by Selene dePackh
This is a story about Pittsburgh, but it isn’t about steel mills. They’re impossible to avoid in this city’s history, so yes, the mills loom over the narrative field, a shifting surface pocked with researchers’ seemingly random holes. Their acrid stink still carpets parts of the city during not-infrequent inversions, when the warm toxicity is trapped under a colder lid of air and spreads out. Most days it stays in the less affluent townships to the south and east, nearer the few remaining mills.
As a fiction writer, I’m reminded to create structure, the story line following a specific pattern of rises and falls to a satisfying resolution. I’ve written a number of ghost stories, and there’s some of that here. There are unquiet spirits, but perhaps not in the usual sense. This isn’t fiction but is the closest my spouse Suzanne’s research into her Pittsburgh family can come to describing a hidden terrain. I’ll play Watson to Suzanne’s Holmes. The story is as much about her search as it is about what she’s found, and everything is subject to the modifier “so far.”
This project started as an effort to find Sue’s father’s birth parents, then opened into a study of lives she uncovered—tantalizing fragments of human beings whose existence wasn’t worth recording beyond simple demographic facts filled in on official forms.
The first piece of information we were able to pry out of his tightly locked box of secrets came a decade after my father-in-law died of ALS in 2003. He’d refused any attempt to open the lid on the protocols of adoption privacy, even when one of his grandchildren was born with a congenital heart defect. After her father-in-law’s death, Sue respected his wish that his past remain silent. She only began collecting what scant hints there were a decade later when the echoes of that concern were superseded by her own wish to understand who she is.
James C***, Sr. was dear to me; the Jim I knew was a class act who was, I deeply believe, protecting the honor of his birth mother and giving his adopted parents their rightful place as his “real” family. Sue remembers her adoptive grandmother with affection made blurry because Rita C*** died when she was five. The paternal grandfather she grew up with lived longer but didn’t accrue much endearment along the way, not that he ever seemed to give fondness much value.
Sue knew her father had been adopted from a foundling home run by nuns, the subject of dark insinuations by her grandfather. He’d told a story to explain why Jim obsessively placed his shoes at a particular spot at the end of his bed, that it was in remembered terror of the strict conditions there. A single adoption document from the Roselia orphanage among her father’s papers named him as “James W***”, a surname with no surrounding information.
Sue contacted the Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill, a Vincentian order who’d established the Roselia Foundling and Maternity Asylum in the late 1800s and operated it until it closed in the early 1970s. The archivist sister who responded was gracious, giving what information adoption privacy laws of Pennsylvania then permitted, including a poignant birth certificate with a nameless mother, featuring only her thumbprint and baby James Francis’s footprints, but no surname. She gave the mother’s house name as “Louise.”
The balance of the fifty dollars less the amount of “Louise’s” money orders that Sister B*** referred to in her note was never paid. Sue sent the full fifty dollars, albeit in twenty-first century legal tender, noting on the check that it was to clear her grandmother’s debt. The sister sent a handwritten thank-you note, calling the payment “a kind gesture and a clever way of identifying it.”
Baby James had been adopted too young to have been placing his own shoes anywhere. The strictness had emanated from Sue’s grandfather, no surprise.
In fact, Roselia was a compassionate part of last-resort Pittsburgh critical child welfare and protection services. Those asylums for orphaned, and more often relinquished, children were foundational to many industrialized urban centers. A household could be destroyed by the loss of a job or the incapacitation of a breadwinner, not uncommon in an era of barely reported mill accidents and toxic conditions. International conflicts made the families of broken soldiers further victims of warfare. Too many mouths to feed meant hard decisions for parents living on the edge of survival themselves.
The building housing Roselia when my father-in-law passed through was in an area of the city where the Bluff borders Crawford-Roberts, with a formidable view of Downtown and across the river to the steel mills of the South Side. It was a block from the now-renovated August Wilson house, an interactive museum celebrating the playwright and regional Black culture of his time.
