Chuck Tillman looks out the edge of a cliff in the Hill District with a view overlooking the Strip District and the North Side, November 2024. (Amaya Lobato Rivas/PublicSource)
Chuck Tillman used to cross paths with the late, great photographer and documenter of the Hill District, Charles “Teenie” Harris. Now he pores over the archive, exploring the neighborhood as it once was and musing: “I gotta be in some of them pictures!”
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Chuck Tillman, just 16 at the time, approached the threshold leading downstairs to the basement. Each step he climbed down brought him closer to the pungent chemical fumes. That smell is still vivid in his memory half a century later, as he tells stories from the very different Hill District of the mid-20th century.
Amid paint cans and a washing machine, Chuck saw Charles “Teenie” Harris in his homemade darkroom equipped with a photographic enlarger, chemical trays, negatives hanging near the ceiling, and paper boxes stacked on shelves.
“I have some negatives to show you,” said the slim, elegant man, unable to conceal the smile forming beneath his neat mustache. Chuck knew the drill. He hovered his face over the magnifying loupe resting on top of a black and white negative sheet. He closed his left eye and peeked in.
“Yeah, Mister Harris. That’s nice,” Chuck blurted, barely looking. His priority at that moment was going to the state store with his best friend, Art, before it closed for the day. “Wait a minute. … That’s Sarah Vaughan!”
Duke Ellington, Nina Simone, Martin Luther King Jr., Lena Horne, Roberto Clemente, Muhammad Ali, Louis Armstrong, John F. Kennedy — the list of talented artists and public figures whose translucent faces shone through Teenie’s negatives seemed never-ending.
From jazz clubs and civil rights events to weddings and family gatherings, Harris’ work as the only full-time photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, a weekly African American newspaper, from 1936 to 1975 allowed him to chronicle ordinary and historic moments of Black people in Pittsburgh. “He showed that Black [people] were deserving,” Laurence Glasco, a University of Pittsburgh history professor and Harris scholar, stated, “that they weren’t people without values, they were good people. Hardworking, respectable Americans. And so, if they’re American, then they deserve to be treated like Americans.”
Chuck, now 72, working as an electrician and musical director at his church, settles in front of his computer, where the Teenie Harris archive on the Carnegie Museum of Art’s website awaits. Since the COVID-19 lockdown, he has spent countless nights sifting through thousands of black-and-white photos, searching for familiar faces and vanished landmarks from his past. It all started when a childhood friend posted an old street photo on Facebook, sparking Chuck’s deep dive into the archive.
So far, he has viewed 20,000 of Teenie Harris’ photos, with 40,000 more to go. Though he has yet to find himself, he holds onto the hope of discovering a long-lost image of his high school band, Five Shades of Soul, performing at a Lemington nursing home — an event he remembers Teenie capturing. “I’m looking for that picture… I gotta be in some of them pictures!”
Chuck hops in his bright red pickup truck parked in front of First Emmanuel Tabernacle Church on Bryn Mawr Road in the Upper Hill, where he has been playing the guitar since 2017. The white goatee on his face contrasts with his black skin, adorned with fine lines and wrinkles. He is no longer the young man he used to be when he pored over negatives in Teenie Harris’ darkroom. Teenie died in 1998, but Chuck remains close to the family through his buddy Art, who married Teenie’s daughter, Crystal.
He slides the key into the ignition, awakening the engine of his red machine with a sudden rev. Chuck drives up and turns left onto Milwaukee Street until he reaches the intersection with Herron Avenue. He points to a convenience store on the corner. “This used to be a drugstore years ago. And this intersection was popping back in the day. All of this was business,” he says.
Chuck merges onto Herron Avenue and drives west toward Wylie Avenue. Sitting on that corner is the abandoned John Wesley AME Zion Church — a historic Black church. Its Romanesque revival-style exterior is tattooed with bubble-lettered graffiti, smashed windows, and yellow caution tape. “This was a great church here,” Chuck explains. Today, the building is condemned.
From the ‘50s to the ‘70s, the church hosted thematic contests that brought the people of the Hill together. Harris, tasked with photographing both the mundane and the exceptional, captured them all dressed in their Sunday best: a proud mother with her toddler wearing a first prize sash after winning the Baby Contest; a group of women in bridal gowns posing on the altar for the June Bride Contest.
On Miller Street, a modern gray apartment now stands where the Church of God in Christ was, before being demolished by Chuck’s cousin. “I used to ask him, ‘Any of that Holy Ghost still left in there?'” Chuck jokes.
Turning right onto Centre Avenue, Chuck enters the Middle Hill. Perched up across the street from a Sunoco Gas Station is the abandoned Terrace Hall Hotel.
Chuck reminisces about the hotel’s glory days and its significance within the Black community. “When some of the big performers would come in town, Jim Crow wouldn’t permit them to go to the Hilton Hotel, so they had to come here,” he recounts.
