PICTURES ON THE WALL: URBAN RESTRUCTURING, GENTRIFICATION AND THE
STRUGGLE FOR PLACE IN 21 st CENTURY WASHINGTON D.C.
By
Damien Juan Thompson
Submitted to the
Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences
of American University
in Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements for the Degree
of Doctor of Philosophy
In
Anthropology
Chair:
Dr. Brett Williams
Da. Eileen Finqlay
Dean of the College
0- £ ) D ate
2006
American University
Washington D.C. 20016 AMERICAN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
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Copyright 2007 by Thompson, Damien Juan
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by
Damien Juan Thompson
2007
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. PICTURES ON THE WALL: URBAN RESTRUCTURING, GENTRIFICATION AND
THE STRUGGLE FOR PLACE IN 21 st CENTURY WASHINGTON D.C.
BY
Damien Juan Thompson
ABSTRACT
When I began writing I wanted to tell a story. The story is about Columbia
Heights, a neighborhood in NW Washington. I believe this is an important story to tell
because it springs from a concern with the human condition generally and with the
condition of children in the inner city specifically.
Simply put this dissertation is about three things: Power, Place and History. In
terms of gentrification in Columbia Heights it is about the power of the insurance and
real estate industries, developers and banks to make decisions which directly affect all of
our lives and life chances. It is also about our power as human beings both individually
and collectively to gain knowledge and understanding of how these institutions operate
and our power to oppose them when they prioritize the accumulation of wealth ahead of
human lives.
Second, it is about place. In general terms I am discussing Columbia Heights and
the way gentrification is changing the neighborhood day by day. More specifically my
dissertation is about grassroots organizing that 1 participated in with a group of concerned
mothers who wanted to stop The Greater Washington Boys and Girls club from selling
ii
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. clubhouse #10 on 14,h street. Not only do these mothers have children who use the club
everyday in a neighborhood with precious little recreation space. Many of these same
mothers went to the club when they were children and it is a part of each of their personal
histories.
Oftentimes in the inner-city we live in communities of fate where we are
intimately connected to our neighbors and vice versa because we all lack the material
wealth to make it far on our own.. We develop ties to specific places (such as the Boys
and Girls club on 14th Street) because they embody our collective history. When these
places are threatened we rally around them.
iii
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. PREFACE
This story is about change in the Nation's Capital. It begins early in the history
of the city and traces the ways that the pursuit of profit by the few profoundly altered the
lives and life chances of the many. This story sheds light on conventional wisdom that
urban America died a slow death through natural decay. Federal policies, especially
after the second world war suffocated inner cities in the United States. The move of
white residents (who had always lived in close proximity to some blacks) from inner
cities to suburbs was not necessarily a natural reaction to more integrated neighborhoods
but was facilitated by one of the greatest affirmative action programs and one of the most
effective fear/marketing strategies ever conceived in this nation's history.
Finally, a significant part of this story is about those black, and eventually, Asian,
Latino, African and West Indian people who inherited the city. Popular depictions
portray minority groups as both perpetrators and victims in the death of American cities.
While it is true the late 1960's “riots" did not help the cause, blacks were reacting to
structural processes that had been underway for more than a decade. The depths to
which many newly minted black neighborhoods fell can be traced in part to municipal
and federal government inaction in terms of rebuilding neighborhoods in the aftermath.
I came to Washington D.C. just as conditions in the city were showing signs of
improvement in many areas. The optimism that permeated the Central Business District
and wealthier Northwest neighborhoods did not reach all areas. I came to Columbia
iv
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Heights as a summer day camp counselor at Calvary Bilingual Multicultural Learning
Center. In total I spent 8 years working at Calvary with children ages 8-11. During this
time I was both a surrogate father and brother to those children and I have been able to
watch many of them grow into precocious teenagers. During the years that I worked at
Calvary not only did the children grow up before my eyes, much to my surprise I grew as
well. I matured and in many ways Columbia Heights is the neighborhood where I grew
up as well. I grew personally through the commitment I showed to Calvary and the
community that it served as I returned summer after summer to resume my familiar role.
I matured as a scholar as it was my love for the children that attended Calvary and with
the children of Columbia Heights in general that led me to conduct the research that led
to this dissertation.
