BGuthrie Photos: DC Heritage Trails: Cultural Convergence: Columbia Heights Heritage Trail

DC Heritage Trails: Cultural Convergence: Columbia Heights Heritage Trail:

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. TRCH_091128_02.JPG: Cultural Convergence Columbia Heights Heritage Trail 19 The Latino Intelligence Center This block is home to some of the largest Latino organizations in the city, all founded as migration from Central America and the Caribbean increased in the 1970s. Several began with a boost from Cavalry United Methodist Church at 1459 Columbia Road. Since 1974 the Latin American Youth Center, now at 1419 Columbia Road, has supported youth and their families with education, employment, and social services. LAYC's Art & Media House is around the corner at 3035 15th Street. CentroNia, in the former C&P Telephone building at 1420 Columbia Road, emphasizes early education, and the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN) has offered legal, housing, education, and citizenship assistance since 1981. La Clinica del Pueblo at 2831 15th Street provides affordable medical care. Most neighboring schools and churches offer bilingual or multilingual programs. Almost 100 years before Latino groups made this their "intelligence center," renowned German immigrant Emile Berliner lived here. Berliner invented a microphone that proved crucial to the Bell telephone's operation. In 1883, he built a large house and laboratory at 1458 Columbia Road, where he also invented the gramophone (record player). With an interest in public health, Berliner founded the Bureau of Health Education and built its headquarters at 1460 Columbia Road (now CARECEN offices). The Fernwood apartments replaced Berliner's house in 1925. In 2000 Fernwood tenants faced eviction when the DC government condemned the building. Led by six Latinas, all named Maria, residents bought, renovated and created Las Marias Condominiums.
2. TRCH_091128_05.JPG: Cultural Convergence Columbia Heights Heritage Trail 1 Main Street Fourteenth Street has always been the business backbone of Columbia Heights. Beginning in the 1890s, electric streetcars dropped passengers at nearly every corner, attracting commerce. By 1925 storefronts occupied the blocks between Euclid and Otis Streets. Most stores, often less than 20 feet wide, were family run and offered one line of products. In 192 on 14th Street between Irving Street and Park Road alone, you could find hats, bicycles, men's clothing, ladies' clothing, automobiles, hardware, musical instruments, candy, cigars, paint, meats, baked goods, and real estate. Larger establishments included drug stores, restaurants, movie theaters, and the Arcade, a granddaddy to the modern shopping mall, with food stalls and family entertainment. After World War II, nightspots featured "hillbilly" music and catered to migrants from rural states. In 1927 J. Willard and Alice Marriott, a young couple from Utah, chose a storefront on the west side of 14th Street for their first business. The opened an A&W Root Beer franchise at 3128 14th Street, added spicy Southwestern style food, and dubbed the enterprise Hot Shoppe. It grew into the Hot Shoppes chain, and by 1957, Marriott food services and hotels. The riots following the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968 devastated 14th Street. Most of the businesses that weren't actually burned out closed, setting off a downward spiral. While immigrants and activists brought some new enterprises in the 1980s, it took the opening of the Columbia Heights Metrorail station in 1999 to begin the latest revival.
3. TRCH_091128_11.JPG: Cultural Convergence Columbia Heights Heritage Trail 2 Amusement Palace The intersection of 14th Street and Park Road has been the center of community life since at least 1871, when the neighborhood was called Mount Pleasant and storekeeper George Emery made his living on the northwest corner to your left. Emery's emporium, the first on upper 14th Street, marked the end of the line for the horse-drawn omnibus (coach) that carried residents to the Treasury and other points downtown. "Its stock ranged all the way from mowing machines to dry goods," wrote Emery's son Fred. In 1892 the Washington and Georgetown Railroad Company began running electric streetcars up 14th Street to your left. After the line was extended in 1907, investors, including gramophone inventor and neighbor Emile Berliner, transformed the car barn into the Arcade, a combination market and amusement park. Best known for its street-level vendor stalls, the Arcade over time boasted a movie theater, sports arena, bowling alleys, skating rink, and dance hall upstairs, not to mention carnival fun in the Japanese Maze and the House of Trouble. "The big Arcade building was crowded from end to end with one of the happiest throngs imaginable," wrote the Washington Post about opening night. In November 1925 the newly organized American Basketball Association inducted DC's Palace Five. The Five (also called the "Laundrymen" for their first sponsor, Palace Laundry) played their first home-court Big League game at the Arcade. Some 2,500 fans watched them beat the Brooklyn Five, 18 to 17.