In any case, Jim’s mystery yielded no further until the law changed in 2017. Having obtained a birth certificate from the state, Sue contacted the Seton Hill archivist. She now had the name of her blood grandmother, Grace W***. Since Grace was twenty-eight when she gave birth to James in Roselia’s maternity ward, it seemed possible he might have had older siblings. The archivist couldn’t shed light on that but mentioned a possible path to finding out whether Grace had relinquished other children. She suggested Sue contact the county Orphans’ Court and request a search agent be assigned to the case. The suggestion didn’t work out. There was no protocol by which Sue could obtain that service.
In the 1940 census, Sue found two children surnamed W***, whose ages suggested they might be her aunt and uncle. Seven-year-old Virginia and three-year-old Richard were on the tally of the Pittsburgh and Allegheny Home for the Friendless. The Home for the Friendless was no Roselia. Children were surrendered there but were also brought in from the streets. There was no maternity wing where mothers could briefly care for their babies, whether to take them home afterward or relinquish them for adoption.
That orphanage has evolved into Pressley Ridge, a multi-state organization providing institutional foster care and residential “behavioral health” services for neurodivergent minors. As an autistic, I get a shudder when I hear terms like “behavioral health.” They rarely have rarely portended a subjectively positive experience for people like me.
In the census, Virginia is listed as having been in the “same place” five years earlier, although it’s unclear whether that refers to the institution or the city. She clocked four hours of work the prior week.
More recently, Sue uncovered a marriage record for a sixteen-year-old girl of the same name and birthdate range who was living with her parents in another part of the state. In the document, her father permits her to wed an older man. It’s unclear whether the Virginia at the orphanage was related to Grace or to the family that signed their daughter away to marry as a minor. It’s unlikely she would have been both. The census is the only evidence of Richard W***.
~
I moved to the Arlington neighborhood of Pittsburgh in 1993, escaping a disastrous seventeen-year marriage. With proceeds from inherited property in the Chesapeake tidewater area, I could afford a home with a yard large enough for my two huskies, while I studied computer graphics. I knew no one beyond my real estate agent and wore my alien status like a neon jumpsuit. A few neighbors reached out, likely as a screening process, which I abjectly failed.
They warned me never to turn east on Spring Street, never mind that maps of the notoriously labyrinthine area showed it intersecting the top of Arlington Avenue, an easy trek even in bad weather down to the art galleries and coffee houses of the South Side flats. No, that way lead through “the heights.” Patiently, they repeated that I should stick to the smaller, steeper, slipperier-in-winter streets, rather than the wide switchbacks of the upper part of the avenue. When I stayed obtuse, my hosts responded with a matter-of-fact racism that left me gobsmacked.
The invitations to stop over for a soda ended and my house began to be on the receiving end of waves of minor vandalism, particularly after Sue moved in.
Arlington Heights is a small neighborhood in the eastern Hilltop area of Pittsburgh that is completely surrounded by the larger neighborhoods of Arlington and the South Side Slopes. Arlington Heights was originally composed of 660 housing units built by the Housing Authority of Pittsburgh in 1942. Initially, the residents of these units consisted solely of war workers who had lived too far from their jobs or were living away from their families. These units later turned into public housing, though much of the barracks-style housing has been demolished in recent years. —Pittsburgh SNAP, Dept. of City Planning, circa 2010
Sue and I lived in that house for a decade and never knew that on the eastern tip of the hill, beyond the heights, was a small, overgrown graveyard with a commanding winter view of the Monongahela River and the remains of the J&L Steel Hazelwood Works. In an unmarked plot, only a short walk from our front door, lay the woman who’d given my father-in-law up to the care of the Sisters of Charity. Perhaps that’s not as chilly as it seems; Sue remembers long walks with her mother and brothers in Allegheny Cemetery when she was a child. It was an oasis of green, with trees and ponds along with the darker mysteries of rotting mausoleums. There aren’t any mausoleums in the little graveyard where her grandmother rests, but it’s a pretty place in its neglected way.
