I became aware of the Hill District in 1994 when I moved to Pittsburgh. It was my junior year of high school and I wanted to play guitar like Wes Montgomery so I began seeking out jam sessions in the city. A friend told me about a Sunday afternoon session in the Hill District neighborhood and so I began going regularly and sitting in. The jam session took place in a community hall run by the Hill House Association and brought together veteran and beginner musicians to play jazz and blues standards. The audience, largely made up of neighborhood residents, brought food and drinks and would relax and talk while listening to the music. It was at this jam session that I began hearing stories of a musical past where you could listen to Art Blakey, Ahmad Jamal, George Benson and many others in the neighborhood’s various small clubs. Listeners and musicians talked about these places with reverence and I began to wonder what had happened to replace such a vital world with the empty lots that remained.

Around the same time that I began attending the Hill District jam session, I met Dennis Morgan, who sold black and white photos of the Hill District. He often set up his van on Saturdays at an outdoor market and I later learned that these photos were taken by Charles “Teenie” Harris and were a piece of one of the largest visual archives of an African American community in an American city. In 2000, the negatives were won in a court case between Morgan and the Harris family and they were subsequently purchased by the Pittsburgh Carnegie Museum, which established the Charles Teenie Harris Photo Archive in 2002. Charles Teenie Harris was a photographer who ran a private studio from the late ‘30s through the 1970s and also worked for the Pittsburgh Courier, which was one of three nationally distributed black newspapers. Teenie had a great love for photography and for the Hill District and produced over 80,000 large format black and white negatives and approximately 30,000 color negatives. Popularly known as Teenie, the local media community called him “One Shot Harris” because of his economy of shooting photographs. For instance, if on assignment to photograph a politician’s speech he would patiently observe the context, plan his framing and lighting, and study the movements and expressions of the subject. When he felt the time was right he would take a single photo, dispose of the spent flash bulb in his pocket, and leave. Many subjects of his photos remarked that his smile was so infectious that they couldn’t help but return it. Teenie also carefully planned many his images to reflect the perspectives and experiences of those he photographed. Because Teenie focused on context and was free to move and photograph any perspective, many of his images tell a multitude of stories.

In my dissertation, The Crossroads of the World: A Social and Cultural History of Jazz in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, 1920-1970, I explore the history of jazz in the Hill District using conversations with musicians and neighborhood resident about photos from the Teenie Harris archive to examine intersections of place, social life, labor movements, urban development, and music. I’ve expanded on this work in the past decade and am looking forward to contributing a book that centers stories of the Hill District in a history of jazz.

A playlist of albums recorded near the time these artists performed at the Crawford Grill no. 2 (1950-1980)