Who Lived Here Before Us; Part II (5/5/15)
Dear colleagues,
As the rhythms of our academic year wind down, we at the Law Center will take the time to recognize and celebrate all of our students’ accomplishments. Graduation brings excitement and anticipation. It gives us one last chance to recognize our students’ hard work and achievements and to wish them well as they take the knowledge and values we hope to instill into the next phase of their lives. It also signals the start of a little respite before we begin to prepare for another academic year.
The BBC construction team will not experience that respite since their work will continue unabated; and as you can see as you walk down 2nd Street, it continues at a dazzling pace. If they stopped for a moment, however, they too would see much to celebrate. Excavation is reaching deep into the earth, and soon it will reach the highway surface. Much of the 128,000 feet of timber that makes up the lagging boards are set in place. Concrete barriers down on the highway are crumbling with great speed under the power of hoe rams, and the retaining walls that define the highway’s 2nd Street exit ramp are nearly demolished. What has amazed me most is how we were able to integrate our academic rhythms with the architectural and engineering rhythms of this massive and extraordinary construction project. Despite the enormity of the project, our lives have been, for the most part, minimally disrupted. There was almost no noise filtering into the classrooms during final examinations. When the sounds did erupt a little louder than we had hoped, BBC shut down the operation so that the students would not lose focus or concentration as they completed their tests. So as I send my shout out to our graduates as they begin their legal careers, I am also sending one to BBC and PGP Partners for making my life as Law Center liaison to the project a little easier than I had expected.
You may have missed it but Mayor Bowser, Congresswoman Norton, and other city officials joined with the developers to formally break ground for the project this past Tuesday. It may seem strange to break ground now given all of the work we have witnessed; but what we have been watching are only the preparations for the actual construction of the deck and the buildings that will stand upon it. If you want to view a new video that shows the completed project, you can access it at http://capitolcrossingdc.com/#asset-library/video
But before we move into the future, I thought I would end the school year by finishing the story I began in my last Construction Note about the people who lived here before we arrived. By 1923, this area was completely developed. Small factories, hotels, apartment buildings, and flat-front houses stood side by side in this multicultural working-class neighborhood. Looking at the neighborhood now, one can hardly believe that this was a thriving residential area, teeming with small businesses. Vaccaro’s Italian Delicatessen and Bakery was located at 3rd Street and Massachusetts Avenue, NW, and survived there until it moved in the 1970s. It served some of the best cannoli in the city. (I know that since I ate them myself when I attended Georgetown when it was still located at 506 E Street, NW.) Each morning, trucks laden with bread left the Holmes Bakery with their morning deliveries. The Holmes Bakery was owned by relatives of retired Law Center Professor Jack Murphy. Holmes stood about where the new Sport and Fitness Center stands. During the excavation of our site, we found remnants of the old Madison Alley that connected 1st and 2nd Streets, NW, and which provided the exit route for the Holmes drivers. Viareggio’s Grocery Store stood at 3rd and I Streets, NW. My wife’s relatives once ran a grocery store on 1st and E Streets, NW, just south of the Law Center campus. Until recently, one of the few remaining examples of the area’s residential architecture stood on E Street between 1st and 2nd Streets, NW — a vacant and a silent reminder of the laughing children and struggling families who lived here in another time. Our daycare center playground now occupies that land, bringing back joyous shouts and laughter for us to treasure as we go about our daily business. A few other such houses still stand north of Massachusetts Avenue but all of them will soon be gone as the now fashionable and hip NOMA neighborhood continues to develop.
Life, however, was not always rosy. The East End and the former neighborhood just to the north, sometimes called Northwest 1, were populated mostly by working-class African Americans and European immigrants. The people of this neighborhood were a mélange of nationalities, with the Irish, English, German, Swedes, Italians, and Eastern European Jews mixing relatively peacefully with African Americans — at least until the 1950s. Although wealthy and prominent people like Stephen Douglas, Ulysses Grant, and William Tecumseh Sherman once lived near 2nd and I Streets, NW, the area never became fashionable. As the grip of segregation tightened in Washington after 1870, the few wealthy citizens in our neighborhood moved farther into the northwest sections of the city. The people who remained often struggled economically and socially, with help coming primarily from the area churches.
Residential neighborhoods north of Massachusetts Avenue deteriorated in the era between 1890 and 1950. Referring to that era and that neighborhood, local newspapers described a “half-century of decay and neglect” producing “slums, crime, and degradation.” They called the neighborhood a “menace — the veritable sink of iniquity.” The area around Holy Rosary parish avoided much of this desolation until after World War II, but the Northwest 1 neighborhood across Massachusetts Avenue suffered greatly throughout the era. Racism and the depressions of the late 1870s, the early 1890s, and the 1930s exacerbated the misery of the people living there. Moreover, restrictive real estate covenants forced the increasing number of African Americans coming to the area from the South to live in already overcrowded and substandard housing. Although new employment opportunities were created during World Wars I and II, African Americans usually had access only to the lower-paying positions. As those jobs were filled, the new residents streaming in from the South had few options.