This is the story of a city—diverse, dynamic and constantly in flux. This is the
story of poor residents and how their lives are confined, constrained, grounded and
uprooted. This is the story of life cut short, a neighborhood, a struggle; this is my story—
our story.
v
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT...... ii
PREFACE...... iv
Chapter
1. “WHAT A LONG STRANGE TRIP IT S BEEN”...... 1
“a chance”-for Edwin
We Have a Biographyand a Geography
Merging Structure and Agency in Urban Theory
‘The State Lies Massively...”
What is Columbia Heights and Why Study It?
Change and Urban Culture
21st Century Urban Political Economy: Theorizing the City
2. URBAN RENEWAL ...... 43
“Funkstown” Old Southwest: “The Island” Early Washington and Alley Housing THE STATE vs. It’s Agents... Planting the Seeds of Restructuring?
vi
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The Trolley and Development
Cold War Suburbs
4. BUBBLING CAULDRON 95
The “Uprisings
5. THE GREEN LINE COMETH 118
Chocolate City Gets a Different Flavor
Metro Wasteland
6. FOR THE CHILDREN 151
Summer in the City
Wake Up!
Obstacles
Kickoff
Building a Movement
Maintaining the message
Victory?
7. CONCLUSION...... 200
REFERENCES...... 209
Vll
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“WHAT A LONG STRANGE TRIP IT’S BEEN”
a chance (for Edwin)
i want a chance to live in a place that is cool in the summer warm in the winter w here pipes don’t freeze and i don’t have to sleep w ith m y brother
i w ant a place to stay that m y fam ily w on’t have to m ove out o f because w e haven’t had any electricity in the m iddle o f a heat w ave
i w ant a chance to play in the grass w ithout rolling through litter w alk down the street w ithout kicking cans
speaking o f kicking i w antac h a n c e t o l i v e alife w here my negro-morenos k i n o r my Spanish nam e and accent don’t m ean an ass kickingby the police or even w orse bysom eone who looks and talks like m e and lives in the sam e neighborhood
so give m e this chance i prom ise i w on't do it again w hatever m ade you so m ad w hether it w as kicking Salvador in the head even though i m eant it or if it w as ju st being born to im m igrants
are you listening?
Damien Thompson 2002
1
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The motivation for this dissertation springs from a concern for the urban
condition and specifically the conditions of children who grow up in inner city
environments. This concern is grounded in an understanding that “In the words of
Miguel de Unamuno, There is nothing more universal than the individual for what
becomes of one becomes of us all. Every man is worth more than all Humanity.’
(Richardson 1979:1). This concern for the human condition generally has developed
during my time in Washington D.C. pursuing my graduate degree.
For the past eight years, I have worked with Latino and African American
children at CentroNia (fonnerly Calvary Bilingual Multicultural Learning Center) in
Columbia Heights, a neighborhood in the city's Northwest section. CentroNia's mission
is to assist the neighborhoods Latino and African American families with the rigors of
raising children, providing pre and post-natal care and continued support through
childcare, and a variety of other social services.
Being from a suburban area of North Carolina with no true city center, I was not
only an outsider in terms of the neighborhood and the culture of CentroNia, I also
viewed the city itself from an outsider's perspective. Over the years I developed
personal relationships with many young people and their families as well as much of the
staff despite my lack of proficiency in Spanish. 1 worked with Edwin for three years at
CentroNia and he was without a doubt one of the most frustrating and mischievous
children 1 encountered. He was also funny and intelligent-1 have never taken so many
beatings in any game as 1 did in chess from nine-year old Edwin. As often as Edwin got
into trouble, he would always ask me the same thing - for “a chance”. At first I thought
it was just a trick to get back into my good graces, which it was, but 1 also began to think
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about the deeper meaning behind his words. I came to the understanding that Edwin was
asking me for the type of opportunity that he did not get from overworked D.C. public
school teachers. The type that his family did not get when they were forced to move out
of their tenement apartment building when the owner wanted to sell the property. This is
the type of chance that eludes many of the children and adults that live in Columbia
Heights. It is the chance denied to them when their well-being and life chances place
second to the accumulation of wealth.
