Crawford Grill celebrates 60 years

You see pieces of Jorge Myers’ artwork when you drive through the Hill District. They are the… You see pieces of Jorge Myers’ artwork when you drive through the Hill District. They are the urban gardens in the lots of demolished building and the Technicolor murals that bear his tag.

Most nights, you’ll find Myers talking up the patrons and listening to the jazz music at The Crawford Grill on Wylie Avenue in the Hill. The artist lives in an apartment above the place and acts as a kind of unofficial spokesman for the old jazz club. He grew up on the Hill with the Crawford Grill and thinks the place still has strong cultural value to the Hill District community.

“If you wanna describe the Hill District, you have to come in the Crawford Grill to understand the description, to understand the diversity,” Myers said. “This is the bar that, if you’re a politician, if you’re a writer, if you’re anybody, you have to come here. This is like the central part of Harlem.”

Opening for business in November 1943, at 2141 Wylie Ave., the Crawford Grill Concert Hall and Lounge was the second “Crawford Grill” opened by “numbers baron” William A. (Gus) Greenlee, who also owned the Pittsburgh Crawfords Negro League baseball team. With the help of business partner Joseph Robinson, the Crawford #2 quickly became famous as a cultural meeting place and a venue for great jazz music.

According to Myers, it was after Joe Robinson’s son, “Buzz,” took over as owner that the place gained notoriety with nationally known jazz acts coming through.

“He was the one that, firstly, started out with Charles Mingus. Then came Art Blakey, and the rest was history, as far as jazz was concerned in the Crawford Grill,” Myers said.

By the time the Crawford Grill #2 opened, the Hill District already had a long history of racial and cultural diversity. Blacks, whites and other ethnicities had moved into the bluffs east of Downtown Pittsburgh to form a unique mix found in few, if any, other communities in America.

Between the 1930s and 1950s, people used to refer to that area’s shops, stores and nightlife as “Little Harlem.” The area was called “The Crossroads of the World” because Pittsburgh fell geographically between the twin giants of northern “Jazz Age” culture. New York City and Chicago had renowned jazz venues like Birdland and Mr. Kelly’s. Pittsburgh venues, like the Hurricane Music Room, the Aragon Ballroom and The Crawford Grill #2 acted as the main musical waypoints between the two larger cities.

In the 1950s, Pittsburgh decided to redevelop the lower Hill District. During the 1960s, everything below Crawford Avenue, where the Civic Arena now stands, was leveled and rebuilt under the direction of the Urban Redevelopment Authority. Taking away stores and cultural venues eliminated the area’s socioeconomic center, and the following decades saw a prolonged economic downturn along, with what Myers termed a large “white exodus.”

Myers was born in 1957, at the end of the golden age of Pittsburgh Jazz. He grew up in a community that, despite the hardships, retained civic responsibility regardless of race.

“It wasn’t like it was just black people that were poor. They was all poor. They all helped each other. They all knew that they needed each other to survive,” Myers recalled of that turbulent period.

“That destroyed the family,” he said. “You basically put a hole right in the middle of the community. Now you got Polish Hill. Now you got Bloomfield. Now you got Squirrel Hill. All those communities was once the Hill District. And when the second or third generation came along, they didn’t understand their roots. They didn’t understand the connection. The Hill District don’t ‘belong’ to black people. The Hill District belongs to all people.”

Myers tries to preserve that fading era by collecting artifacts from rotting buildings and aging Hill residents to turn into art. It can be challenging. He’s found himself staring down Pittsburgh police guns after emerging from an abandoned storefront and known drug den, with what Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Tony Norman described as “a zoot suit in one arm and a ram’s horn in the other” that he had scavenged for his artwork.

The Crawford Grill is one of several establishments in the neighborhood whose walls bear his Hill District art collages. Naturally, each piece has a story.

One collage uses pieces of a trumpet and part of a fur coat. That coat was stitched together by a black Hill District furrier who did, unbeknownst to most of their white clientele, the sewing work on many furs that appeared in the store windows of Kaufmann’s department store for decades.

A piece that holds special significance for Myers is one using the bass of jazz great Leroy Brown, who was once known by his contemporaries as the “Duke Ellington of Pittsburgh.” It was given to him by the musician’s German-speaking widow, who still lives above the Crawford. Myers respects the fact that she didn’t leave the Hill – and the Crawford Grill – during the racial exodus that accompanied the economic backlash caused by ’60s redevelopment.

“Now I always ask her,” Myers said, “‘You didn’t have to stay here on the Hill. Why did you stay here?’ She’s lived here 55 years. She said to me, ‘Where could I go in the world that’s gonna give me what this place gave me?’ And that means a lot, because she could go anywhere, but she stays right here, and she’s still upstairs.”

Myers sees the music, art and literature produced in the Hill, including his own, as being essential to preserving the cultural legacy of the community.

“I’m no different from August Wilson. I’m no different than Leroy Brown. I’m no different than George Benson. I just do it in a different medium. I’m just a visual artist, and these guys are doing it in a different type of art, but it’s all art and it’s all inspiration and it’s all a placement in the history of this community.”

Jazz music is the bedrock the Crawford Grill is built on. Mondays, Fridays and Saturdays are jam nights, and if you have the instruments and find an open time slot, you can get up and jam, too.

As long as jazz music is the focal point of the Crawford’s sound, Jorge sees the place retaining cultural significance on the Hill long after its 60-year anniversary, which was celebrated in November.

“Everybody wants to go to a place that brings everyone together in harmony.”