4. TRCH_091128_15.JPG: Cultural Convergence Columbia Heights Heritage Trail 3 A City in Itself Columbia Heights by the mid 1920s was a center of white elite activity and commerce. The elegant, Neoclassical style Riggs Bank branch and the Italian Renaissance style Tivoli Theater opened to great acclaim. Soon after, radio station WRC moved into the bank building, its rooftop tower advertising the wondrous new technology. Harry Crandall's Tivoli was among the largest and grandest theaters in Washington. People literally danced in the streets the day it opened. The 2,500-seat theater hosted live shows as well as films. It was Washington's first movie house equipped for "talkies," movies with sound. With these two anchors, Columbia Heights in 1928 was "practically independent of downtown Washington," proclaimed the Washington Post. Then the housing demands of the Great Depression and World War II led some to subdivide the larger houses. New residents in the 1950s demanded more affordable goods and services. Soon the discount department store Morton's arrived, and the number of night spots increased. Like many other DC theaters, the Tivoli was segregated until forced by the Supreme Court in 1953 to desegregated. In the 1960s its programming shifted to attract local audiences in the now-predominantly African American community. Children enjoyed Saturday matinees for 25 cents, with 15-cent popcorn and 10-cent sodas. Despite the civil disturbances of 1968, the Tivoli remained a neighborhood anchor until it closed in 1976. Thanks to preservationists and area residents, the landmark was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985 and was carefully restored in 2006.
5. TRCH_091128_22.JPG: Cultural Convergence Columbia Heights Heritage Trail 4 After the Hard Times When the smoke cleared after the civil disturbances of April 1968, Columbia Heights lay devastated. Many residents and businesses simply left. Others remained to pick up the pieces. But who would help rebuild? Citizen groups, church leaders, and the federal government -- which controlled the city's pursestrings -- initially answered the call. The three-year-old Cardozo Heights Association for Neighborhood Growth and Enrichment (CHANGE), Inc., also responded with housing programs, health clinic, a "street academy" for adult education, and other assistance. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development bought, or took by eminent domain, hundreds of properties, give some to the city for public housing,. Some damaged buildings, and many rowhouses that were simply old, were razed. Soon, on the block behind you, only the Tivoli Theater remained. In 1976-77 CHANGE -- All Souls Housing Corp. built the 406-unit Columbia Heights Village complex along 14th Street. However most of the land between Irving and Monroe Streets sat vacant for decades as city officials and community groups argued, and investors looked elsewhere. Though damaged, the grand Riggs-Tompkins Building, catty-corner to this sign, escaped demolition, thanks to the neighborhood preservationists who helped place it on the National Register of Historic Places. The Kelsey Temple Development Corp. added apartments for seniors above the original building. The largest enterprise to survive the disturbances was the Giant Food, then located at 3460 14th Street. It had opened in 1966 as a model facility after citizens complained that "inner-city neighborhoods" had inferior stores. In the difficult days after the riots, Giant joined Sacred Heart Church and St. Stephen and the Incarnation Church in distributing needed provisions.