~
Once Sue had Grace’s full identity, she joined an online genetics and genealogy group and began searching the records there using her grandmother’s name and her own DNA. She found Grace’s birth certificate through the site, learning that Louise was her middle name. Grace showed up in the family tree of a man who was the nephew of the husband she found late in life. Sue made a helpful connection with Grace’s nephew-in-law, although photos he later sent to us that he thought were of her turned out not to be.
More pieces fell into place. Various documents showed Grace at several addresses in the South Side area. She was delivered by midwife in a row house on Carey Way, an alley a block from East Carson Street, the main road through the South Side flats. On the other side of Carson, down to the river and stretching the length of the neighborhood, J&L Steel’s South Side Works blew fire day and night, roaring, clanging and darkening the sky with black smoke that brought weakened hearts and damaged lungs.
I spent nearly four decades of my life in renovation and restoration of old structures, first in Maryland, then Maine, back to Maryland, and finally here in Western Pennsylvania. Every pre twenty-first century building I’ve worked on locally has that black hidden in its walls. To rip off the covering of an old wall here is to uncover and release shovelfuls of that fine, deadly dust. When we gutted our East End house, behind the rough lath and horsehair plaster, the industrial residue lurked so thick. When we were done for the day, we had to towel-wipe holes in our caked-on carapaces to free our faces enough to function in the civilized world before we could change clothes and leave. For those whose labor put the dust there, the work was never done. The mills—the mile-plus of the South Side Works, winding down the riverbank was one of multiple behemoths—never slept. The few remaining mills still make this area one of the most polluted in the country; the specs of chemical-laden powder they deposit in a dark film over anything left outside for a season are fine enough to penetrate the blood-brain barrier.
As she looked deeper into her own background, Sue kept uncovering families who’d lost more children than lived to adulthood. Coronary and pulmonary problems predominated, and few members lived to old age. It’s easy for me to grieve the loss of the magnificent hulks of blast furnaces that used to loom up, as I drove down the slopes, imagining how they must have looked when their fierce glow obscured the stars. They’ve been replaced by a tacky, consumer-oriented development with a Cheesecake Factory and the American Eagle Outfitters headquarters. I hate that sea change, but I’m not from around here.
What remains of Grace’s Carey Way home is now under the concrete of a Goodwill building that takes up most of the block. It fronts on Carson; the rear of it comes to the edge of the pavement, so no footprint of a tiny yard or front steps remains, even as a faded trace on the ground.
The family (Grace, her parents and two brothers) resided in the South Side flats for several decades. One brother died in action in WWII. Her father, a laborer who worked for the city, died of mouth cancer and arteriosclerosis in 1950. After that, she lived with her mother in a duplex at the top of the slopes until at least 1953. Her husband’s death certificate shows she was living with him a few blocks back downhill. There’s some question whether they were legally married, or it was a common law arrangement.
He seems to have been a hard luck guy, making the newspaper in 1940, after fleeing the scene of an accident that left the victim with fractures and lacerations. He lived on Mission Street then and when he died of pneumonia at the age of fifty-two. Grace then moved a few blocks to South 18th Street, where she died of heart disease in 1974, dead on arrival at South Side Hospital.
~
Sue wanted to pay respects at Grace’s grave but didn’t know where it was. Finally, she caught a break.
Sue had made contact with Grace’s nephew-in-law Denny S*** through Ancestry.com. In Sue’s note to him, she wrote, “So I decided, for the heck of it, to contact the funeral home that handled her mother’s arrangements. I figured that families usually have a history with a particular funeral home, so I gave it a shot…he told me her death date, confirmed that she had a brother Edward (which I had already found out), and he told me that she had married and told me her husband’s name and that he had pre-deceased her [and] that Grace was buried at Loretto and gave me Lot #4, Section A, Range 2…that’s how I knew that her mother and older brother Albert were both buried there, too. I’m not sure that the family plots are all together at the cemetery. So, Grace’s married name led me to your family tree.”
