rooney, died Sunday at her Lawrenceville home, surrounded by friends, after a seven-year battle with breast and lung cancer. She was 58.
Ms. Peterson was tougher than she looked and loved Pittsburgh to her last breath. On April 30, she posted on Facebook, “Thirty-four years ago today, I moved to Pittsburgh. Best decision I ever made.’’
She wrote then that even if she were killed by the cancer she so often railed against, “at least I’ll have lived the majority of my life in this unique and wonderful place.’’
She had grown up in suburbs. Her love affair with this city began in Oakland in 1983. She had graduated from Widener University in Chester and would soon enroll at the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.
After earning a master’s degree in urban and regional planning in 1985, she became marketing coordinator at the Michael Baker Corp. in Beaver in 1987. Later, she would become Baker’s architectural historian, and by then she had a side business in house histories. Her work was so detailed that Pittsburgh’s walls may as well have spoken.
“She had so much knowledge of our house, she amazed me,’’ Patricia Rooney recalled of Ms. Peterson’s first visit to the Rooneys’ home in Allegheny West on the North Side.
Patricia Rooney and her husband, the late Dan Rooney, had moved back to his boyhood home in 1993. She called Ms. Peterson after reading about her work in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and from her first visit she began telling Mr. Rooney things he hadn’t known about the house he had grown up in.
His parents had been the third owners, but the Rooneys were pleased to learn the servants for the original owners hailed from the same counties in Ireland as Mrs. Rooney’s parents and Mr. Rooney’s ancestors. Such historical brush strokes built and burnished a business for Ms. Peterson that spanned three decades.
She got into it after renting a house in Polish Hill in 1989 and wondering about its past. She went to the Allegheny County Recorder of Deeds office and taught herself how to trace a deed. She got more information from old city directories at the Western Pennsylvania Historical Society.
Her neighbors asked if she could find out about their houses. She didn’t charge them but thought, “Maybe people will pay for this.” Thousands would.
Back then, she would do a history for $100. The price eventually rose to $350, but her format didn’t waver. She would find the year the home was built, the dates of every sale and the names of every person who had lived in the place. Her customers have learned they were in the homes of decorated Civil War veterans and, sometimes, of scoundrels.
Ms. Peterson didn’t dwell in the past, though. She bought her first house on 43rd Street in 1991, taking it from three units to single family at a time when homeownership in Lawrenceville had shrunk dangerously low. She lived there more than 17 years before moving three blocks east to 46th Street in 2009. Along the way, she rehabilitated 12 houses in Lawrenceville and two in Polish Hill, and took pains to leave each one “owned by people who live in it and aren’t shooting up.”
When she had the energy, she would tear house-flippers’ signs off telephone poles and would say that the difference between her rehabs and theirs could be found outside in their dumpsters.
“He tears out everything original on the inside,’’ she said. “Once you get rid of that stuff, it’s not coming back.’’
Her friend, Kitty Julian, said a little green clapboard house on Davidson that Ms. Peterson rehabbed years ago sold “for the most per square foot of any house in Lawrenceville to [that] date.’’ But even through her illness, Ms. Peterson kept her eye on the community at large, and was appointed to the city Historic Review Commission in 2015.
Matthew Falcone, head of Preservation Pittsburgh, served on the commission with Ms. Peterson and loved her ability to “see history through the perspective of ordinary Pittsburghers.’’ She used her encyclopedic knowledge of the neighborhoods to explain why a workman’s house is as important as a lawyer’s house.
“She’s very direct,’’ he said.
Ms. Julian met her in the late 1990s when Ms. Peterson helped found Lawrenceville Stakeholders. It sought to be a counterweight to the Lawrenceville Corp., which at the time had people living outside the neighborhood seeking to turn streets one way “to make it easier for cement trucks to come through,’’ Ms. Julian said.
“We became friends in what I call the torches-andpitchforks stage,’’ she said.
Ms. Peterson had an “almost Rain Man’’ capability to remember details, and “an absolute moral fortitude about right and wrong, particularly when it comes to preserving Pittsburgh’s architectural history,’’ Ms. Julian said. Lawrenceville Stakeholders helped keep the old Iron City brewery complex from being razed.
Ms. Peterson also co-authored “Allegheny City: A History of Pittsburgh’s North Side’’ with the late Dan Rooney. She managed the research and writing even though she was enduring the chemotherapy she loathed. After the book was published in 2013, she made promotional stops with Mr. Rooney.
“She made every event and I know it had to be a lot of effort on her part,’’ Mrs. Rooney said. “But she always was smiling and she’d always take ‘Mr. Rooney’s’ lead. She always referred to him as Mr. Rooney.”
For as much as she liked to laugh, Ms. Peterson didn’t suffer fools, and nobody ever stared down cancer like she did.
She posted furious Facebook messages not entirely suitable for a family newspaper.
“It’s a distraction,’’ she said about such postings. Friends’ reactions made her “feel a little bit better.’’
She loved listening to the Pirates on the radio and the Ramones on the stereo, and there was no shortage of love for her in Lawrenceville. A posse of roughly 20 neighbors and friends helped cared for her in recent years, taking over meals, doing dishes and emptying the litter box of her beloved orange cat, Wee-Bey.
In her kitchen was the same tile that had been in the house in the 1930s, in her parlor a marbleized slate fireplace there since the 1880s.
“I like that nobody ever messed with it very much at all,’’ she said.
Ms. Peterson said in April, “I wanted to make things happen that weren’t going to happen otherwise and I’ve been able to make that happen a whole bunch of times the past 30 years.
“It could be worse. I’m not sure how,’’ she said then. “But I’m alive. I’m doing house histories.’’
A memorial service for Ms. Peterson is planned for January somewhere in Lawrenceville.