Audio File
Transcript
My name is Collette Evon Brooks. I was born in Elmore Wylie in 1959. My relationship to the Hill District is lengthy. I’ve been here all my life, and I’ve experienced going to school here, to elementary school, to middle school and to high school. My grandmother’s family was born on Elmore St. Of course, they purchased the house back in the late 1800s, 1880s, her siblings were born. So I have a daughter and I have 3 granddaughters. I just took my youngest granddaughter to Norfolk State. And so, that is a result of sowing seeds and being there. What I learned is that you really can give anyone anything tangible, you know? You can only give them a piece of yourself. At Herron Hill, I was in the Scholars program, and so that’s when I really started to take off and do well and take an interest in school, and then from there, I went into ABC and that’s why I didn’t graduate from Schenley. By the time I got to Schenley, I was sent away to high school and I graduated in Radnor, PA, so… But Herron Hill, it laid the foundation. I had a teacher, and I remember saying, “I’m not really that good at math.” And he said “yes you are.” Shows you how much power teacher has in your life. And I started believing it, you know, I started to do real well. So of course, because my math got strong and that improved my testing scores, which made me a viable candidate for a very good college. My first job that came, was 13, making earrings across the street there. I worked for my uncle for several years in the restaurant and the different businesses that he owned. My Uncle Eddie was open 365 days a year for 36 years. The only day he closed at 2:00 PM was on Christmas Day. Other than that, he was open. From 6:00 AM until 9:00 PM, commitment. But he loved what he was doing. He had a full menu every day. You could get spaghetti, roast beef, roast turkey, meatloaf, and then the other days it will be a specialty, now on Thursday was liver and onions and… but it was at least 5 or 6 things that you could order every day from Uncle Eddie. Uncle Eddie never missed a pizza. I would love to have Uncle Eddie back. I did have a cousin who stepped in and tried to do it, but you have to love doing it. By the time I graduated college, I was doing accounting. I left that and started doing private business as an artist because I had children at that point. And then I took jobs, mostly in social service, working with women, working with CYF, things like that. I live directly across from the Crawford Grill, so a lot of times I was in there on the stage with the musicians and so that was a favorite memory. People went in on the weekends. You would go in and eat, and so it was because they were serving the musicians. It was like steaks and lamb chops, and Mr. Norwood was a chef who did an excellent job, and then upstairs also served to take care of the celebrities that were in town. And so you had 4 apartments that were above the Crawford Grill. It was vibrant. I knew Miles Davis. Max Roach, Freddie Hubbard. It’s not anyone that came through Pittsburgh during the 60s that I didn’t know. I think the most significant thing was the riots in ‘68. And so that’s when Martin Luther King was killed, and because there’s so many accesses to downtown, all this neighborhood was quarantined by the military. They called in the marshals to quarantine us into the Hill District to prevent us from rioting and looting in downtown, and after that, that’s when things changed. We burned down all of our businesses. So all those things I talked about before were no longer here in the community and that’s when it changed. My favorite aspects of the Hill District are the people that are still here. So a lot of the people that I know are dying or have died, but one of the favorite aspects of seeing the people in the Hill District that I do know. It’s changing and it’s developing, so that’s a good thing. So we have the Y, we have a nice library. As money is brought into the neighborhood, is it benefiting the residents of the neighborhood? I’d say definitely not. But is there opportunity? So the gentleman, Tom, has had a barber shop down there at Center. He’s going to be moving into this building here on the corner that was owned by Ham’s Barbershop for many a years. He was on that corner. So things are changing. And so as long as things are changing, then there’s always hope for new and better things.