Denny wrote back to tell her that the location was in the W*** plot. He expressed surprise that she wasn’t beside her husband, buried at Loretto in his family plot, and found it hard to believe someone hadn’t gotten her a stone. In fact, the only member of the W*** family at Loretto with a grave marker is Albert, the WWII soldier, whose stone and bronze eagle were provided by a grateful nation.
Grace lost her late-in-life companion in February 1966 and her mother a month later, spending the remaining eight years of her life alone. She lies between her mother and older brother, a crumbling ceramic cemetery stake with just the lot number marking the place. Her mother’s plot is an empty space of sometimes-mown grass. It’s a windy place in March, high on the ragged hill. The mostly vacant Arlington Heights project offers little noise to break the sound of air rushing through trees. There’s a small ballpark nearby; perhaps voices drift over her grave on the summer breezes.
Denny S*** had some photographs on his family tree that were supposed to be of Grace, but he later wrote to say they were of someone else. Even the open question of her face is erased in the mind’s archive because the potential that was once there has been overridden by an incorrect answer that won’t move aside for an unknown.
Sometimes I wonder whether Sue’s father would have visited Grace, either when she lived in a succession of shabby little houses on the slopes or afterward, here in the wind on the hilltop, had he known where she was. Old Pittsburghers like Jim C**** are notorious for their reluctance to cross rivers, and he lived his life north of the Monongahela, first in Lawrenceville, where his adopted father worked in the steel industry. The wave of suburbanization kept calling, and an FHA-subsidized loan in the early 1970s finally let him move out to the northern suburbs, where his children could have grassy lawns to play, in places other than cemeteries.
Grace’s younger brother died in 1993. He’s buried in the stately, better-maintained Calvary Cemetery on the far side of the river, beyond the crest of the hill as one looks through the boundary fence of Loretto. Still with its working railyards, the mill outline remains. It’s now called Hazelwood Green, a performance and festival venue and site of several tech companies. Spreading along the bank separating the two graves, the mill site leads upriver, farther into the past.
~
The Janus-faced woman in the illustration above is taken from a photograph of a group of mostly mothers and young children. They’re arranged on what are apparently the back steps of the old, long-demolished Hazelwood Public School cement stairs with oddly spiked cast iron railings that would have discouraged loitering. It was taken to document the Milk Station there by the Pittsburgh city photographer tasked with recording municipal projects. Neighborhood families would have brought their kids to the site for routine medical exams and supplemental nutrition. Sue’s mother remembers taking her to what were called well-baby clinics in the 1960s; these seem to have been an evolution of the program.
I came across the photograph while searching the Pitt University archives for images from Hazelwood at about the time of the death of another of Sue’s more distant relatives, Jadwiga D***. Although I can’t find anyone on those steps who exactly meets her demographic (woman in her early thirties, three children, two girls ages seven and nine and a boy age four) I keep scanning it for her. Just as the pictures from Denny turned out not to be Grace yet still represent her, the motion-blurred woman is Jadwiga to me. Her movement is what remains of her, caught in the long exposure of a glass-plate negative.
Sue learned of her genetic relationship to Jadwiga, still unclear in the particulars, when she looked more deeply into the genealogy of the man she suspected was her biological grandfather. DNA matches of second to fourth cousins turned up, with his family being the common denominator. Using that as a working hypothesis and incorporating information from the trees of her genetic cousins, (not always consistent or necessarily accurate), Sue constructed a theoretical tree for herself.
Nothing has come along to disprove the diagram’s main structure, although as it retreats deeper into a Polish past, where ethnic identities were suppressed by the Russian Empire: hard facts become elusive. As she researched these unfamiliar relatives, Sue reached Jadwiga and got a jolt. Because other people had her in their online trees and had filled in the basic documents, the facts surrounding her death were readily available.
Jadwiga died of a septic abortion in November of 1920. It wasn’t a compassionate time for a woman needing medical care after a botched abortion. Her death certificate stated she’d performed the procedure on herself, but there are reasons for doubt. By then, many of the midwives who traditionally helped women terminate their pregnancies had been driven off by the “modern” medical system of college-educated male doctors, but sympathetic doctors did exist and were severely prosecuted when caught.
