Five drunk men pulled Joseph Cawthon from his car at a Garfield intersection one Sunday afternoon in 1958. Cawthon was Black and his attackers were white. The men beat Cawthon while his wife, Christine, watched.
In 2010, the Municipality of Penn Hills demolished the former Cawthon home in Lincoln Park. Penn Hills planners wrote that the 83-year-old house, which, by then, had been abandoned, had no history — a nebulous designation. Penn Hills used federal Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to demolish the former Cawthon home. It was one of hundreds of buildings razed over the past 50 years in the municipality’s Townwide Demolition Program.
The CDBG funds have strings attached to them: Penn Hills is required to comply with the National Historic Preservation Act before spending the money. By ignoring the former Cawthon home’s history and others, Penn Hills has contributed to the root shock — the disintegration of residents’ emotional ecosystem — described in last month’s story. That trauma is a major factor in what Black Lincoln Park residents believe is a long pattern of environmental racism in Penn Hills.
Historic preservation isn’t just about protecting old buildings. “The curious thing about the [Section] 106 process is that it’s not supposed to prevent the destruction of historic resources,” says Jeremy Wells, a former University of Maryland historic preservation professor and the author of several books on historic preservation. “The main intent of [Section] 106 is to get people from the public or groups representing the public to the table to have a conversation with government about what’s going to happen to this place and how to mitigate any of those changes.”
In other words, the Section 106 compliance process mandates community involvement. People in neighborhoods like Lincoln Park are guaranteed a seat at the decision-making table. Yet, none of the Lincoln Park residents interviewed for this story knew about the law or the municipality’s responsibilities to comply with it.
That lack of engagement has costs, including root shock and a greater detachment from the neighborhood’s history as longtime residents die or move away. Few people interviewed for this story remembered the Cawthon family, who last lived in Lincoln Park in the 1980s.
The Cawthons, like many other Black Lincoln Park residents, moved there from Pittsburgh. Some transplants came from parts of the city destroyed by urban renewal: the Hill District, East Liberty, and the North Side. Joseph Cawthon worked as a Pittsburgh streetcar operator when he became the victim of a well-publicized hate crime in 1958. Christine Cawthon later became a community leader active in civil rights.
Though Pittsburgh’s white newspapers didn’t attribute the attack on Cawthon to a cause, the Pittsburgh Courier alluded to it in its reporting: racism. “Get the n—,” Cawthon reportedly told police his attackers said. “[They] began to beat and kick Cawthon. The hoodlums spit in [Cawthon’s] face.”
A forgotten Little Italy
The Cawthons bought their Lincoln Park home in 1954. Peter Katsafanas, a Greek immigrant who owned a successful North Side coffee company, built it in the 1920s. Katsafanas was married to Jennie Rossi, the daughter of Italian immigrants who owned a Lawrenceville gravestone company near Allegheny Cemetery.
Santino and Marianna Rossi, Jennie’s parents, bought eight Lincoln Park lots on Funston Ave. between 1916 and 1920. They built a brick home, but Santino didn’t live there long, dying in 1920. Jennie and her husband Peter built a home next door to Marianna’s house. Other Rossi children got additional lots.
The extended Rossi family essentially created a borgata (Italian for enclave or village), the kernel of one of many early Pittsburgh Little Italys that began similarly.
“So much scholarship focuses on Little Italys with the assumption that a Little Italy has to be in an urban center,” says Melissa Marinaro, who directs the Heinz History Center’s Italian American Program. “It is showing that multi-generational style of living through a physical entity, which is the architecture, the compound. I think that is a valuable piece of material culture and a site.”
By the time Marianna Rossi died in 1952, Black homeowners had begun moving into the Lincoln Park subdivision, a part of western Penn Hills that historically had been majority white. Joseph and Christine Cawthon joined other Black homeowners moving there in the 1950s. They had moved to 1903 Funston Ave. from East Liberty. The Cawthons were living there when Joseph was brutally beaten in 1958. It was their home in 1965 when Christine Cawthon worked with physician and Lincoln Park resident Dr. Charles Greenlee to end the sewage spills and dumping threatening Lincoln Park residents’ health.
