... Growing up, the mill was always in North Braddock. So Braddock had no tax base from the mill. Until they built the bop shop. The place across from Unsmoke. That’s fairly recent, in terms of being around ’76, ’77, something like that.
Before that, all of the mill was in North Braddock. All of that area called the bottoms. The projects were there, the towers, that’s where all the african-americans lived. It was called the bottoms.
Now when the mill expanded, they took over that property, and people were forced out, the people who lived in the projects were forced out of that area.
Braddock’s tax base was the stores on the avenue. The stores started shutting down in the 50’s and 60’s. Then the tax base was gone. In the early 60’s was when retail started to really die. It took a while. The people who owned the stores owned the buildings, so they just hung on until the father died before closing up.
Once that generation finished ... (shrugs). And then the GI bill. You’d be able to get low interest loans for homes.
So you could buy a better quality house somewhere else.
You could buy a new house, somewhere else, not next to the mill.
I can’t go to Braddock for longer than 2 hours at a time.
The noise.
I cannot breathe. I get sick. I start coughing stuff up when I leave.
Imagine what it was before those devices were put on to filter it!
The mill was there, and all the industry was on the river, with Josh Steel, the O’Shea Brothers, the cement contractors, ... they built these homes in Braddock, Penn Hills, these - like 50 houses, two story homes that are pretty small, they would be a thousand square feet.
We used to go to the biggest houses they had, and it used to seem like mansions.
Our house was big, but grandmother and grandfather would live downstairs. Upstairs was three rooms. So there was the kitchen, the middle room, there’s our bedroom for myself and my brother, the other room, the front room was a bedroom for my mom and dad. At eleven or twelve, they put us in the attic. So then it became kitchen and living room, and we would live in the attic, and there were six of us in one house. One bathroom. And on the other side, there would be six rooms, but there would be people living upstairs, and people living downstairs.
I look at these places now, and I wonder how did I ever think that these places were nicer than my house?
The houses in North Braddock were always in better shape, cause that’s where the foremen & everybody lived.
Then they merged Braddock, North Braddock, and Rankin, and created the largest segregated school district in the country.
The largest segregated school district?
Yeah.
I want to know more but I don’t know what question to ask.
Nobody from Pittsburgh, nobody wanted to merge with them. Finally they ended up having to go to court, and that’s how Woodland Hills came about. They end up suing, because of creating this segregated school district.
When did that happen?
That was in the - I’m trying to think of when Braddock High School closed. General Braddock ... it ended in ’83, I think thats when they started the Woodland Hills district. & so it was ah - it was probably around - OH it was when the library - ’75, ’76 -
was when they merged?
Yeah they created this - so you had Braddock with a population that at that time was probably ah - probably about 60/40, sixty percent white, forty percent african american, North Braddock was probably 70/30, Rankin was probably 50/50. And all the white kids went to the catholic schools.
All the white kids went to the Catholic schools, and they merged the larger public schools together into a district that was almost entirely african-american?