Abortion had only been illegal in the US since 1867. Prior to then, the law had little to say. The general sentiment was that before quickening, when the baby begins to move in the womb, usually around the fourth month of pregnancy, what a woman did with her body was her business. Abortifacients, marketed as medication to help restart faltering menstrual cycles, were readily available. After the baby had quickened, abortion became murder.
The change in laws reflected a puritanical drift to American society, and to the opinions of its male-only voters. Birth control, likewise widely available and also the province of midwives, was severely curtailed during the 1870s.
By the 1920s, at least in Chicago, a city not unlike Pittsburgh at the time, women even on their deathbeds were aggressively questioned by law enforcement if abortion was suspected. According to Leslie R. Reagan’s 1997 When Abortion Was a Crime, enormous pressure was put on women receiving medical treatment for botched abortions to give up the provider and anyone who’d helped in obtaining the procedure. Family members who visited dying patients were coerced to give each other up. If someone helped Jadwiga end her pregnancy, it’s possible she protected them by claiming full responsibility.
Jadwiga’s husband’s sworn statement at her inquest stated he knew nothing of its cause. Frank D*** was illiterate, signing with an “X”. There’s evidence in earlier documents that as a native Polish speaker he may have struggled with English.
The couple and their three children had been through rough times. Events of the years prior to her death had put devastating pressure on families like theirs.
First, the end of WWI knocked the steel industry off its wartime production status, leaving it burdened with overcapacity and idle workers. Returning soldiers found little employment and wages dropped. Steelworkers called an industry-wide strike. With the weak hand they had to play, they lost the conflict decisively; the labor movement would take decades to recover. Those soldiers also brought home influenza that would kill two-thirds of a million Americans, in waves sometimes so heavy they outpaced the ability to bury the dead.
The war allowed women to step forward and prove their competence, and those in a position to advocate for themselves did so. After the Armistice, President Woodrow Wilson finally looked favorably on women’s suffrage. The US Congress approved the 19th Amendment in the spring of 1919, and the country ratified it in the summer of 1920. There’s a cardboard placard behind the blurred woman in the original milk station photo announcing that the schoolhouse is a polling place, although none of the people on the steps could legally vote at the time.
Frank D*** worked at J&L Steel Hazelwood Works, but we don’t know if he was involved with the steelworkers’ strike. J&L wasn’t kind to union organizers. Its self-founded, privately policed company town, Aliquippa, thirty miles north of Pittsburgh, was called Little Siberia for the ruthless discipline applied to the workers who lived there.
In the 1920 census, a Frank D*** who matches the demographic profile appears as an inmate of the Pittsburgh City Home and Hospital. This institution became the infamous Mayview a few years later. The census was conducted in February. We haven’t found when Frank was released. He began the citizenship process in April and was present in November for his wife’s inquest.
Frank probably lost his mill job while he was institutionalized, if not before. Jadwiga was always “Housewife” in the records. If she did anything to make ends meet, it wasn’t in an occupation listed on an official form. There wasn’t a social safety net beyond the milk stations, and what union brotherhoods and faith-based charities could offer.
The D***s owned a small house on Path Way, a short alley a block south of the railyard that served J&L’s Hazelwood Works. Like at Grace’s home on Carey Way, the noise, smell and soot would have been a constant onslaught. The trains’ rumble must have made the ground tremble under their beds. They’d bought the newly built house in 1913, around the time of the birth of their second child. That house still stands, although the world around it has changed into what would probably seem another planet to its original occupants.
Frank’s institutionalization could be just the result of a man overwhelmed by towering challenges, but an incident in Little Siberia about a decade and a half later, during another push to unionize leaves room for doubt. A town of some 27,000 people (of whom 9,000 worked for J&L) is small enough that when things happen to coworkers, it gets noticed.
First, there were beatings, firings and deportations back to an Eastern Europe that many had risked everything to escape. There were jailings by company police and evictions from company-owned housing. Then, there were the disappearances of union men. The governor of Pennsylvania finally heard about it and sent in an investigator, Clinton Golden. Golden uncovered the story of George Isosky, a destitute ex-steelworker crippled in a mill accident who’d been organizing for the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers.
