2021

December
Reflections on Keeping Tabs: A Holocaust Sculpture
Speaker: Bill Walter, retired eighth-grade social studies and history teacher who taught at Community Day School (CDS) for 23 years
Bill Walter will talk about his role in creating the Gary and Nancy Tuckfelt Keeping Tabs: A Holocaust Sculpture on the CDS campus.

November
Pittsburgh Center for the Arts
Speaker: Kyle Houser, Executive Director, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts
Kyle Houser will talk about the history of the organization, including Pittsburgh Filmmakers.

October
Reflections on the Tree of Life Shootings Three Years Later
Speaker: Beth Kissileff, Co-Editor of Bound in the Bond of Life, will discuss her book of first-person accounts that memorialize the Tree of Life massacre. One reviewer wrote, “This remarkable collection is a powerful testament to how individuals and communities cope with an act of unbelievable violence.”

September
The Story of Carrie Furnace
Speaker: Ron Baraff, Director of Historic Resources and Facilities for Rivers of Steel.
Ron Baraff will present the story of Carrie Furnace and the Carrie Blast Furnaces National Historic Landmark, a former set of blast furnaces located along the Monongahela River in Swissvale.

Tour of Carrie Furnace
This tour will be in conjunction with Ron Baraff’s presentation. Tour details are still being worked out. Members will receive information about registering in a separate email/letter in August, and more information will be in the September SHHS Newsletter

August
Summer break: No Tuesday evening program scheduled.

SHHS Tour and Lunch at The Woods House Historic Pub
Tour of the historic Woods house in Hazelwood built by John Woods in 1792.

July
Changes in Squirrel Hill’s Political Borders
Speaker: Helen Wilson
Have you ever wondered how Squirrel Hill became Squirrel Hill? Who decided on its borders? Why are its borders where they are? These and other questions will be answered in this presentation by Helen Wilson, SHHS Vice-President, who has been studying Squirrel Hill’s history in depth for 15 years.

June
Deciphering Presidential Scribbles
Speaker: Michelle Dresbold
Michelle Dresbold is an internationally renowned handwriting expert, personality profiler, author, speaker, and artist, and Squirrel Hill resident. She will explain what the signatures and other handwritings of our nation’s commanders-in-chief tell us about their personalities.

May
Expert Analysis of Zone 4 Crimes
Speaker: David Shifren Pittsburgh Bureau of Police Officer David Shifren is a community resources officer at the Pittsburgh Police Department’s Zone 4 Station on Northumberland Street. He will review recent crime statistics in Squirrel Hill and provide insights to those numbers based on his 15+ years of experience as a police officer. He will also expand on the themes of some of his Squirrel Hill Magazine columns.

April
The Mystery of Liberty Township
Speakers: Jim Wudarczyk & Tom Powers, Lawrenceville Historical Society
Jim Wudarczyk and Tom Powers of the Lawrenceville Historical Society will discuss the short-lived Liberty Township. Its boundaries incorporated East Liberty below Penn Avenue, Friendship, Shadyside, and parts of Bloomfield, Point Breeze, Regent Square, and Squirrel Hill.

March
Pittsburgh Pirates Go to the Movies
Speaker: Ron Backer, Attorney & Author
Ron Backer is an attorney who is an avid fan of movies and baseball. He has written five books on film, his most recent being Baseball Goes to the Movies, published in 2017 by Applause Theatre & Cinema Books.

February
Engineering Pittsburgh: Bridges
Speaker: Todd Wilson, P.E.
Have you ever thought about how the Pittsburgh area became the City of Bridges? If you were starting over, would you build the city’s bridges where they are now? And what types would you build? Located at the confluence of three rivers instead of along the coast and being one of America’s earliest frontier cities west of the Appalachian Mountains, bridge engineering in the greater Pittsburgh area experienced a lot of unprecedented engineering challenges. This resulted in many advances in bridge engineering and the development of unique engineering solutions. Join local engineer and historian Todd Wilson to tell the story of how bridge engineering developed in western Pennsylvania through highlighting the various innovative structures that were built.

January
Writing the Book about The Homewood Cemetery
Zoom Program
Speaker: Lisa Speranza
Lisa Speranza, Director of Development for The Homewood Cemetery Historical Fund, was born and raised in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood. She has been visiting Allegheny Cemetery her entire life. Her family has been part of the grounds since the 1940s.

January Interactive Activity:
“What’s in Your Basement?”
Do you have something odd, historic, or unusual in your house’s basement? Send us your story! You don’t have to identify your house. In the course of working on the House History Project, we came across a house with a room behind a disguised door in the basement where bootleggers cooked mash to make moonshine during the Depression, and one that had a bomb shelter during the Cold War. And we’ve heard about “slag humps” but have never seen one. Send us your stories! We’ll publish them in this newsletter. Email us at sqhillhist@shhsoc.org or click on “Contact us” on the SHHS website…..