In this dissertation 1 will focus on the struggle over the future of Boys and Girls
Clubhouse #10 in order to examine the spatial and social reorganization of Columbia
Heights. By looking at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Washington’s desire to sell
the land and cash in on the booming real estate market of the neighborhood I will be able
to locate the neighborhood within the flow of time, capital accumulation and economic
restructuring both locally and globally.
The localized effects of this restructuring and the cyclical nature of capital
investment help to explain what gentrification is and why it happens in particular places
at particular moments. These structural arguments, taken alone, often make it difficult to
deal with how the changes caused by this economic restructuring articulate with cultural
concerns and everyday lives. The actions of parents and community activists fighting to
preserve Boys and Girls Clubhouse #10 must be examined using an analysis of both
structure and agency.
Examining gentrification and its effects on everyday social relations will also
allow me to speak about the convergence of two types of history, the history of capital
accumulation and urban/community/individual histories which occur over a much
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shorter span of time. By understanding these localized histories and how they articulate
with the much longer history of capital accumulation we can better decipher the ways
that human agency is implicated in deciphering and negotiating the changing spatial and
social forms that economic restructuring has created. Because capitalist systems are not
wholly structuring it is imperative that any analysis of these systems be understood in
relation to human agency. Because of the ability of capitalism to be at once abstract and
concrete in its effects on our lives, its sometimes striking rationality as well as its
inherent flaws, it is the quintessential human creation.
The term gentrification was coined by sociologist Ruth Glass (1964) to describe
the process where inner city London neighborhoods were being appropriated to make
way for middle class residents. For the purposes of this project, gentrification is the
reinvestment of capital into deteriorating neighborhoods following a period where inner
city properties devalued as the result of suburban expansion. This investment in turn
attracts additional economic investment by middle and upper income renters and
homebuyers, which subsequently drives up property values and rents driving out poorer
residents. Gentrification is evidence of deeper social, economic and spatial shifts. It is a
part of deindustrialization, the boom in downtown real estate, redevelopment of urban
waterfronts, and the rise of service economies-centered on hotels, convention centers and
entertainment districts. Gentrification is the physical and spatial realization of these
types of transformations, and is a mechanism through which these transformations
reorder the lives of ordinary people.
In the summer of 2001 the District government evicted Edwin's family from their
building, after not having had electricity for more than a week. It was at that point that I
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understood how profoundly gentrification changes a neighborhood and the lives of the
people who live there. Not long after this event I began to study the gentrification of
Columbia Heights and planned to focus on housing displacement. I spent the next
several months making contacts with residents and social service organizations that help
local residents with the various issues they may encounter on a day to day basis,
including threats to their current housing situation. Beatriz Otero (B.B.) the director of
CentroNia, put me into contact with Raul Rodriguez of the Central American Research
Center also located on Columbia Road. It proved to be one of the most beneficial
connections 1 made during the early portion of my research as it was Mr. Rodriguez who
put me into contact with Serita “Cookie” Wilson. 1 formally interviewed “Cookie"
Wilson on two different occasions and spoke with her informally at other times.
Gradually, she became a valuable source concerning the issues I was trying to examine.
This was so true that 1 used one of our interviews as the basis for a paper presentation at
the meetings of the Society for the Anthropology of North America in the Spring of
2003. One evening in May 2004 she invited me to her apartment for a meeting to
discuss the Safe Summer Kickoff Parade organized by the late Rita B. Bright, a resident
of the Nehemiah Cooperative, employee of the Shaw-Columbia Heights Collaborative
and community activist who grew up in Columbia Heights. After that meeting Cookie
asked me to attend a second, larger meeting held in the Nehemiah Cooperative's
Community Room to finalize last minute details.
While this was ostensibly a meeting about the parade it turned out to be much
more informative and covered everything from police harassment of black youth to the
closing of the Boys and Girls Clubhouse (#10) on 14th Street. We spoke about the
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parade briefly then the conversation shifted to a meeting held the night before at Cardozo
High School regarding the selling of the land that the club sits on. The field notes I
recorded in that meeting describe my first impressions of the club.
