I grew up in a wonderful, horrible Pennsylvania town called South Park. It is located a scant 12 miles south of Pittsburgh and features an ice skating rink, a BMX bike course and a big, concrete roller skating rink.
Prior to the 1930s, the area had been known as Snowden Township. It was in this era that Allegheny County--the home of Pittsburgh--purchased nearly half of Snowden, loaded it up with all sorts of recreational amenities, and labeled the area South Park based on its location relative to Pittsburgh. (The county did the same thing, though on a smaller scale, with a patch of land to the north of Pittsburgh, thus creating North Park.)
So, in short, my hometown got a lion's share of Allegheny County's tennis courts, hiking trails, walking paths, basketball courts, nature centers, game preserves, swimming pools, picnic areas, and ball fields. North Park got a bunch of that stuff too, but not as much as South Park. And when compared to adjacent towns, the recreational overload present in South Park is immediately evident.
In the fall of each year, a wooded, non-residential portion of South Park Township near the back nine of the town's public golf course is transformed into something called Hundred Acres Manor. According to its website, Hundred Acres Manor is "The Site for Fright." More specifically, it is described as, "The region's only 100% volunteer-based tri-themed haunt benefiting Homeless Children's Education Fund and Animal Friends."
Basically, the woods by the golf course become one of those haunted house-themed, all-in-good-fun frightfests that are so popular during the weeks leading up to Halloween. This one, as noted, is "tri-themed," so it features Massacre Mansion ("What was once a picturesque mansion, home to one of the most famous families, is now over run with specters and spirits just dying to meet you."), Black Hill Sanitarium ("Comforting, serene, Black Hill Sanitarium. Well . . . only from the outside."), and Fearscapes Factory ("Designed to help those who are plagued with nightmares recover, but utilized as the very place where nightmares start. The nightmare clinic is open for business and your reservation has been made.").
As if those three attractions weren't enough to scare the daylights out of little kids, there's also a "7,500 square-foot labyrinth maze plagued with chainsaw wielding maniacs!"
Yikes.
Between 1992 and 2003, the same location was used each fall for a somewhat similar seasonal event known as "Phantoms in the Park." According to this website, the volunteers who organized the Phantom spectacle every Halloween raised more than $1.3 million over their 10-year run, all of which was donated to The Make-A-Wish Foundation.
Those looking to attend the modern manifestation of South Park's haunted house tradition need only click on the "Location" section of the Hundred Acres Manor site for directions. There, prior to detailed driving directions for those traveling from various spots around Western Pennsylvania, you will find the following bit of information: "Hundred Acres Manor is located on Hundred Acres Drive on the site of what used to be Sully's Pool and Phantoms in the Park in South Park, PA. We are about 10 miles south of Downtown Pittsburgh."
With all due respect to the "chainsaw wilding maniacs" and "the forgotten, the lonely, the dead" of Black Hill Sanitarium, here's where things get really scary.
It turns out that Sully's Pool--the current home of Hundred Acres Manor and a mere 4-iron away from the 16th tee of the golf course I played hundreds of times as a youngster--was once the home of South Park-style Jim Crowism. It was, effectively, a segregated all-Black swimming pool for those who were not welcomed at the larger, better-maintained, all-white alternative located a mile or so away.
Unfortunately, not many people in my recreational wonderland of a hometown have the slightest clue about the ugly history of Sully's Pool. It's not kept secret or anything, it just seems to be something that no one really talks about. In that way, it's akin to a more offensive version of the failed monorail system the town foolishly attempted to maintain during the early '70s.
The only reason I know about Sully's Pool is because one summer during a Cub Scout outing I went on as a child, my troop passed by a fenced-in old building and concrete slab smack in the middle of an otherwise natural setting, and I happened to ask some grown-up what it was.
"That's the old Black pool," the guy said. "It's been closed for a while now. But before that, this was where Black people went swimming."
Though I have no clue who relayed to me this bit of South Park history, I never forgot what I was told on that day. The conversation must have taken place in the early-'80s, more than 20 years ago, but it has haunted me (and I don't mean in the Hundred Acres Drive, "Can you survive Massacre Mansion?" way) ever since.