The infamous 2nd police district, stretching from Massachusetts Avenue to Florida Avenue and from Union Station to 14th Street, NW, was a neighborhood of “rotting hovels, rusted tin fences, and littered yards.” Called the “Sinful Second” or the “Wickedest Precinct,” it housed the worst slums in Washington, D.C. Flats and tenements were built “side by side and back to back.” It was an area where “sunlight was a stranger.” As late as 1950, one-half of the houses were dilapidated, without plumbing, and without adequate heat or light. People in the area often lived six to a room. Housing codes were seldom enforced, either out of pity for the residents who had nowhere else to go or because graft lined the pockets of the enforcers. Social services, then as now, were under-funded and poorly staffed. Every other child in the area was considered illegitimate under the laws of that day, and the tuberculosis and alcoholism rates were the highest in the city.
Thirty courts or alleys, with names like Logan, Marion, or Clothesline, infamous for one vice or another, laced the neighborhood. Crime was rampant. One could buy “with ease a shot of dope, a numbers play, a woman, a jug of Sneaky Pete on ice, and all the stolen merchandise you wanted. Make a wrong remark and you [could] get your throat cut for free.” Although the precinct’s 1953 crime rate of nineteen murders, 269 robberies and 714 house breakings seems low today, it was a scandal for that era. The police call box at 6 ½ and N Streets, NW, was the busiest box in the city.
The reasons for this slide within this otherwise thriving international city were as common then as they are today. Budget strangulation by a Congress unwilling to appropriate an adequate federal payment, the lack of meaningful home rule, and the pervasiveness of racism in an essentially Southern city virtually guaranteed the result. Moreover, the post-World War II boom spurred on by the GI Bill and housing policies that benefited whites more than African Americans resulted in the flight of middle class white families from the city to the suburbs. Even after attorney Ralph Urciolo, a Holy Rosary parishioner, teamed with legendary African-American lawyer Charles Houston to attack restrictive housing covenants in the D.C. courts, city planners were still looking for ways to keep neighborhoods segregated. Urciolo and Houston eventually prevailed when the Supreme Court declared restrictive covenants unconstitutional in Shelley v. Kraemer, a case with which theirs was joined for Court consideration. 334 U.S. 1 (1948). Nonetheless, their victory had little immediate effect on segregation in the city. The federal committees that ruled Washington, D.C., were often led by Congressmen from Southern states who found little political advantage in ameliorating the causes of poverty, especially since the urban poverty in Washington affected citizens who did not look like the voters in the Congressmen’s hometowns. By the mid-1950s, the combination of these policies and practices had devastated Northwest 1 and the devastation began to spill over into the East End.
Calls for urban renewal to relieve the plight of those living in poverty began in the late 1940s and came to fruition in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Plans were made to build new parks, improve commercial areas, and close the dangerous streets and alleys. North Capitol Street was to become a “dignified and beautiful” approach to the Capitol. But the early plans issued by Ulysses S. Grant III, grandson of the hero of the Civil War, also reinforced the practice of segregated housing. The first D.C. urban renewal site was the old Southwest neighborhood, a small enclave of mostly black and some poor white residents living between the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers and Independence Avenue. The plan called for the complete destruction of the neighborhood and the permanent relocation of its residents to the other side of the Anacostia River. By the time the bulldozers were through, there was nothing left of the old neighborhood. Parts of that neighborhood, between the Nationals ballpark to the Maine Avenue Wharf, is again undergoing a renewal.
The total devastation of Southwest produced calls for something different in the Northwest Urban Renewal District. The original plan for the 2nd precinct called for razing all 16,000 houses and relocating the 60,000 people who lived there. Neighborhood outcries produced new plans, intense debates, and more new plans and challenges. The City issued “raze or repair” orders against many dwellings hoping to force some resolution of the issue. Ultimately, most of the early urban renewal plans were abandoned. During the past forty years, housing policies changed and new residents moved into the area. Today, homes in the 2nd precinct’s Shaw and Logan Circle neighborhoods, once called “rotting hovels,” now sell for more than a million dollars.
The final plan for Northwest 1, an area within the larger Northwest Urban Renewal tract bounded by Union Station to the east and I-395 to the west, and Massachusetts Avenue to the south and M Street to the north, called for the demolition of 1,011 homes and the displacement of over 7,000 people. Although some houses were rehabilitated, most were torn down. The few residents who remained could walk out their front door to a view of the Capitol that was unimpeded by other buildings.
Many buildings on the land Georgetown currently owns were also torn down. At one time the City planned to build a thirty-one-unit mobile home park on our McDonough Hall site, but I can find no evidence that the plan was carried out. Sometime later, a similar park for 225 units was planned along New Jersey Avenue between Prince and L Streets. Again, it is unclear whether the plan was carried out.