“now I have been past this place many times on my way to other places never having stopped in butI have always been struck by how amazingly shabby it looks from the outside and compared with Calvary and the LAYC area, devoid of young people” (Thompson field notes 2005).
At that time the sale of the club seemed like a done deal with the Boys and Girls
Clubs of Greater Washington selling the land and building to a developer who would put
in luxury condos and possibly a small grocery store in addition to space which would
supposedly house a new Boys and Girls club. The facility will be in the basement of the
building and will be dug four floors down. Also they said that Greater Washington
would get $7 million, which would relieve them of the financial burden they took on
after merging with Metropolitan Boys and Girls Club.1
It was at this meeting that 1 first met Iris and Linda Edmundson, sisters who grew
up in Columbia Heights in the 1980‘s, left and lived in the Mount Vernon Square area
and being faced with rising rents in that neighborhood, came back to Columbia Heights.
They are both raising son's on their own and rely on the Boys and Girls club as a safe
space for their son's to physical and emotional development just as their mother had
relied on the club when they were growing up. It was at the rally celebrating the
conclusion of the Safe Summer Kick-off Parade that Iris first told me the story of their
brother Ronnie.
1 The Metropolitan Boys and Girls Club merged with the Metropolitan Boys and Girls Club in 2003. Before the merger Greater Washington did not operate any clubs within the Washington D.C. city limits.
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We Have a Biography and a Geography
The individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own life chances ...We have come to know that every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that he lives out a biography, and that he lives it out within some historical sequence. By the fact of his living he contributes however minutely to the shaping of this society and to the course of history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove. C. Wright Mills
Ronnie was a 22 year old father of a young son when he was murdered at the
comer of Chapin and 14th Streets, just steps away from Clubhouse #10 of the
Metropolitan Boys and Girls Club, the same club where Ronnie spent many days during
his childhood. He played American Athletic Union (AAU) basketball in the winter and
football in the fall. Ronnie was a member of the math team and Iris boasted to me in our
conversation after the parade that, “if you go in there you know the pictures on the wall
that are in there, he is in a lot of those pictures". The club is a place for recreation.
Athletic teams play a large role in the identity of the club and of the community that uses
it. In that same initial conversation after the parade Iris explained the club was also
important because it "was a safe haven and we could do different activities and just be
with our friends and you know be with people we knew were there that cared about us
and all that." One of those people was Officer Mitch Credle who was an important role
model for Ronnie as a boy. The adult role models that the club provides to the young
boys and girls that use it are important. Linda. Iris and Ronnie's mother, along with her
twin sister (who lives across the hall) and her daughters lives in the Wardman Court
apartments directly across the street from Clubhouse #10. The Wardman Court
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. development is the redeveloped Clifton Terrace apartments where she raised her
children. I had an opportunity to visit and talk with her and she was adamant about the
importance of the club to her efforts to raise a family.
Mom: as far as having a place, having a safe house that is where the club comes in because a lot of kids they come to the club because they don’t have any male guidance in their house, they teach the kids and they show the kids they make the kids laugh. If the kids get out of control they straighten things out just like they daddy would straighten them out and 1 believe that is good for the kids. If they don’t have that at home then they go over there [and] they are going to look up to some man over there someone who will straighten them out and make them laugh.
Does this description of Ronnie’s life give any indication how that life would
end? If as C. Wright Mills explains, in his formulation of the sociological imagination,
by locating ourselves within our period we can know our life chances thereby better
understanding our fate, how was Ronnie to know that he was to meet his end murdered
on a city sidewalk at the age of 22? Logan and Molotch (1988) argue that
neighborhoods themselves can order life chances much like the dimensions of caste and
class. By highlighting the importance of spatial segregation in the reinforcement of
unequal market relations and the ‘prisons of space and resources’ created by that
disadvantage, Logan and Molotch demonstrate how places create “communities of fate"
and state that we must understand stratification of place in order to understand life
chances. This notion of communities of fate is important because it “seeks to dislodge
understanding of community from identity or allegiance to a bounded group toward a
recognition that contemporary individuals find themselves tied in a web of relationships
with others, some chosen and some not. These entanglements force a recognition of the
ways in which our individual decisions affect and are affected by others so that what we
share is not identity but rather a situation, a process, a fate” (Brydon 2006). “Life stories
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have a geography too they have milieu immediate locales, provocative emplacements
which effect thought and action” (Soja 1989:10). We cannot understand Ronnie's life
cannot without addressing not only when, but also where it happened.