Over the last 10 years or so, I've tried to find out what I could about Sully's Pool and my hometown's history of segregation. Not surprisingly, my inquiries netted little in the way of advanced knowledge on the subject.
Nonetheless, every once in a while I'll remember that conversation from when I was a kid and think about that damn pool. Today, as it turns out, happened to be one of those days, so I decided to take another shot at researching the topic.
Because of advancements in technology and the fact that I'm fairly badass at computer searches by this point, I now know more than almost anyone on the planet about the history of Sully's Pool.
My initial goal was to figure out the name of the pool so that I could use its name in searches thereafter to dig up as much information as possible. I got lucky on my first attempt at this by typing "South Park" and "segregated" into the Google search engine. On the very first page of search results, I came across a news article about efforts to integrate South Park's "white pool" in the '50s that gave me more than enough info to proceed with subsequent advanced searches.
The pool I'd ambled past that day as a scout, the article informed me, "officially was called One Hundred Acre Pool." But at the time most people called it "Sully's Pool, and it often was referred to by blacks and whites as The Inkwell." It opened in 1938 and the pool area's adjacent barn "served as a popular dance hall that attracted blacks from all over the county."
The article continues: "Integration groups succeeded in cracking the color barrier at the [all-white] pool in 1954, according to old newspaper accounts. The county commissioners issued anti-discrimination orders covering both South Park pools. 'Negroes and whites have patronized the facility ever since,' says a 1963 clip. In reality, though, most blacks continued to swim at Sully's while most whites went to [the all-white pool]. . . . Sully's Pool was closed in 1977 . . . and a picnic grove on the crest of the hill on 100 Acre Drive bears no memorial or marker that it was the location of Sully's Pool. The main pool was filled in and paved over, but the original oval in-ground kiddie pool sits next to the former bathhouse."
Among the handful of other Sully's Pool-related pieces of information on the Internet is a passage by Virginia Whitfield in "The South Park Historian" (Who knew?) entitled, "Sully's Pool-A Revisit."
In the 2003 article, Whitfield provides even more background on the segregated pools of South Park past:
"In 1932, Allegheny County's South Park opened a swimming pool on Corrigan Drive. At that time, Afro-Americans were not permitted to use the facility. In 1938, Sully's Pool was opened to accommodate the Black population of Allegheny County. There were other privately owned swimming pools in the area, but Blacks were not allowed to use them."
She continues:
"In the 1970s, Black leaders in Pittsburgh addressed the issue of segregated pools. Subsequently, in 1977, both swimming pools were closed, and in 1978 the Wave Pool on Corrigan Drive was opened to everyone. . . . On an August Saturday in 1988, we held a family reunion at the 100 Acre House, and we were the only ones in that area."
According to various news accounts on the web, the plot of land that once housed Sully's Pool is now used for more than just family reunions and autumnal fright nights. It has hosted marching band picnics, company outings, nature seminars, and a host of other gatherings.
A September 2002 article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has an account about the first annual Greater Pittsburgh Pagan Pride Day being held at 100 Acre Drive. According to the piece, of the 200 or so people who attended, some "proudly identified themselves as witches" and "there were several psychics available to do readings."
"There were no black cats or broomsticks," the article notes. "No bloody rituals or animal sacrifices."
That stuff, I suppose, is left to the crew who put together the Hundred Acres Manor displays each Halloween. Though everything done at the park's popular haunted house events is performance-based and purely for show, you wouldn't know it by the reactions of the children, parents, and assorted fright-seekers who flock to the event. The realistic setups and attention to detail that go into the creating Hundred Acres Manor has allowed for it to garner quite a reputation throughout the city. According to the event's website, it is recognized as "Pittsburgh's Largest and Scariest Tri-Themed Haunted Attraction," and their haunted houses really do sound like a lot of fun.
Still, I will not be attending the Hundred Acres Manor performances anytime soon.
The ghosts of racism, discrimination, and hatred that swirl around the despicable history of Sully's segregated pool are scary enough for me, thank you.
posted by mjxm at 11:20 AM |