6. TRCH_091128_28.JPG: Cultural Convergence Columbia Heights Heritage Trail 5 Community Builders Harry Wardman, Washington's prolific developer, built nearly all of the 300 houses to your right between Monroe Street and Spring Road. Wardman, an English immigrant and self-made millionaire, became known for his rowhouses, whose front porches allowed neighbors to visit easily. These date from 1907 to 1911. Two adjoining Wardman buildings at 3501-3503 14th Street once housed Danzansky Funeral Home, originally opened in 1921 by Bernard Danzansky on Ninth Street, NW, as DC's first Jewish funeral home. Soon after, he moved his residence and business here, as affluent Jews migrated from the old city to newer "suburbs" such as Columbia Heights. Nearby the Jewish Social Service Agency as well as a mikvah -- a ritual purification bath -- also served the community. Dazansky later helped found the Hebrew House for the Aged and the Hebrew Academy of Washington. His wife Nettie was a leader in charitable work, and his son Joseph was president of Giant Food and twice headed the city's Board of Trade. When the funeral home relocated to Rockville, Maryland, the offices of the Washington Urban League moved in, remaining for 30 years before moving to 14th and Harvard Streets. Across 14th Street is Hubbard Place apartments. Long known as the Cavalier, the originally ritzy building was constructed by Morris Cafritz, a top DC developer. It was later converted to low-income housing, and in 2009 was renamed to honor the late community activist Leroy Hubbard. In the 1980s growing crime led to the formation of the "red-hat" Citizen Organized Patrol Effort (COPE) to walk the neighborhood and alert police to loitering, vacant properties, burn-out street lights, and other conditions that contributed to crime. To reach Sign 6, please proceed on Otis Place, then turn right on 13th to the intersection with Monroe Street.
7. TRCH_091128_32.JPG: Cultural Convergence Columbia Heights Heritage Trail 6 Holmead Legacy This spot once was the center of the Holmead family estate, "Pleasant Plains." The property stretched from today's Spring Road to Columbia Road, and from Georgia Avenue to Rock Creek. In 1740 the Holmeads built a house near here. In 1802, two years after Congress arrived in Washington, Col. John Tayloe leased land from the Holmeads to open the city's second racetrack (the first was walking distance from the White House where the Organization of American States is today on Constitution Avenue, NW). Congress regularly recessed to make post time at the one-mile track, which extended from today's 10th to 16th Streets, bordered on the south by Tayloe's Lane, now Columbia Road. During the 1800s Holmead descendents gradually sold off Pleasant Plains. In 1883 William and Mary Holmead laid out Holmead Manor, with 50-foot wide building lots. For themselves they built a large house at 3517 13th Street (behind you). That structure remains today, adapted for apartments. You can see its carriage house, tucked into the alley that you'll pass on your left en route to Sign 7. In 1909, shortly after 11th Street was built, the Anacostia & Pacific River Railroad's 11th Street line ended at Monroe Street. Added to existing lines on Georgia Avenue and 14th Street, the new line made this DC's best-served "streetcar suburb." As you proceed on Monroe to Sign 7, notice the small park at the end of the block where streetcars once turned around to head back downtown. Then turn right on 11th and continue to Kenyon Street.
8. TRCH_091128_40.JPG: Cultural Convergence Columbia Heights Heritage Trail 7 Nob Hill For Nearly 50 Years, this corner was home to Nob Hill Restaurant, one of the nation's first openly gay bars for-and run by-African Americans. Started in the 1950s as a private social club, Nob Hill went public in 1957. Patrons enjoyed entertainment ranging from male dancers to weekly "Gospel Hours" with local church choirs. One regular called the low-key club "a house party that charged a cover." When Nob Hill closed in 2004, it was considered DC's longest-operating gay bar. Across Kenyon Street are the playing fields of Harriet Tubman Elementary School. The school opened in 1970 amid controversy over whether it would destroy the neighborhood's essential character. Despite resident efforts to block the school; construction went ahead, displacing 17 longstanding businesses along 11th Street and fine, three-story rowhouses on 13th, Irving, and Kenyon Streets. The remaining single-story commercial strip behind you dates back to the early 1910s, shortly after the 11th Street streetcar line arrived and increased foot traffic here. As you proceed to Sign 8, you'll pass Columbia Road, where Ralph Bunche lived at number 1123 in the early 1930s. Bunche later founded Howard University's Political Science Department and served as a U.S. diplomat. For his work on establishing the state of Israel, Bunche received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, the first African American so honored.