I met Linda and Iris at a community meeting concerning the Boys and Girls club.
As I mentioned they grew up in Clifton Terrace apartments in a family of 4 with a single
mother. Linda, Iris, Starr and Ronnie used the club when they were growing up and it
became a vital part of their lives. Today both Iris and Linda are in their early 30's, they
are both single mothers and both have recently moved back to Clifton Terrace and
Columbia Heights from the Mt. Vernon area where rising rents stemming from the
building of the new Washington Convention center are driving out low income people. 1
am able to know Ronnie's story because his sisters continue to keep his memory alive.
Ronnie murder came at a time in Washington DC history when violent crime, and
especially murder was at an all-time high. Violent crime in some areas was so persistent
that Ronnie's mother was shot in 1996 while trying to deliver money to Ronnie and one
of his sisters. During our interview she recounted the story of her own shooting, and her
luck at not being fatally wounded, she remembered how scared she was and how Ronnie
had comforted her wiping tears from his mother's eyes—a year later he was dead.
In 1996 there were 397 murders in Washington DC in 1997 301. Ronnie and his
mother's shootings came at the tail end of a ten year period, from 1987 to 1997, when
the number of murders per year in the city did not fall below 300.
Social scientists realize that factors such as gender, race/ethnicity, and socio
economic status, level of education contribute to life chances. To some degree
Anthropologists, Sociologists and Human Geographers have understood thatwhere you
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are also plays a role in life chances. Individuals in developing nations are likely to have
shorter life expectancies than most residents of developed nations, but even when
differential life chances determined by location are acknowledged economic,
environmental and other social factors are seen as being more influential in impacting
life chances. Location is more of a secondary variable, a container, in which larger
social forces act upon individuals or entire populations.
Washington D.C. in the 80’s and 90!s was among the most violent cities in
America and the crack epidemic which had infested many inner city neighborhoods
reached near epidemic levels in the Nation's Capital. The level of violence that occurred
on the city’s streets reached the status of urban legend both for those who experienced it
directly and those who did not. Many residents remember the violence of the time, and
feel considerable pain at the loss of friends and loved ones.
Columbia Heights, in the 1980's and 90's, was home to many impoverished
families and was rife with drugs. In addition Metro construction turned 14th street into a
work zone where tom up sidewalks and scaffolding made walking from one location to
another hazardous without an orange vest and hard- hat. B.B. Otero, executive director
of CentroNia, a long-standing non-profit organization, described the area this way, "It
was such a harsh environment the drug scene in particular was probably the worst piece.
This street (Columbia Road) is the corridor for folks coming in from (suburban)
Maryland so white collar workers who pick up drugs have to pick them up somewhere, it
was just unbelievable at 7 o’clock in the morning and you walk in the Center and there
would be a line [of cars waiting to buy drugs]”
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The Boys and Girls Club, located across the street from the building where he
grew up, was an extension of Ronnie’s home. An important part of Ronnie's early life
experiences involved his participation in club activities. Those experiences nurtured a
commitment in his community, and his pictures on the wall in the club are testament to
how active he was at the club when he was growing up. The club was a safe haven for
both Ronnie and his sisters. Linda and Iris often have told me that the best part of their
days when they were girls was getting home from school and going to #10. This was
especially important for people who lived in Clifton Terrace, which at the time was one
of the most notorious apartment buildings in Columbia Heights, with drugs sold and at
times used in the hallways.
Because of his involvement in club activities Ronnie learned the importance of
community involvement. The type of community involvement that he learned through
participation in the club was a part of Ronnie's life until his death. In his early 20's he
received an award from Cardozo High School for being a booster and supporter of the
athletic teams. He cheered for the teams not because he was a graduate of the school as
his sisters were but because they were neighborhood kids he could identify with and who
could identify with him. Tragically it was probably his commitment to his community
and to younger neighborhood boys that led to Ronnie's death.
