From a 1931 real-estate announcement to 2022 coverage of a teenager's Eagle Scout project, Duncan Heights has surfaced in the press again and again — usually to ask the same question: whose responsibility is this? Summaries below are written in our own words; original scans are available to download.
Two display advertisements from the Courier, Pittsburgh's major African American newspaper, market the newly opened cemetery as the "finest and most beautiful cemetery in Pennsylvania" and include a bird's-eye illustration of its planned lots, evergreen-lined drives, and entrance circle. A companion article on the June 20 page describes the grounds as "a large tract less than 30 minutes' drive from any part of Pittsburgh," with roads, sunken lots, and ornamental shrubbery under construction.
Reporter Marjorie Ihr's investigation found the ownership question already decades old: William Sirlin, a North Side funeral director, had operated Duncan Heights without being a listed shareholder, and county records showed no clear owner of record. The article traces a tangle of half-connected names — Sirlin, the Schillings, a McCandless real estate firm — none of whom could produce a deed. It closes with a grieving daughter, Dorothy Stern Madey, still tending her father's grave by hand because no one else would.
Diana Nelson Jones's feature is the fullest account of the ownership mystery: neighbors George and Mary Ann Bigelow's ten years of amateur detective work through county deeds and wills; the 1931 incorporation by Myer Sparks and the perpetual-care fund that seemingly never existed; the string of names — Sparks, the Schillings, Sirlin — who each, in turn, led nowhere. It documents the cemetery's condition in stark detail: unmarked graves, five to ten headstones marking the wrong plots, and human-sized depressions where wooden coffins had collapsed. It also credits a 1977 Cub Scout cleanup, led by Toni Gizzi, as one of the few sustained restoration efforts in the cemetery's history.
Caitlin Cleary's follow-up, published for Memorial Day, found conditions largely unchanged or worse: flooding and small landslides had shifted more headstones, and vandalism and litter — broken bottles, aerosol cans — had accumulated in the brush. A prior push to restore the cemetery, involving neighbors, local politicians, lawyers, and the Army Corps of Engineers, had stalled on the same unresolved question as ever: legally, the land belonged to no one. The Bigelows, still searching for answers, are quoted continuing their research.
Julia Felton's article marks the turn toward the cemetery's current restoration era. It introduces neighbor Beth Burrell, who began GPS-mapping grave sites after discovering the cemetery on a dog walk, and 16-year-old North Allegheny student Ralph Abdel-Massih, who made cleaning up the site his Eagle Scout project. The piece is also the clearest published account of the cemetery's founding purpose — a segregation-era burial ground for Pittsburgh's Black community — and reports plans for a rain garden to help address the site's chronic flooding.