4. Memory Lane

Norman Brown

My mother for the most part was a stay at home mom until most of us were pretty much grown. She was one of the first African-American women to work at Joseph Horne’s, she was a salesperson there. My father worked for Dravo Corporation. He worked in the steel mill for awhile…doing barge work, welding and stuff like that. I don’t know if this happened in other project areas, but certainly Whiteside Road was, everyone sort of knew everyone at least in the row houses where I lived. There was always somebody looking out the kitchen window or the front window or out the front door or the back door. It was one of those places that, when you hear the term it takes a village, it had that sense about it. That you didn’t get away with sort of anything. It was the type of situation in reference to raising children, at least for my family, when the streetlights came on you need to be on the sidewalk in front of the house or in the house. It was the clear message of please don’t have me come lookin for you. I would love people to know what an incredible positive place it was to be. What a wonderful place it was to grow up. What wonderful basics about how you treat people. What respect is about, I got from being there. What an absolutely exciting thing it was to explore Centre Ave when I was old enough to do it. It was that quality of growing up. It was quite lovely, actually.

Margaret Brown

“Well my connection to the Hill is that I lived on the Hill four different times. I worked on the Hill twice at two different schools, and my father lived on the Hill. So even though I grew up in Homewood, I would visit him here. My dad was born in Ft. Deposit, Alabama. A town that has a gas station and a school. He came to Pittsburgh because he had an uncle that lived here. And he met my mother and they got married here. He lived on the Hill the whole time he was here and he died on the Hill. His name was Mitchell Brown Sr. but they called him Charlie Rue. He did painting and carpentry, but he was also a gambler. They used to call me Chip bc, and I used to get upset and say my name was Margaret, but they’d call me a chip off the old block. I looked a lot like my dad. But he knew a lot of people.

-I was 17…and I was working on the Hill, I worked at the B&M Restaurant, on Centre. It was right next to the Hurricane. Then up the street at Dinwiddie and Centre, there was a restaurant called S&M. So I worked at the B&M from 3pm-11pm, and the S&W from 12am-8am. That was the problem, I didn’t sleep. I was 17, I dropped out of scehool. I got sick. I had to end up in the hospital because I not only worked two jobs, I partied the other 8 hours. At the time I started working down there as a teenager, you could walk anywhere any hour of the day or night. Then it just seemed like at night it got to be less trusted. And they started closing a lot of the places that existed for entertainment. It almost seems like the caring part that was on the Hill before—bc everybody cared about you—you know, they saw you and you were a child, you were their child. And it doesn’t seem to exist anymore. And we need more of that.”