When a fight broke out at a local club and the beef spilled out into neighborhood
streets, Ronnie tried to step in and settle things. His sisters believe that people from
outside coming into the neighborhood and creating a lot of problems initiated the fight.
This is not the first time I have interviewed people from neighborhoods that had at some
point seen a lot of drug traffic. These residents all have noted that a significant aspect of
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the drug trade comes from outsiders with no stake in the neighborhood. These outsiders
are most likely the customers that do come in from outside during the early morning or
late night hours. To be sure the majority of neighborhood residents in Columbia Heights
were not involved in the drug trade but there are those that were. It is the combination of
those in the neighborhood willing to supply and those who will come into the
neighborhood looking for their fix of choice that creates a dangerous environment for
everyone. While Linda and Iris never mentioned that drugs might have been an issue, I
believe that the original beef was fueled by competition in the informal economy.
I.E: .From my understanding Ronnie and another one of the guys that got killed didn't have anything to do with it. It was just the people that was involved came to him so you know he was like the backbone to some of the younger boys you know and he felt like a protector and he had to handle a situation and just got into it and the initial beef was not with him so he died the way that he lived.
L.E.: Trying to protect somebody.
I.E.: It was to a point where you couldn't even look like you wanted to do something to one of us you know so 1 m not saying that that is the right way to be but that is the way he died protecting somebody else. He got involved in something out of being who he was 1 mean if he felt like somebody close to him was being hurt in some way he would do whatever he felt he had to do to yield that pain from that person that's just how he was anybody that knew him would tell you the same thing even his enemies knew that about him so you know and a lot of that probably came out of fear that they knew that that's how he was They knew that if we do something to somebody on that side he's coming he wants to know what happened.
I have tried to situate Ronnie's life within the context of a profoundly violent
time in the history of Washington D.C. but also in a neighborhood where the effects of
the drug trade and violent crime were being experienced first hand. The comments from
his sisters above paint the picture of a young man who was committed to his community
and looked to support neighborhood youth in any way that he could, who looked to
protect those same young people and his family from the very real dangers that existed
on every comer—even to the point of resorting to violence himself. But understanding
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the history of a life or a group of people or a city is not simply a question of biography it
is also a question of geography.
Since that meeting I have grown more and more involved in the struggle over the
future of #10. 1 have moved from an outsider frantically trying to write down what was
said in those early meetings to a reluctant volunteer making phone calls and creating
flyers and finally to a committed scholar activist on the support team of the #10 Parent's
Association. This small group of people some of whom have children in the club, some
who grew up in the club and have kids there, other neighborhood residents and some
who were inspired by their tenacity molded themselves into an effective political
movement. 1 became more and more deeply involved because of the commitment and
tenacity of this small group of people and I view our struggle as a direct challenge to the
structural processes that I have studied for so long and will detail here.
Although 1 do not know Ronnie outside of the anecdotes his sisters and mother
have told me, I feel it necessary to tell his story. As 1 mentioned previously, my reasons
for studying gentrification in Columbia Heights come from a concern for the welfare of
children there. Ronnie's story and it's connection to our organizing for #10 are important
for several reasons. First, his death was not an isolated incident-there were thousands of
murders that took place in the 1980‘s and 90's across the city. That fact alone creates
the necessity to examine the conditions that are particular to the inner city, which make
this type of result seem normal. Second, because the Boys and Girls Club played the
prominent role that it did in Ronnie's life and this was the result, it should heighten our
awareness of the absolute necessity of maintaining safe places and open spaces where
children can learn and grow into viable members of their community and the larger
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society. Lastly, Ronnie' s story is Edwin's story. It is the story of every child who
simply needs a chance to live up to their full potential but must negotiate the difficulties
tied up in their geography.
There has been considerable work both in academia and the popular press
examining the conditions particular to inner city existence. There has also been work
that examines the economic and social processes that have created the inner city.
What was missing from my analysis was a way of connecting the structural aspects of
gentrification with the more personal “communities of fate” (cite) that I knew residents
were trying desperately to preserve. Ronnie's story and the large role that the club
played for him as he grew into adulthood allows me to place the pressures of
gentrification on #10 within the context of not only urban political economy, but also a
working class historical geography where physical spaces can represent and serve as
rallying points for a certain “community of fate".
