Historical Facts of SWDC: Did You Know?

ON THIS SPOT: Pinpointing the Past in Washington, DC
by Douglas E. Evelyn and Paul Dickson

ON THIS SPOT: Now the site of the Federal Aviation Administration building on Independence Avenue between 7th and 9th Streets, S.W., formerly 8th and B (now Independence Avenue) Streets, S.W.

PLACE OF INFAMY -- Robey's Slave Pen operated here when the slave trade was still permitted in the District prior to its abolition in 1850.

ON THIS SPOT: Part of a totally redeveloped area, once bounded by 10th, 11th, E and G Streets, S.W., now covered by L'Enfant Plaza and highway interchanges.

CAL'S MARKET -- In one of his final acts as president, Calvin Coolidge authorized a farmer's produce market for this site on March 2, 1929. It was still active in the 1950s. While the site was transformed by urban renewal in the 1960s, a small vegetable market remains as part of the nearby Maine Avenue Fish Market. The transformation symbolizes the vast changes that have occurred in this part of the city.

ON THIS SPOT: L'Enfant Plaza, formerly 85 E Street, S.W. (between 9th and 10th Street, S.W.).

UNDERGROUND RAILROAD STATION -- The east end of the L'Enfant Plaza complex rests on the site of the home of Anthony Bowen, a free black community leader who operated a school for black children and, according to The Guide to Black Washington, started the first YMCA in the world for "colored men and boys" in 1853. Bowen also ran an underground railroad station to help convey fleeing slaves to safety in the north. In 1863 he assisted President Abraham Lincoln in recruiting blacks from Washington to serve in the Union Army unit called the First U.S. Colored Troops.

ON THIS SPOT: 926 G Street, S.W.

BOSS' HOUSE -- Probable site of the birthplace of Alexander R. "Boss" Shepherd, whose dramatic improvements and public works programs paved the way for the modern city. Although he served as governor of the Territory of Columbia 1873-74, Shepherd's real impact on the city came from his direction of the Board of Public Works from 1871 to 1874. Shepherd oversaw the installation of 123 miles of sewers, 133 miles of water mains and pipes, 3,000 street lamps and over 180 miles of streets and sidewalks; he was also responsible for planting over 25,000 trees along the city's streets. According to Eugene L.Meyer in "Boss", The Washington Post Magazine, April 28, 1991, improvements "appeared with uncanny frequency in areas where Shepherd and friends had invested. Assessments were uneven and cost overruns frequent." Buildings on this site were cleared in the early 1960s. An elementary school was built and named after him located at 14th and Jonquil Street, NW above Walter Reed Medical Army Hospital.

ON THIS SPOT: Southeast corner of 13th and C Streets, S.W.

PIONEER ROMANTIC WRITER -- Novelist E.D.E.N. Southworth lived in a house on this site and taught evening school classes attended by Rear Admiral Robley D. Evans, who developed the steel navy. Southworth (1819-99) penned novels with names like The Missing Bride and The Hidden Hand that were the rage of Victorian America and are all but forgotten today. She later moved to Georgetown.

ON THIS SPOT: Southeast corner of 12th Street and Maryland Avenue, S.W.

ROBERT BRENT HOME -- Robert Brent was the first mayor of Washington, appointed by the president to ten annual terms from 1802 to 1812. He presided over a city that Benjamin Henry Latrobe, in 1806, described as abounding "in cases of extreme poverty and distress...Workmen...are to be found in extreme indigence scattered in wretched huts over the waste the law calls the American metropolis... There are a higher order of beings quite as wretched and almost as poor, though as yet not so ragged...master tradesmen, chiefly building artisans. Above these again are others who brought larger fortunes to this great vortex that swallowed everything....thrown into it....nothing but the grave will set them free". This bleak picture was part of Latrobe's plea for improved and dependable financing for construction of public buildings under his direction as superintendent of public buildings.

During Brent's administration the city imposed taxes, established markets, began a rudimentary fire control system and opend two public schools paid for by public subscription.

ON THIS SPOT: 6th and M Streets, S.W. (although the address is often given as 6th Street and Maine Avenue, S.W.)

MODERN THEATER -- The Arena State repertory group broke local precedent when it opened to integrated audiences in 1951. Among its other achievements was a Tony award, the first one awarded to a theater company outside New York City. Its prior locations were the Hippodrome (1951-55), at 9th Street and New York Avenue, N.W. -- according to historian Constance McLaughlin Green, "an old burlesque house opposite the [old Carnegie] Public Library" -- and, beginning in 1955, in Foggy Bottom in the old Heurich Brewery. It opened at its present building in 1961.

In 1967 it premiered Howard Sackler's The Great White Hope", which won a Pulitzer Prize for the playwright and also launched the careers of James Earl Jones and Jane Alexander.

ON THIS SPOT: 4th and 7th Streets, S.W.

JOLSON'S NEIGHBORHOOD -- During the late 19th century (when today's 4th Street was named 4-1/2 Street in Southwest), these streets were lined with small shops and were centers of a Jewish immigrant community. A synagogue of the Talmud Torah Congregation opened in 1906 under the direction of Rabbi Moses Yoelson. One of his sons was singing star Al Jolson.

ON THIS SPOT: 4th Street, S.W.