9. TRCH_091128_45.JPG: Cultural Convergence Columbia Heights Heritage Trail 8 Girard Street Elites The 1100 and 1200 blocks of Girard Street once were home to a "Who's Who" of African American leaders. This and nearby "double-blocks" are the heart of John Sherman's Columbia Heights subdivision. By placing all houses 30 feet from the street's center, Sherman created a gracious and inviting streetscape. The elegant rowhouses, built mostly between 1894 and 1912, echoed the social and economic class of their first, white residents. By the 1920s black families began arriving from neighborhoods to the east and south. Many had ties to nearby Howard University. Dr. Montague Cobb of 1221 Girard, a foremost physical anthropologist, headed the Howard Medical School's Anatomy Department and helped lead the NAACP. His colleague, Dr. Roland Scott of 1114 Girard, chaired Pediatrics and led the fight against sickle cell disease. Dorothy Porter Wesley, of 1201 Girard, developed the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, the eminent library of the African Diaspora. Educator Paul Phillips Cooke, who led the American Veterans Committee and became President of D.C. Teachers College, moved to 1203 Girard as a boy in 1928 and remained until 2006. Across Girard Street is Carlos Rosario Public Charter School, originally the white Wilson Normal School (teachers college) and later part of the University of the District of Columbia. As you walk to Sign 9, you'll pass Fairmont Street, where jazz pianist, composer, and educator Billy Taylor grew up at 1207. Music teacher Henry Grant, mentor to both Taylor and Duke Ellington, once lived at 1114. Home rule activist Rev. Channing Phillips lived at 1232 Fairmont before becoming, in 1968, the first African American nominated for U.S. president at a major party convention.
10. TRCH_091128_49.JPG: Cultural Convergence Columbia Heights Heritage Trail 9 Justice vs. Injustice These elegant 13th Street houses were constructed when racial separation was legal and widely accepted. In 1910 the deeds for many houses across 13th Street had covenants banning "any negro or colored persons." Those on this side generally did not have the covenants. By the 1930s, 13th Street divided black from white. Then, in 1941, African American educator Mary Hundley and her husband Frederick bought 2530 13th Street, on the white side, despite its restrictive covenant. Hundley was the granddaughter of William Syphax, founder of the nation's (and Washington's) first public high school for African Americans. White neighbors successfully sued the Hundleys for breaking the covenant, but a higher court overturned the ruling. In 1948 the U.S. Supreme cited the Hundley case when it decreed racially restrictive covenants unenforceable. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan once lived a block away, at 14th and Euclid Streets. In 1896 Harlan was the only justice to dissent when the Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that "separate but equal" facilities were constitutional. That ruling "Dunbar High School French teacher Mary Hundley, fifth from left, poses with her students on the steps of the school, 1937" (Library of Congress.) helped justify the racially restrictive housing covenants that the Hundley case helped end. Economic discrimination spurred further activism in the 1970s. Protesters rallied for low-income tenants of houses subdivided into apartments who faced eviction by speculators seeking to convert their homes into condominiums. Across Euclid Street from this sign is number 1236, once the Afro-American Institute for Historic Preservation and Community Development. Established in 1970 by Robert and Vincent DeForest, the institute helped obtain National Historic Landmark status for more than 60 African American historic sites across the nation.
11. TRCH_091128_57.JPG: Cultural Convergence Columbia Heights Heritage Trail 10 On the Heights In the days of legally segregated public education (1862-1954), this school building was Central High, the gem of the School Board's white division. But by 1949, it had few students, as the post-World War II suburban housing boom had drawn whites away. Consequently, African American families outnumbered whites around Central. Nearby "Colored" high schools - especially Cardozo at Ninth Street and Rhode Island Avenue - struggled with overcrowded, outdated facilities. When activists pressed the city to move Cardozo's black students to Central, the white community resisted. But the School Board could not justify the waste of space. So in September 1950, with white students relocated to other schools, Central became Cardozo, the business high school for black students. Four years later with Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court nominally integrated all DC schools. Long before there was a school here, though, this fabulous view was enjoyed by a sculptor and engraver named William J. Stone. In 1835 Stone moved into the Federal style "Mount Pleasant" house, once the center-piece of the prominent Peter family's thousand-acre estate here. During the Civil War, the house served as a hospital. In 1881 Senator John Sherman bought 121 acres, then laid out a subdivision between 11th and 14th Streets, naming it Columbia Heights. His contemporary, Senator John A. Logan of Illinois, a Civil War general, co-founder of Memorial Day, and future vice presidential candidate (1884), bought the old mansion and renamed it Calumet Place. Later, Logan's widow Mary rented it to Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan.