Columbia Heights is by all accounts a neighborhood in transition. The
tremendous changes that have occurred here since the opening of the Green Line metro
station have brought development pressures that threaten to dismantle the, sometimes
tenuous, circumstances of the neighborhoods working class and poor residents.
Institutions like the Boys and Girls Club have served as a critical link in support of these
residents, these families. It is a place where children like Linda, Iris and Ronnie learned
communal values, the importance of having places where the problems of the outside
world could be put on hold and you could just be a kid. This was especially true of the
generation of African American children and families that called Columbia Heights
home in the late 1970's and 1980's. At this time violence was not an unusual occurrence
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in Columbia Heights. Police and municipal responses to that violence showed a divide
between a comfortable middle class African American bureaucracy and the trials of
poorer residents. It is these values that made Linda, Iris and the other mothers who
opposed the sale of #10, so determined in the fight to preserve their history and their
children's future.
The shifts and changes going on in Columbia Heights right now threaten to erase
the place where these communal values have been learned and may be passed on to
another generation. To Linda and Iris and countless other families #10 is a physical
manifestation of the “use value”. Gina Perez (2002) explains that, “people may...create
supportive, place-based networks with neighbors, small business owners, schools and
other institutions that both provide material sustenance and engender emotional and
sentimental attachments to a particular place.” It is the use value, all the sentimental
attachments and relationships, which make one's emotional and material life more
comfortable, more bearable that is at the center of this work. However in order to
understand what the struggle for #10 truly means it has been necessary to merge the on
the ground realities of the present with Marxist and humanist urban theory as well as the
realities of history. Only by fully understanding the connections between Columbia
Heights history and the histories of other gentrified/redeveloped neighborhoods can we
place our struggle within the proper historical context and understand the power of what
was accomplished
Merging Structure and Agency in Urban Theory
As I mentioned previously, my motivation for undertaking this project is based
on the relationships I developed with residents in Columbia Heights, both with the
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parents of the Boys and Girls Club and particularly the children I worked with while
employed at CentroNia. Edwin and his families displacement from their apartment
building and the story of Ronnie’s murder fueled a desire to understand why these
things were happening to good people who worked hard to raise their children and get by
in a city and a nation that is often hostile to their presence here. I understood that if I
was to build a dissertation around describing the impacts of gentrification on Columbia
Heights residents and their reactions to it I would first need to understand and explain
what gentrification is and why it is happening in this place at this time.
From the beginning I have understood gentrification to be a process with both
economic and social impacts. I was however, not completely aware of the processes
which created it. On the ground gentrification can often appear to be driven by a high
demand for housing from the middle classes and mostly white young professionals who
desire to experience the excitement of the city before moving to the suburbs to raise their
children. The sheer volume of personal friends and acquaintances I have made over the
years who fit that exact profile has reinforced this understanding. Many of them, like me
are children of baby boomers, brought up in suburban America, eager to experience the
difference and unpredictability that the idea of living in an urban area promises. This
consumption side explanation of gentrification, while formidable when examining
gentrification and why people gentrify, was not sufficient to answer questions of why
working class people were being forced with the closing of a community resource that
they rely on for support in raising their children. Later, as I became involved in the
organizing to keep clubhouse #10 from being sold, it became apparent that a
consumption side argument focused on gentrifiers, falls woefully short in explaining the
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manner in which working class people address the challenges and threats gentrification
brings to their everyday lives.
Being a student who has always found truth in the Marxist analysis of history and
class struggle I immediately understood gentrification to be a process which
economically and socially had adverse affects on poor and working class people while
benefiting slum and absentee landlords. The primary theoretical influences for this
project are scholars committed, as I am, to using Marxist theory in an analysis of urban
processes. This theoretical orientation places its emphasis on understanding capitalist
economic processes in the urban context.
Since the late 1970's there have been a number of perspectives providing
alternatives to Marxist critiques of the effects of capitalist processes on the city.