Joseph died in 1984, and Christine sold their home the next year. Christine moved to California, and she died there in 1998. A daughter, who briefly worked as a Post-Gazette reporter in the 1970s, also lived in California. Pittsburgh City Paper could not locate any of their heirs.
Before razing it, Penn Hills evaluated the historical significance of the former Katsafanas and Cawthon home at 1903 Funston Ave.
“This structure holds absolutely no historical value for the municipality,” wrote Planning Director Chris Blackwell. “The only historical narrative that can be discussed here is a history of neglect.”
Blackwell, who is retiring in 2025, told City Paper that the paperwork Penn Hills filed with the PHMC for many of the demolished properties contained the same historical evaluation as the one for 1903 Funston Ave. “The form was filled out by me and copied many times, and the particular address was filled in by others,” Blackwell explains.
Marinaro disagrees with Blackwell’s assessment. She also connects the heirs’ property issues found in Lincoln Park and in Black communities throughout the United States to the Italian Americans who lived in Penn Hills before the Black homeowners.
“Knowing that both Italian American families and African American families in those decades were having large numbers of children,” says Marinaro, “I wonder if the legacy of those communities, if you do see more of these issues with heirs’ properties because you have larger families, and because maybe there isn’t a plan in place for the future of the property or what we would call ‘wealth management.’”
Contrary to what Penn Hills wrote about the former Katasafanas and Cawthon home, there’s abundant evidence that both families contributed to Penn Hills and Pittsburgh history. The former Katsafanas Coffee Company building in the North Side is part of a new Allegheny Second Ward Industrial Historic District currently being reviewed by state historic preservation officials.
The Cawthons weren’t anonymous historical figures. Pittsburgh newspapers, Black- and white-run, reported on them multiple times.
The former Katsafanas and Cawthon home isn’t an isolated case. Farther up Funston Av., in 2012, Penn Hills demolished the home where one of Pittsburgh’s top Mafia figures lived for more than 30 years. Joseph Rosa rented a home from his wife’s family (who owned two neighboring houses) before buying it in 1940. Local and federal law enforcement officers believed Rosa was an assassin, allegedly involved in several high-profile killings including gamblers Patsy Arabia in 1934 and Gus Gianni in 1946. Rosa had also been convicted of bombing an East Liberty bar in 1933.
Neither Penn Hills nor the PHMC has any record that the municipality evaluated the former Rosa home in compliance with Section 106.
Other Lincoln Park homes the municipality has razed include the former Buffalo Soldier’s home on Torrance St. described in the first part in this series, and a home once owned by Hill District photo studio owner Luther Johnson and his musician wife, Maudelena.
Many longtime Lincoln Park residents refer to the Johnsons whenever the subject of neighborhood history comes up. “Do you [know] Johnson’s studio?” asked Nanette Tipton in one interview. “Well, the house is torn down; it was across the street.” Tipton has lived on Travella Blvd. since 1956.
Lee, one of the Lincoln Park residents who filed a 2005 complaint with the Pennsylvania Commission on Human Relations alleging racism by Penn Hills, mentioned the Johnsons in her first email to CP: “Maudelena Johnson was a music teacher and taught/coached many talented voice students.” (CP is using her middle name to protect her privacy.)
A bronze plaque marks the last location of Johnson’s Centre Ave. photo studio; there’s nothing but a patch of grass and concrete ruins where the Johnsons’ home once stood. Penn Hills demolished the house in 1997, and the only record that survives is a two-sentence memo (in an obsolete word processing program’s format) authorizing the contract for its razing.
Neglected history
Penn Hills officials say that they comply with the National Historic Preservation Act.
“We have to go to the State Historic Preservation Office when we demolish a home,” says Blackwell.
“I would really like to think everybody did what they were supposed to do,” says municipal manager Scott Andrejchak. He described municipal hearings and notifications in local papers. The hearing notices don’t mention Section 106, and legal ads published in newspapers inform residents that the municipality has evaluated each project and found that there are no significant environmental impacts.
For each home that Penn Hills wants to demolish, planners send the PHMC photos of the building, a list of previous owners, and other information related to building codes violations and tax delinquencies. CP reviewed Penn Hills filings in a PHMC database and others that the municipality provided in response to Right to Know Law requests. None of the records CP reviewed included any historical research to justify the municipality’s conclusions that the homes were not historically significant.
