Saving monuments to city’s beautiful Black history

It’spast time to preserve the physical places that made Pittsburgh a national center of Black culture. Last week’s groundbreaking on the restoration of the National Negro Opera House is a wonderful and hopeful step in that direction.

The house, on Apple Street in Homewood, has sat vacant and derelict for decades, but it was the first home of the offices of the National Negro Opera Company, the first Black opera troupe in America. Even after the company moved to Washington, D.C., the house remained a center of cultural life, hosting nationally recognized boarders who couldn’t get accommodations in white Pittsburgh, or who just wanted to sample the history for themselves.

Count Basie, Lena Horne, Cab Holloway and Duke Ellington stayed in the illustrious Queen Anne-style home, and Joe Louis and Roberto Clemente visited. It is a mecca on par with the Crawford Grill — which we will return to later.

Generous donors made this act of historic and racial justice possible. Grants came from local foundations all the way to former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura. Many donors were spurred to action by the house’s 2020 inclusion on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of the nation’s most endangered places. They deserve the city’s gratitude.

The preservation of the National Negro Opera House, and its eventual transformation into a museum and performing arts center, is another step in the recent rediscovery of Pittsburgh’s as a center of Black culture.

August Wilson, always revered among dramatists, has become a household name, with the establishment of the August Wilson African American Cultural Center in 2009 and the 2016 release of “Fences,” an Academy Award-winning film based on his play of the same name, starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis. His childhood home on Bedford Avenue in the Hill District is now slated for restoration.

Also in the Hill District, the Art Deco New Granada Theater, which hosted many of the musicians who stayed at the National Negro Opera House, is slated to anchor the New Granada Square development.

Much of this history was brought to light in the acclaimed 2018 book “Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance,” in which historian Mark Whitaker chronicled the unique and astounding contributions of Black Pittsburgh to thenation’s history and culture.

There is, however, one more endangered landmark. The Crawford Grill sits forlornly on the corner of Wylie and Elmore in the Hill District. Steelers great Franco Harris has big plans for the famous jazz club, and we hope they cometo fruition soon.

When complete, this collection of monuments will represent, as far as possible after the ravages of time and racist “urban revitalization,” a fitting tributeto a tremendous history.