Existing comment:
Hub, Home, Heart
Greater H Street NE Heritage Trail
16 The Fires of 1968
On Friday, April 5, 1968 the 600 block of H Street went up in flames. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated a day earlier, and grief-stricken, angry men and women had taken to the streets across the city. Some took part in looting and burning.
Helen Wooden Wood remembered watching from her home on Linden Place as flames spread. "It was horrible. You could feel the heat and couldn't open the windows for the smoke." According to a fireman, the alley behind Morton's Department Store became "a freeway for looters" carrying "television sets, clothes, everything." Yet other people supported the firefighters, bringing them chairs and coffee.
When Morton's first opened downtown in 1933, it was among the few white-owned department stores that did not discriminate in hiring or sales. In fact owner Mortimer Lebowitz was a former Urban League president who had marched with Dr. King. Nevertheless, looters ransacked and torched his store here. The destruction, Lebowitz told a reporter later, "was nothing against me personally."
"The riots did not happen in a vacuum," recalled Sam Smith of the Capitol East Gazette. In 1968, "24 percent of the [area's] labor force was unemployed or underemployed." After the smoke cleared, 90 buildings in Greater H Street, containing 51 residences and 103 businesses, were gone. Most stores that weren't destroyed closed, never to reopen.
While the city cleared land for sale, it didn't pay to repair existing businesses or develop new ones. In 1984 the H Street Community Development Corporation formed to attract investment for development. The corporation and other nonprofits built housing and commercial buildings but H Street suffered from relentless suburban competition. It took the rehabilitation of the Atlas Theater, which started in 2002, investments in nightlife, and a new appreciation for the charms of the neighborhood's close-in, 19th-century buildings for H Street's revival to take hold. |