“All of the listed properties … are not of historical significance, have no cultural or societal importance,” reads the letter Penn Hills sent to the PHMC for the 16 demolitions proposed in 2024.
Pennsylvania Deputy State Historic Preservation Officer Andrea MacDonald declined to answer questions about Penn Hills’ National Historic Preservation Act obligations. “We are unable to comment on the obligations of the municipality under Section 106,” MacDonald emailed CP. “That question should be addressed to Penn Hills Township and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, who administers the Community Development Block Grants.”
HUD also declined to speak about Penn Hills’s National Historic Preservation Act compliance obligations. A HUD spokesperson replied to emailed questions, “As the Responsible Entity acting on behalf of HUD, Penn Hills is required to comply with the requirements set forth [in federal regulations], including those relative to public participation.”
Blackwell says that the municipality has never identified any of the homes demolished as historically significant. Sometimes the PHMC responds to one of the municipality’s letters with questions about a particular property, or the agency informs Penn Hills that one of the houses might be historically significant. The municipality doesn’t provide the additional information requested.
“Sometimes, there’s properties that are in an area, it’s not a historic property, but it’s an area that could be deemed historic,” says Blackwell. “Then we can’t use CDBG funds for that. So occasionally we will use other funding, local funds, to demolish a structure.”
“We have never torn down a structure that was deemed historic in any way,” says Blackwell.
Technically, Blackwell is correct. But preservationist Wells suggests Penn Hills evades learning whether homes slated for demolition are historic by pulling CDBG funding and taking an offramp from National Historic Preservation Act compliance.
“There’s not any legal barrier to doing that,” says preservationist Wells. “It sounds like a fairly calculated way to avoid any issues.”
“That’s What’s Happening in my neighborhood”
Each time Penn Hills razes a historically significant home, the neighbors who remember the former occupants and their stories lose more connections to their community. The root shock can spread and claw deeper into the psyches of longtime Lincoln Park residents.
“Black communities across the U.S. have been the victim to so many different types of oppressive tactics,” says Amber Wiley, a University of Pennsylvania historic preservation professor. “One of the issues that Black communities or other marginalized communities face in the preservation field is the long-held bias towards architectural style, architectural significance. There are any number of different measures of significance according to the law and to policy.”
Wiley says that Penn Hills is only evaluating properties based on architectural characteristics and it is ignoring many other criteria that make old buildings historically significant. “You have to say folks have been creating history, living lives, and doing things that are, in fact, socially significant,” she says.
By ignoring Section 106 requirements and contributing to the disintegration of Lincoln Park, Wiley agrees that the municipality’s actions could qualify as environmental racism. “I would say it does or it can fall into that category,” Wiley says.
Preservationist Wells cites research by environmental psychologists to explain how people become attached to their neighborhoods over time. As neighborhoods disintegrate, residents’ mental health is affected.
“I tell my mom, it’s amazing, especially as Black women, that we’re not all up in Western Psych dealing with the crap we have to deal with,” says Lee’s 65-year-old daughter. “You know, the microaggressions and the major aggressions. It’s crazy. Every little thing.” Though she no longer lives in Lincoln Park, she asked that CP not use her name to protect her mother’s privacy.
Contrary to assertions by Penn Hills officials, some Lincoln Park residents say that historic buildings have been demolished. Other buildings, like Charles Greenlee’s former home on Travella Blvd. (which is not slated to be razed — yet), are left to rot with no code enforcement action taken until the property has reached the point of no return. The municipality’s actions, they say, degrade the neighborhood’s historic character.
“They should wonder why can a house, a historically significant home, sit in a state of abandonment and no one wants to do anything because of where it is? But if you changed the ZIP Code on that house, people would be all over it,” says Deborah Matthews Luckett, a Duquesne University professor who grew up on Travella Blvd.
“You see historic neighborhoods in the Upper Hill, Middle Hill, and Lower Hill that are torn down … and tore-up houses all over East Liberty,” says Luckett. “I think all you have to do is just look around and you see it happening elsewhere. So I think it’s almost a foregone conclusion that if I see it happening over here and over here and over here, that’s what’s happening in my neighborhood.”
This article appears in Jan 15-21, 2025.