Isosky had been disappeared from the local jail after a bad beating. J&L operatives approached his wife with papers to sign him into Torrance, an institution seventy-five miles away with staff capable of handling the criminally insane. It remains the state’s primary forensic psychiatry facility. Mrs. Isosky refused, and Isosky vanished. Golden found him at Torrance and unraveled a series of officials—from the jail doctor, a local judge, and the Lunacy Commission overseeing the asylum—who’d arranged for his incarceration. The governor intervened, and Isosky was finally freed.
Frank did declare his intention to become a US citizen in April of 1920, perhaps to protect himself from the risk of deportation. There’s no evidence of him actually becoming one. Whether Frank had been threatened with anything similar, he no longer owned the house on Path Way by the 1930 census. His children with Jadwiga appear to have gone to Michigan. In the coroner’s papers, there’s a statement by a Michael D*** who may have been his son by an earlier marriage. After that, he and Frank faded from the public record.
~
Hazelwood seems to live in two time dimensions simultaneously. In the community bounded by Tecumseh, Second Avenue, Elizabeth, and Langhorn, where Path Way lies, it’s mostly the late 1980s after the body of the Steel Behemoth finally stopped twitching. Within those ten blocks is also the Homestead Brewing Company, now on the National Historic Register, resurrected as a craft brewing cooperative. There are trendy restaurants on Second Avenue, and the long-demolished school with those spiked railings has been replaced by a freshly accredited steel-and-glass branch of the Carnegie Public Library system. Just across Tecumseh, where trains fueling the blast furnaces chuffed and wailed, there’s a surreal landscape combining the routes of century-old streets and ceremonial-looking geometric grassy mounds. It forms the maze route for a self-driving vehicle development company.
If one were to rise in the air above Path Way and look across to the hill on the far riverbank, one would see a patch of sloped lawn that’s Loretto Cemetery. Small shreds left of different women who needed to not be mothers again. Different, unknowable reasons and consequences, both ending in erasure. Husbands lost to the poisonous grinding of the mills in different ways, voices drowned in the sediments of time. All we can do is put a few lines of their lives back on the page.
Jadwiga was taken to South Side Hospital on November 2nd, 1920, the date of the first US general election in which all otherwise-qualified women could legally vote. She died four days later.
We looked for the footprint of the old South Side Hospital, where so many of Sue’s ancestors had passed. It was disorienting because articles about the new hospital said it was built on the site of the old one, but no matter how I turned the maps around, I couldn’t match that up with the evidence on the ground. After going home, we realized it had to be not under the abandoned and now condemned “new” hospital built back in the 80s, but under the parking lot and raised courtyard/parklet across the street.
It was unsettling to stand there, both calm and disquieting, imagining those deaths in the space over my head. The ghosts weren’t below, they were in the air, with Jadwiga and Grace somehow meeting in the wind blowing across the hilltop.
Images
[i] Probable grave marker of Grace W*** 1911-1974, Loretto Cemetery, Pittsburgh, PA. October 2021. Photo by the author.
[ii] Baby James and his adoptive parents. 1942, photographer unknown. Digital darkroom work by the author.
[iii] Finding Grace. Probable grave marker of Grace W*** with flowers. March 2024. Photo and digital darkroom work by the author.
[iv] Paragraph from Letter from Sr B***, Sisters of Charity, Seton Hill. April 14, 2016.