OLD 4-1/2 -- Then called 4-1/2 Street, by 1900 this street was a dividing line between white residents on the east and blacks on the west. When renamed 4th Street between the world wars, both groups joined together and persuaded the city to widen and repair the street, add modern paving, and improve lighting. Community activist Harry Wender reported that the neighborhood commemorated its victory by holding the "biggest celebration in the history of the city" and that "it was the first time that Negroes and whites paraded together in the history of Washington".

ON THIS SPOT: Former 825 - 3rd Street, S.W.

LONG GONE -- The two-story row house and the street that existed here were among those first demolished by the government in the early 1950s to make way for the new Southwest. It became emblematic of the structures that were being destroyed. Here is how the house was described on the eve of its demolition in the Evening Star: "It had no central heat. The only running water came from a single cold water faucet protruding from a kitchen wall. Toilet facilities were in an outhouse, backed against the dwelling in a rubble-littered yard. For this, the family was charged $61 a month rent, not counting coal and wood for the two pot-bellied stoves used for heat and cooking."

On the site today is a townhouse development erected in the 1960s.

ON THIS SPOT: 1315 - 1321 4th Street, S.W.

LAST VESTIGE -- Wheat Row, constructed 1794-95, is one of the earliest row house complexes surviving in the city and the result of an early development scheme advanced by speculator James Greenleaf. According to Diane Maddex in Historic Buildings of Washington, D.C., Greenleaf was permitted to purchase at bargain rates 3,000 city lots for resale. In return he was to erect ten houses a year for seven years and lend the government $2,200 each month to complete public buildings. At one time, he controlled more than a third of the buildings for sale in the city.

Unfortunately, there was insufficient demand for lots, and Greenleaf's syndicate went bankrupt in 1797. Named after an early resident of number 1315, John Wheat, this block is one of the few examples of pre-1960 Southwest architecture to survive the massive urban renewal -- or as some termed it then, "urban removal" -- clearances of the late 1950s.

ON THIS SPOT: 470 N Street, S.W.

SPECULATOR -- A mansion on this site was occupied by Captain William Mayne Duncanson after his arrival in Washington, D.C., with fellow real estate speculator and developer Thomas Law in 1794. Duncanson met heavy losses in his ventures. In the 20th century the mansion was used for the Washington Sanitarium, a home for the indigent elderly, and as the Barney Settlement House. It was saved from demolition and is now incorporated into the Harbour Square residential complex.

ON THIS SPOT: 4th and P Streets, S.W.

FORT LESLEY J. MCNAIR -- The home of the National Defense University (formerly called the Army War College), this strategically located point has been associated with military purposes since the origins of the city. An early speculative real estate venture by James Greenleaf failed to take but gave the site the name Greenleaf's Point. Washington's first newspaper, a weekly called Impartial Observer and Washington Advertiser, was published here for a year beginning in 1795. The area was the site of a federal arsenal after 1804, destroyed by the British in the War of 1812 and rebuilt.

In 1864, when 21 women working in the arsenal room were killed in an explosion, President Lincoln attended their funeral and led the procession to Congressional Cemetery.

A federally constructed penitentiary for the District of Columbia, built here in the 1830s, was taken over by the Army as part of the arsenal for the Civil War and then appropriated as the site of the trial of the Lincoln conspirators in 1865. Azteroth, Herold, Payne and Mrs. Surratt were hanged in the yard on July 9, 1865. A tennis court now occupies the site of the scaffold.

The imposing red brick Beaux Arts War College building was added to the site in 1903. The post itself has had several names. For a while it was Fort Humphreys; in 1938 it became the Army War College and later still Fort McNair. The grounds are open to the public.

ON THIS SPOT: 4th and P Streets, S.W., in Washington Channel Park next to Fort McNair

MEMORIAL TO TITANIC MEN -- Gertrude Vanderbuilt Whitney sculpted this striking monument to the men who gave their lives so that women and children could escape the doomed Titanic. The stone bench that surrounds the draped granite figure at the center of the memorial was designed by Henry Bacon, designer of the Lincoln Memorial.

NEIGHBORHOOD LORE

Southwest -- Beginning in the early 1950s with the annihiliation of 5,700 -- mostly slum -- dwellings, Southwest Washington went through dramatic change. Not only was a large part of the area razed and rebuilt, but the old building lot system was abandoned to permit open spaces, apartment towers and townhouse clusters. Today, the residential mix of the area ranges from posh upper-income to public housing, extremes often a few doors apart.

Before the area was razed, it was largely populated by poor blacks. Over half of their dwellings lacked bathrooms and more than 70 percent were without central heating. Over 15,000 people were dsplaced by the renovations.

The new Southwest was the first part of the city to offer hgh-quality housing to both blacks and whites. Ironically, many of the displaced were poor who relocated to other parts of the city. Many residents and small business owners did not want to leave.

STREET LORE

Washington Avenue -- For many years, one could win a D.C. trivia contest by knowing which was the only one of the 50 states without a street in the city named after it. The answer was -- until November 16, 1989 -- the state of Washington. On that date the four-block stretch that was Canal Street, S.W. (a diagonal street that ran from South Capitol Street to Independence Avenue, S.W.) was renamed for the 42nd state.

It had been long reasoned, but never proven, that the omission was made to prevent confusion withthe name of the city and George Washington himself. The name was changed because of a one-man campaign launched by C.S. Wetherell, a 67-year-old retired Coast Guard captain and life-long resident of the state.