12. TRCH_091128_62.JPG: Cultural Convergence Columbia Heights Heritage Trail 11 Views of Justice On your left once stood Belmont, an impressive stone mansion built in 1883 by entrepreneur Amzi L. Barber, "America's Asphalt King." Barber headed the Education Department at Howard University at the time of its founding in 1867. He soon bought land from the university to build the exclusive LeDroit Park neighborhood. Next he entered the asphalt paving business, and came to dominate it nationwide. Barber also worked with Ohio Senator John Sherman to create the Columbia Heights subdivision. For years Belmont was a landmark that greeted streetcar riders cresting the 14th Street hill. Justice William R. Day was one of the powerful men who lived nearby. After Barber's death, developer Harry Wardman bought Belmont, only to replace it in 1915 with Wardman Courts, then the city's largest luxury apartment complex. In 1921 new owners named it Clifton Terrace. The once-glamorous complex did not age well, and succeeding owners deferred maintenance and crowded more tenants into the units. By the 1960s, the situation was so bad that, with help from CHANGE, Inc. and others, tenants organized and stopped paying rent. When the landlord tried to evict them, the tenants sued. In a landmark 1970 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals, Javins v. First National Realty Corporation established the right of tenants to withhold rent payments when conditions violated housing codes. Social activist Rev. Channing Phillips's Housing Development Corporation renovated Clifton Terrace in the late 1960s. In 2003 the buildings, once again named Wardman Courts, reopened as condominiums and rental units.
13. TRCH_091128_66.JPG: Cultural Convergence Columbia Heights Heritage Trail 12 1968
14. TRCH_091128_70.JPG: Cultural Convergence Columbia Heights Heritage Trail 13 The Outer Limit
15. TRCH_091128_75.JPG: Cultural Convergence Columbia Heights Heritage Trail 14 Pitts Motor Hotel The Pitts Motor Hotel, formerly located at 1451 Belmont Street, lingers in memory for two reasons. In the 1960s it was a gathering place of Civil Rights movement leaders. Later it became a "welfare hotel." In March 1968 the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., reserved 30 rooms at the Pitts Hotel to house leaders of the Poor Peoples' Campaign he planned to lead in May. He chose the facility because it was both comfortable and black owned. Despite Dr. King's 1968 assassination, the Poor People's Campaign went ahead. Demonstrators maintained that jobs and income were a civil right owed to the needy citizens by the federal government. In May and June thousands camped in "Resurrection City" on the National Mall where, due to excessive rain, conditions deteriorated quickly. Resentful campers marched on the Pitts where the leaders were housed, demanding (unsuccessfully) that the leaders exchange their comforts for the muddy Mall. In its heyday the Pitts Motel housed the Red Carpet Lounge. "Everybody would be there" remembered activist Bob Moore. But its popularity masked an unstable financial situation. Owner Cornelius Pitts and other African American entrepreneurs (and would-be homeowners) at the time often were refused bank loans or offered unfavorable terms. In the 1980s, when Reagan administration cuts to social programs led to widespread homelessness, Pitts took the opportunity to turn around his fortunes, converting his hotel into a shelter. The city rented all 50 rooms, but the prices were so inflated that a congressional investigation resulted. In 2004 a condominium building replaced the hotel.
16. TRCH_091128_79.JPG: Cultural Convergence Columbia Heights Heritage Trail 15 College Hill Wayland Seminary opened in Foggy Bottom just after the Civil War to train formerly enslaved people and others as "preachers and teachers for the South" and as missionaries to evangelize Africa. In 1875 it moved here, later merging with Richmond Theological Seminary to become Virginia Union University in Richmond. Among Wayland's distinguished alumni was Booker T. Washington. Just two blocks up the hill is the former site of George Washington University's predecessor, Columbian College. Founded by Baptist missionaries in 1821, Columbian gave the area the nickname "College Hill." Some 24 years before Wayland Seminary's arrival, landowner Col. Gilbert Livingston Thompson and his wife, Mary Ann Tolley Thompson, attended, attended a Prince George's County slave auction and purchased Emily Saunders Plummer and three of her children to serve them here. After Emancipation, Plummer's son Henry returned to attend Wayland Seminary. The Thompson home, which stood where 16th Street is today, was built in the early 1800s by Commodore David Porter, During the Civil War, it was used as a hospital. By the 1870s, Thompson's land was subdivided into building lots, and a working-class community of mostly African Americans developed. "Residents depended entirely upon wells and the rain barrel for water," wrote local historian John Clagett Proctor, who lived nearby after the Civil War. "There were no streets or sidewalks." Around 1912 the federal government forced the residents out and razed their houses to make way for Meridian Hill Park (later also known as Malcolm X Park).