[v] Baby James at Roselia. 2024. Photo collage by the author. Component credits:
- Baby James Roselia Birth Certificate. 1940
1. Baby James legal adoption papers. 1942
2. Baby James dietary instructions from Roselia. 1941
3. Note from Sr B*** on Roselia letterhead regarding initial adoption agreement. 2016
4. Roselia Foundling and Maternity Hospital. Listing from St. Regis Association’s Catholic yearbook and directory of Pittsburgh Diocese, 1910. University of Pittsburgh, Historic Book Collection
[vi] Virginia and Richard at the Pittsburgh Home for the Friendless. Photo collage by the author. Component credits:
a. 1940 Census listing.
b.Photo of Pressley Street location, 1861 https://www.pressleyridge.org/about/history/
[vii] Arrival circa 1993. 2024. Photo collage by the author. Component credits:
a. Allegheny County Office of Property Assessments, Allegheny County, PA, 2024.
b. National Tube Co. Engineering Department, Map of the Pittsburgh district showing railroad terminals and location of iron and steel works having track connections (Williams Engraving Co, 1906) Collection of the Library of Congress.
c. Montrésor, John. Copy of a sketch of the Monongahela, with the field of battle. 1755? Map, hand-drawn. Collection of the Library of Congress.
[viii] 2700 Block of Carey Way with Matrix. 2024. Photo collage by the author. Component credits:
a. 2700 Block of Carey Way, March 2024. Photo by the author.
b. South Side Flats, South Side Slopes, Arlington Heights, Arlington. Plate 26. 1910. G.M. Hopkins & Co. University of Pittsburgh, Western Pennsylvania Maps Collection
[ix] View of Hazelwood Railyards from Loretto Cemetery, March 2024. Photo by the author.
[x] Mother of Sorrows. Photo collage by the author. Component credits:
a. Hot Metal Bridge, Northbound. March 2024. Photo by the Author.
1. Hazelwood Milk Station. 1919. Emil Kloes? University of Pittsburgh, City Photographer Collection.
[xi] Path from Jadwiga D*** to Suzanne C***. 2024. Based on family tree developed by Suzanne C*** on an Ancestry [dot] com template in 2021.
[xii] Death Certificate of Jadwiga D***. 1920. Digital darkroom work by the author.
[xiii] Statement from Frank D***, Coroner’s Inquest into the Death of Jadwiga D***. 1920. University of Pittsburgh, Coroner’s Office Records, 1887-1976.
[xiv] Triptych of Events: WWI Armistice, Spanish Flu, Steel Strike. 2024.Photo collage by the author. Component credits:
- The war of the nations: portfolio in rotogravure etchings: compiled from the Mid-week pictorial. (New York, NY), Jan. 1, 1919. https://www.loc.gov/item/19013740/
- Her sister had not seen Mrs. Brown for almost a week, and with Mr. Brown a soldier in France, she became so worried she telephoned Red Cross Home Service which arrived just in time to rescue Mrs. Brown from the clutches of influenza. United States, 1918. [29 November date received] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017668532/.
- Militia on guard, “Etna i.e., Aetna Standard Sheet Mill,” Bridgeport, Ohio. Bridgeport United States Ohio, 1909. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2024691940/.
- The Threatening Steel Strike., 1919. Sept. 22. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2002695618/.
- Latest news from the steel district – State troopers ready for a hurry call at Farrell, Pa., 1919. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2002699935/.
[xv] Frank D*** at Future Mayview. 2024. Photo collage by the author. Component credits:
a. 1920 United States Census listing.
b. Mayview Hospital. 1916. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection.
[xvi] Path Way. 2024. Photo collage by the author. Component credits:
a. Path Way Facing West. March 2024. Photo by the author.
b. Path Way Western Terminus. March 2024. Photo by the author.
c. Path Way Eastern Terminus. March 2024. Photo by the author.
d. Hazelwood. Plate 31. 1911. G.M. Hopkins & Co. University of Pittsburgh, Western Pennsylvania
Maps Collection.
e. Promotional animation screenshot. 2024. Aurora Tech
Moving us Towards a Self-Driving Future | Aurora
[xvii] Site of Old South Side Hospital. March 2024. Component credits:
a. South Side Hospital Parklet, Mary St. March 2024. Photo by the author.
b. Old South Side Hospital. Circa 1900. South Side Hospital (brooklineconnection.com)
c. South Side Fact Sheet. 2009. Pittsburgh History and Landmarks.
