Pittsburgh gets serious about old documents
records they had “carefully guarded for the better part of a century” may not survive the move to the new CityCounty Building.
The article described the Rev. D.M. Kemerer as “the custodian” of the city’s records. It isn’t known whether he was the first or the last the city had before Mr. Hartley or whether the carefully guarded records made it through the move.
When he first started the job, Mr. Hartley said, “I spent a week in the basement just to understand what’s down there. There is incredible research potential here.”
The records range from 1870 to the 1960s, with many gaps, he said. Roughly 10,000 cartons of inactive and unprocessed records live in a variety of places “not designed for storage,” including thousands of unindexed maps jammed into shelves.
“We have had nowhere to put them, but we will begin relocating them this summer” to a Bureau of Fire warehouse in the Strip District, he said.
Eventually, all records of value will be sorted, collated, described and indexed, then linked to the Heinz History Center and the University of Pittsburgh archives. The city’s goal is to have its own archives site for public research, Mr. Hartley said.
This is not a novel idea, he said, adding, “Most cities have this.”
The strategic plan states that record keeping by department was long a jumble of whimsy, with no professional guidance, policy standards or resources for preservation.
“Search and retrieval functions remain limited and insufficient,” the report states, “[exposing] the city to seriousrisks associated with efficiency, legal compliance and litigation discovery.”
Besides salvaging locally, the city will try to bring records home, such as the first borough book of the city. It had gone missing in 1895, then was sold to a man in Philadelphia in 1912.
“We found it in the online archives of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania,” Mr. Hartley said.
One day recently, archival intern Charles Succop had the old book open and was typing its contents into a laptop, wearing blue gloves to keep finger oils off the paper.
An interesting fact in the book, he said, was “a $10 charge for false reporting of a fire.” A pretty steep fee, it would be about $188 today. “By the handwriting, you can tell which secretary did the recording.”
Numerous boxes that have been salvaged are marked “Board of Viewers.” Their documents describe testimony of parties aggrieved by fees assessed for public improvements, with photos in some cases.
“Whenever the city improved a street or built a sidewalk, it would assess people a fee based on the value people got out of it. If people protested, the Board of Viewers would hear their case,” Mr. Succop said.
One box of documents holds testimonies from hearings during the 1913-14 leveling of what used to be called the Hump District in Downtown, near what used to be the Lower Hill.
The Hump transcripts were found stored in a chemical-testing lab in Oakland. The transcripts are held together with pink ribbon through two holes along the left side of the pages.
Dentist G. La Rosa and wholesale druggist Guiseppe Cusumano were among dozens of people who testified that construction to level the Hump caused them loss of income because their storefront doorways ended up 12, 14, and 18 feet above the new grade
Mr. Cusumano moved his business, telling the board he lost at least $4,000. That’s almost $100,000 today.
The Board of Viewers still exists, enabled by state statute to view properties subject to eminent domain and to hear grievances in cases of taking by public works, just like in the Hump District days.
“Everyone is assessed based on benefit, whether it’s sewer lines, water lines, the widening of highways,” said Michelle Lally, a member of the panel of three. When government takes property for construction of, say, a sewer line, people can contest the valuation or compensation, she said.
Mr. Hartley said gaps in the records are frustrating.
“One of the great finds was the city planning director’s files from the 1980s,” he said. “It would be great to have every department’s record in every decade. What we hope is that records that have become alienated will start to be returned by people who didn’t realize the [public] value of their mementos.”