17. TRCH_091128_82.JPG: Cultural Convergence Columbia Heights Heritage Trail 17 Social Justice Straight ahead is All Souls Church, Unitarian, long known for its social activism, starting with abolitionism in the 1820s and ranging through nuclear disarmament and interracial cooperation. During the segregation era, All Souls was one of the few places in DC open to integrated meetings. During the 1980s and '90s it (and other neighborhood churches) even hosted concerts by DC's influential punk bands Bad Brains, Fugazi, Minor Threat, and others. In the 1960s, the church launched the model Girard Street Playground Project in response to growing neighborhood crime. After the 1968 riots, the church worked with Change, Inc. to build 406 apartments on 14th Street. All Souls' first African American senior minister, Rev. David H. Eaton led the church as it opened its doors to Antioch Law School, DC Music Center, DC Rape Crisis Center, and other groups. Eaton also became president of the DC Board of Education in 1982. Others shared All Souls' commitment. Sojourners, a Christian social justice community, ran summer and after-school programs at 1323 Girard Street and at Clifton Terrace, and helped form the Southern Columbia Heights Tenant Union. Sojourners organizes nationally for social change. The Community for Creative Non-Violence grew out of anti-Vietnam War protests at George Washington University. After the war, CCNV opened soup kitchens, free clinics, and shelters. Eventually the group moved its headquarters to 1345 Euclid Street. Led by Mitch Snyder until his death in 1990, CCNV won political influence for its causes. Behind you on your right is the Mexican Cultural Institute, welcoming visitors to see exhibits and murals on Mexican life and history. The Institute succeeded the Mexican Embassy in the 1911 building originally the residence of Chicago Socialite Emily MacVeagh.
18. TRCH_091128_87.JPG: Cultural Convergence Columbia Heights Heritage Trail 18 Literary Lights "A Black world in which a wonderful democracy of conditions prevailed -- waitresses, doctors, preachers, winos, teachers, numbers runners and funeral directors, prostitutes and housewives, cabdrivers and laborers all lived as neighbors." -- - Marita Golden, describing Columbia Heights of the 1960s in Long Distance Life The house to your right at 1422 was built in 1893 for P.B.S. Pinchback, a Reconstruction era politician and lawyer from Louisiana. Pinchback briefly served as Louisiana's governor, the only African American governor in the country until Virginia elected Douglas Wilder in 1990. Pinchback also won seats in the U.S. House and Senate, but white politicians prevented him from claiming them. Here on Harvard Street, Pinchback raised his grandson, future author Jean Toomer. Toomer's time here provided material for his 1923 masterpiece, Cane. "Dan Moore walks southward on Thirteenth Street," Toomer wrote. "The low limbs of budding chestnut trees recede above his head....The eyes of houses faintly touch him as he passes them. Soft girl-eyes, they set him singing." Almost four decades later novelist Marita Golden also found a rich setting in Columbia Heights. The great Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, son of a diplomat assigned to the Mexican Embassy on 16th Street, relished life here in the 1930s. Washington had "one of the best public school systems in the world," he recalled, "and I profited from it." The Drum and Spear, Washington's first Afrocentric bookstore, operated three blocks from here, at 1371 Fairmont St., from 1969 until the mid 1970s. As you turn left on 14th Street to reach Sign 19, note the formerly private residences at 2901-2907 14th Street. From 1917 until 1972 the Hines Funeral Home operated there before the buildings became home to the Greater Washington Urban League.
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