SS Fact Sheet-6-2005 (phlf.org)
[xviii] South Side Hospital in Two Time Dimensions. 2024. Photo collage by the author. Component credits:
a. Twenty-first and Mary Streets, Looking East (Reconstruction of Mary Street Photo) March 2024.
Photo by the author.
b. Mary Street. 1913. Emil Kloes? University of Pittsburgh, City Photographer Collection.
c. South Side Flats, South Side Slopes, Arlington Heights, Arlington. Plate 26. 1910. G.M. Hopkins
& Co. University of Pittsburgh, Western Pennsylvania Maps Collection.
d. Screenshot, Mary St at 21st . 2024 Allegheny County GIS Viewer.
Allegheny County GIS Viewer | Allegheny County GIS Open Data (arcgis.com)
[xix] The Ghosts Above Our Heads. 2024. Photo collage by the author. Component credits:
a. Parklet Steps-Eerie Light. March 2024. Photo by the author.
b. Hazelwood Milk Station. 1919. Emil Kloes? University of Pittsburgh, City Photographer Collection.
Web References
1918 Pandemic (Spanish Flu):
· Rampaging Invisible Killer Stalks the Entire Country! (loc.gov)
· https://newsinteractive.post-gazette.com/flu-1918
Asylums:
· Pittsburgh City Home and City Hospital at Mayview History, by Fr. George T. De Ville, Catholic Chaplain,
Feb. 25, 2009 (rootsweb.com)
· Mayview State Hospital – Asylum Projects
· Torrance State Hospital – Asylum Projects
Coroner’s Records:
· Coroner’s Office Records, Allegheny County, Pa. | Digital Pitt
Hazelwood:
· Hazelwood Green
· News Coverage – Pittsburgh Green Story
· 2017_Issue_1-complete.pdf (heinz.org)
· The House That Beer Built: An Inside Look at the New Hazelwood Brewhouse | Pittsburgh Magazine
Historical Maps and Photos:
· Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection | Digital Pitt
· G.M. Hopkins Company Maps | Historic Pittsburgh
· Digital Collections, Available Online | Library of Congress (loc.gov)
Roselia:
· Roselia Foundling and Maternity Asylum – Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill (scsh.org)
· https://scsh.org/about-us/archives
· My birth certificate says I was born at the Roselia Hospital, but I can’t find where it was.
Can you tell me more about it? | You Had to Ask | Pittsburgh | Pittsburgh City Paper (pghcitypaper.com)
· Patterns of Harmony and Dissonance in the History of Roselia Foundling Asylum and Maternity Hospital
(duq.edu)
South Side Hospital:
· South Side Hospital (brooklineconnection.com)
· SS Fact Sheet-6-2005 (phlf.org)
Bibliography
Bowser, Casey & Grundish, Sr. Louise, SC. Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2019.
Brooks, Robert R.R. As Steel Goes,… New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940
Cantrell, Joann & Wudarczyk, James. Pittsburgh’s Orphans and Orphanages. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2022.
Reagan, Leslie J. When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973. Berkley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997.
Wollman, David H. & Inman, Donald R. Portraits in Steel: An Illustrated History of Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1999.
Selene dePackh is a queer, crippled, neurodivergent crone who, spent most of her professional life as a trim carpenter and illustrator/designer (cover, Mitchell & Snyder’s Biopolitics of Disability, U. Mich. Press.) She turned to writing about a decade ago. Her essays have appeared in Heavy Feather Review, Neuroqueer, and the Identities issue of Shooter. Kirkus describes her 2018 debut novel Troubleshooting as “a gripping, lyrical, and ambitious dystopian novel,” whose MC is one of the “few protagonists in sci-fi—or literature in general—that present an autistic perspective with such specificity and pathos.” Her genre-fluid speculative fiction has recently appeared in the anthologies The Nightside Codex, Recognize Fascism, Nightscript, and Oculus Sinister. Her horror novella The Golden Road was published by JournalStone in 2022.
SLAG GLASS CITY · Volume 11 · May 2025
Header by Selene dePackh
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