Terrace Hall Hotel, Centre Avenue, Hill District, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, ca. 1960. (Photo by Charles “Teenie” Harris, born 1908, Pittsburgh, PA; died 1998) Bottom, Terrance Hall Hotel, abandoned, November 2024. (Amaya Lobato Rivas/PublicSource)
Terrace Hall was listed in the Green Book, a travel guide that helped Black travelers navigate the Jim Crow era. Throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s, Harris’ bulb flash immortalized the diverse crowd that passed through the hotel. A group of Fifth Ward committee members celebrating primary election victory. Elegantly dressed dance instructors lined up for the opening of Renee’s Dance Studio. Black political figures of the state, including the Honorable Andrew M. Bradley, Pennsylvania’s budget secretary, and K. Leroy Irvis, speaker of the state House, enjoying the hotel’s buffet.
When, as a young boy, Chuck cruised down the streets of the Hill with his grandmother, he was surrounded by the lively businesses of a self-sufficient neighborhood. Today, as he drives up Centre Avenue, he rolls down his window to take in the sight of vacant lots and boarded-up buildings.
“You wouldn’t have to go anywhere to shop. Everything was right here,” he says as he drives past the corner of Centre and Kirkpatrick, where Gordon’s Shoe Store once sat. From the ‘30s to the ‘50s, Teenie captured construction workers in the process of paving Kirkpatrick Street. Today, large wooden planks cover the abandoned property’s display windows, and there are no shoe stores in the Hill.
A couple of blocks down the avenue, Chuck stumbles upon the scaffold-covered shell of the former New Granada Theater.
The theater was renowned for showing Black films, a rarity at the time. Young Chuck would pay a quarter and stay there all day long, watching movies and eating popcorn. Though the theater shut down in the 1970s, there have been sporadic attempts to revitalize this historic site. In 2023, the Hill Community Development Corporation launched a construction and revitalization project that includes apartments, performance spaces, retail shops, restaurants and 40 units of affordable office space.
Right turn down to Reed Street, then another one onto Crawford Street, the westernmost edge of the Hill. Chuck looks out his window at the vast, flat parking lot used for PPG Paints Arena, a 15-year-old occupant of the original Lower Hill area, originally demolished to make way for the Civic Arena.
Chuck imagines the streets that used to go across the area. He thinks about the countless houses, businesses and people displaced so the city could build parking. “What are you gonna do when the city says ‘go?’” Chuck ponders as he drives up the deserted street. Fifty-six years ago, Teenie Harris photographed a minister and two boys carrying a crucifix and a picture of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. leading a march down the sidewalk of this very street.
At the top of Crawford, Chuck turns right onto Bedford Avenue, then left onto Manilla Street, and finally right onto Cliff Street. He drives past a vacant lot where his aunt’s old rundown house used to be. On one corner of Cliff and Ledlie Street, a construction crew builds a new house next to another vacant lot previously occupied by Chuck’s grandmother’s home.
Chuck makes a left turn onto the corner of Ledlie and Arcena Street. He puts the truck in park and jumps out. A sense of childlike wonder possesses him as he crosses the street. He hurries down a grassy lot at the edge of a cliff with a view overlooking the Strip District and the North Side.
“This was all my stomping grounds,” Chuck says through a boyish grin.
Chuck Tillman runs down the street to an empty lot on Ledlie and Arcena Street, November 2024. (Amaya Lobato Rivas/PublicSource)
When he was a kid, this used to be nothing but woods. To his right, a paved path leads to a dense thicket. Chuck used to hike up there with his friends without his grandmother’s knowledge; she always said it was too dangerous. Now, Chuck wanders all the way to the cliff’s edge. This time, it is not his grandmother yelling out “Chuckie, get back here!” that makes him take a step back, but a feeling of vertigo.
Back in his truck, Chuck makes his way down onto Bedford again. He drives past Miller Elementary School and sees the playground he helped build when he worked in construction as a young man. He remembers sitting around it while the asphalt dried to ensure the schoolchildren did not write their names on it. As he keeps driving down the block, he notices an intersecting street sign labeled Memory Lane.
“That’s ironic,” Chuck thinks. “Now why do they call it Memory Lane? I don’t know, because it used to be nothing but woods back there.” In reality, a housing project called Whiteside Road was demolished to make way for Memory Lane.
Photographs appearing here include parts of the Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive, a living resource of 20th-century American life as seen through the lens of Charles “Teenie” Harris stewarded by Carnegie Museum of Art. Learn more about the archive at https://carnegieart.org/art/charles-teenie-harris-archive/.
Amaya Lobato Rivas is a photojournalism intern at Next Generation Newsroom and works as a freelance photographer. She is a senior at the University of Pittsburgh. She can be reached at amayalobato27@gmail.com.
This article first appeared on PublicSource and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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