[PRCo] Re: Teenie Harris Collection

[Fred Schneider]

If my memory works as well as I would like (and this morning I have great doubts), Teenie Harris was an African American photographer who lived in the Hill Diztrict and who was noted for his photographs of the neighborhood when it had vitality as a commercial and entertainment center for the
people who lived there.  But the streetcar shows that a lot of the people also went downtown ... maybe the car was taking them to work.
I've seen a large print ... perhaps 11x14 ... at the museum (the means PTM) which showed an entire trolley in front of the Hertron Hill Car House ... taken from a second or third story window across the street.  It may also be one of Mr. Harris' works.  I do not have high speed internet so I'm
not about to scan through all of his photos to find it.   Matt may wish to continue the search.

Interesting how neighborhoods changed over time.  If we were to go back to the period when my great grandparents came to Pittsburgh, downtown was where the German's resided.  Herron Hill was mostly Irish.  The English lived on the North Side and in Manchester.  My authority?  The U. S. Dicennial
Census enumeration worksheets from 1870 and 1880.  My great grandfather ultimately moved himself, his German wife and his tailor shop over to Sandusky Street next to Allegheny General Hospital on the North Side of the River.  Ambition aside, Germans were not supposed to go there.  That was
English territory.   Jean Cerra, a waitress at Max's Allegheny Tavern (Middle and Suismon Sts., North Side, explained that here family experienced problems ... her grandfather had to lie about their origins in order to enroll her future father into the Catholic schools on the North Side ... they
were also German.  One might suspect that my grandparents did a very evil deed by hooking up with each other because one was German and the other was Irish.   That just was not supposed to happen.

I'm not exactly sure when Herron Hill became the domain of Pittsburgh's black population.  Obviously it was sometime after the Civil War and after the 1880s.  (The 1890 census was lost in a fire.)   By 1900 my great grandmother had moved out ti Wilkinsburg and I wasn't looking at ethnicity and
countries of origin in Herron Hill.  Some time around 1927 - 1935 Dad took a great picture of a little Black boy sitting on the stoop of his house up in the hill ... an absolutely fabulous picture ... he threw out the print and the negative when he moved into a retirement home about a decade ago.

fws

Matt Barry wrote:

> I hope this link works.
>
> It is a photo from the Teenie Harris Collection at
> www.images.library.pitt.edu
> of the 85 Bedford in the line's heyday.
>
> http://images.library.pitt.edu/cgi-bin/i/image/image-idx?sid=b4fbd1f4545bb6c5b22eba2eb83b5d0a;g=imls;med=1;c=cmaharris;q1=cmaharris;rgn1=cmaharris_all;evl=full-image;quality=2;view=entry;subview=detail;lasttype=boolean;cc=cmaharris;entryid=x-1996.69.402;viewid=1002621.TIF;start=401;resnum=407
> Matt