Some hope actually emerged out of all this human and architectural desolation. Officials from Mt. Airy Baptist Church, Bible Way Church, and the Prince Hall Masons formed nonprofit organizations that built Sibley Plaza and Tyler House, two mid-rise apartment buildings on North Capitol Street for low- and moderate-income families. The Golden Rule Apartments soon followed. A group of Catholics from Gonzaga High School and St. Aloysius Church formed a nonprofit group to build a low- and moderate-income housing community called Sursum Corda, Latin for “lift up your hearts.” Built between 1967 and 1969, the townhouses and apartments featured air conditioning, garbage disposals, and washers and dryers. The concept for these houses and apartments grew out of the socially progressive ideas of the 1960s and 1970s that demanded affordable, quality housing for poor residents who had been displaced by urban renewal. A group of nuns moved into the neighborhood to provide spiritual and temporal assistance to the residents. At the time, an editorial in the Washington Post lauded the architects for building “a compact little village.”
But the hope generated by these projects soon turned to bitterness. Urban renewal stalled, and white flight produced an even more segregated city. Instead of model communities, urban renewal had produced total devastation in the Southwest Urban Renewal area and “a low-income segregated ghetto without adequate schools, shopping, or community facilities” in Northwest 1. Sursum Corda continued to suffer from the debilitating effects of the well-intentioned but misguided and poorly planned efforts of the 1950s and 1960s. The last of the many nuns who once lived at Sursum Corda moved out when their home became a target for crime. Open air drug markets operated twenty-four hours a day. Today, however, developers are competing to buy the land, offering large sums of money, to the current owners.
The Italians of Holy Rosary Parish began to move to the suburbs, although they remained active in their church. The hotels near Union Station had long lost their glory as airplanes replaced trains as the major form of transportation. By 1965, the hotels had deteriorated into dingy waystations. Urban renewal, once thought of as a cure for the city’s poverty, had instead created an urban ghost town in the East End.
Between 1950 and 1970, the communities in our section of the East End were all swept away. Ill-managed urban renewal and a planned inner-city highway system had nearly destroyed L’Enfant’s dreams. It would take the foresight of Dean Paul Dean and his colleagues at Georgetown to begin the long, but now successful, rejuvenation of our neighborhood. When the Law Center began purchasing land in 1965, the area had become a wasteland. Few vestiges of a once-thriving neighborhood remained. No buildings stood on the McDonough Hall site. The Salvation Army, a Fish Fry carryout, and a few other small commercial buildings stood south of F Street where the Gewirz Residence Hall now stands, and a few townhouses remained on the Williams Library site. Most residences were vacant. To the west, land was being cleared for the Center Leg Freeway. You may want to go back to the June 11, 2014, I-395 Construction Note to review how that highway got built. http://www.law.georgetown.edu/campus-services/facilities/construction-info/index.cfm
In 1971, Georgetown Law Center completed McDonough Hall and became the pioneer that brought life back to the area. By 2004, we had developed seven acres of land and erected five buildings and an additional east wing to McDonough Hall. We assumed developers would follow us but none came for many years. Slowly however, the area developed. First came the hotels, spurred on by a renovation of Union Station. Then, new office spaces were built to house those companies and associations that did business with the Federal government. Abe Pollin developed the Verizon Center which spurred the development of apartment buildings along Massachusetts Avenue between Gallery Place and the Law Center and created the NOMA neighborhood. By 2004, the once-desolate East End was beginning to bustle with new life. Condominiums and apartment buildings brought new residents while shops, restaurants, and theaters re-establish the area as a commercial engine of the city. Nonetheless, Georgetown’s campus, facing outward to the commercial nature of the area but inward to our academic mission, was the jewel of our East End neighborhood.
Soon we will have a new jewel to join what we began; but much remains to be done on the Capitol Crossing project. When you return in the Fall you will see a much different site. Much of the utility work on the west side of the highway along Massachusetts Avenue will have been completed. BBC will be installing caissons in the south block on the east shoulder of the site and in the highway median of the north block to support the deck. A slurry wall will be rising along the west shoulder of the north block for the same purpose. Excavation for the new exit ramp will be completed and the retaining walls of the old exit ramp will almost all be demolished. Stay tuned, because all those stories will be told here another time.
As the academic year ends, I want to express my thanks for your cooperation and patience during this project. I am sure that some of you, especially Gewirz residents, have endured some inconvenience this year. I still have nightmares about water shutoffs! As I said when utility excavations began, Capitol Crossing is not a Georgetown project; but our concern for your safety and your welfare remains paramount and we will remain vigilant as the project continues. Fortunately, BBC Construction and PGP Developers have proved to be good partners. Our neighborhood will be more exciting once the project is completed, but all great things come with hard work and sacrifice. Thanks again for your patience and understanding.
I will continue to write these notes during the summer. For those of you who are graduating, send me your email address if you want to keep receiving them or visit our website where they are being stored.http://www.law.georgetown.edu/campus-services/facilities/construction-info/index.cfm I hope you all have a great summer.
Wally Mlyniec
Sources
John P. Deeben, To Protect and to Serve: The Records of the D.C. Metropolitan Police, 1861–1930, Prologue Magazine, Spring 2008, Vol. 40, №1. http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2008/spring/metro-police.html
Wallace Mlyniec, Construction Notes, Transforming a Campus in Washington, D.C. (2006) and sources cited therein.
Southwest DC Neighborhood History, http://libguides.dclibrary.org/swfed
