Every time I went to my grandparents house I sat in front of a cobalt blue punch bowl on her dining room table and when I went upstairs I was greeted by a wooden crucifix on her landing. They were fixtures in my life and only recently did I find out where they came from. Before living in their current house, my grandparents lived in Gus Greenlee’s house. They rented from him for a short time and somehow those two items stayed with our family instead of being left behind. Why is this interesting? Because Gus Greenlee changed Pittsburgh and sports.
He was not born here but came to settle in The Hill District and made a life for himself. Like Woogie Harris he too was a numbers runner and neighborhood philanthropist. If you don’t who Woogie Harris is you can read about him a few posts back, and while you are catching up read the one about Pittsburgh Jim Crow just to get a sense of the times. Black communities needed funding. Business and neighbors could not get loans from banks. Students could not get scholarships. This left a gaping need and men like Gus and Woogie filled that gap by putting money back into the community.
In 1931 Gus branched out in the world of Negro League Baseball. He bought a team known as the Pittsburgh Crawfords. Baseball among other things was still segregated in the United States. Soon after that he purchased an empty lot which became Greenlee Field. He was the first Black Man to own a field in The Negro Leagues. That was an amazing accomplishment in its own right but The Crawfords also fielded some baseball’s greats like Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Papa Cool Bell.
Around the same time he also opened The Crawford Grill. Gus was not only a sports legend but also standard in the Jazz world. His venue was the place to be outside of Harlem and Chicago for Black Elites and entertainers. If you can name them, they were there. The Crawford Grill was frequented by Louie Armstrong, Dizzie Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, Joe Louis, Roberto Clemente, Benny Goodman, Martin Luther King Jr, The Rooneys and a host of other world famous names.
In a city that prides itself on its rich tradition of arts and jazz let us remember one of its pioneers Gus Greenlee.