Traditionally, the literature on gentrification has featured supply side (structural, radical
Marxist) arguments that look to explain urban restructuring through a critique of the
logic of capitalism or demand side arguments which begin with humanist concerns for
the active role of human agency in structuring urban landscapes. This drive to better
understand the role of human agency in place making like likely began with Kevin
Lynch's (1960)Image of the City which examined the differing ways individuals
perceived the built environment. Perhaps the most notable of these theorists is David
Ley (1987, 2003). Since the 1980"s there has been considerable work that has looked to
bring together influences of Marxist and humanist urban theory, the place making role of
human agents were incorporated more and more. While not replacing a Marxist analysis
of the city, these alternative perspectives (Massey and Allen 1984, Agnew 1987,
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Gregory 2000) emphasize the importance of not losing sight of the role of agency,
ideology and the power to manipulate symbols in structuring urban landscapes.
Both Marxist and humanist scholars have spent thousands of hours and pages
examining the economic and social processes that have created and changed cities,
especially since World War II. Critical to any understanding modem cities (especially in
the historically industrialized world) is the explicit acceptance that the nature of the
capitalist system of production and the accumulation of wealth has changed dramatically
since 1945. Economic restructuring, as this process has come to be called, is based on an
understanding that after WWII deindustrialization and the increasing white collar nature
of employment has set cities off in a vastly different direction, economically, socially
and spatially from their pre-WWII forms. Marxist analyses link these changes to falling
rates of profit, which led to a series of decisions by capitalist firms, businesses and
nation-states as they struggled to adjust to changing social, political and economic
conditions and maximize opportunities to make profits.What is central to this project
is the “local dynamics of economic transformations and how these affect the
configuration of urban space in advanced capitalist societies”(Fyfe and Kenny 2005:
106).
In order to fully understand these local dynamics and what was happening in
Columbia Heights it was necessary to shift my understanding of what neighborhoods are
and the way they change over time. The work of the Marxist social theorist Henri
Lefebvre allowed me to begin to conceptualize of neighborhoods as complex social
spaces and spaces as products of the entire complex of social relations. Urban space is
not simply a container within which people make history, but is itself a product of
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human activity. To say this does not mean that I understand space to be only a cultural
product. To the contrary I view the social world to encompass all of human activity;
ideological, cultural, economic and political. Human activity affects the manner in
which space is used and how those uses change over time. Lefebvre’s Marxist analysis
has contributed to an understanding of capitalist economic activity as an aspect of human
activity in the modem era, and that economic activity in particular (but not solely) affects
the form and function of the urban landscape.
How space is created and structured is a reflection of political and economic
realities and social relationships. Lefebvre insisted that the contradictions of space or
what he called the “spatial problematic” marks a new phase in capitalist development.
He argues that capitalism has been able to survive and even flourish despite its own
internal contradictions “ by occupying space, by producing space’". The space of “neo
capitalism”, homogenous yet fragmented marks a period in which capitalism is unable to
overcome its own contradictions and the social or urban revolution becomes a battle
where the spaces of social reproduction are more contested than are the spaces of
production.
In the United States entire urban landscapes were created to support plants,
factories, mills and deep water ports-the sites of capitalist production and trade.
Residential neighborhoods were sites of social reproduction for workers and the stores
and shops they patronized were sites for the consumption of the goods. In his
description of Detroit in its manufacturing heyday Thomas Sugrue (1996) notes that,
Factories, shops and neighborhoods blurred together indistinguishably, enmeshed in a relentless grid of streets and a complex web of train lines...The city's sprawling form and its vast array of manufactories made little sense. But Detroit's industrial geography
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had a logic that defied common observation. Rail lines formed the threads that tied the city's industries together. Automobile manufacturing and railroad transportation were inseparably bound in a symbiotic relationship. Sugrue 1996:30
Sugrue’s representation is that of an industrial city where roads, neighborhoods,
rail lines and roads were spaces created fully in support of capital accumulation by the
manufacturing companies that dominated its economic base.
The cities that grew up around these sites of capital accumulation, as well as the
factories themselves, represented a significant investment of capital in the built
environment. Over time these same factories, as well as their supportive infrastructure,
began to age. From it's beginnings economic restructuring in the United States took on a
distinctly spatial character.
The “spatial problematic" that Lefebvre identifies is the same crisis of capitalist
accumulation responsible for a new era in the form and substance of capital
accumulation. Borrowing from Marx's analysis of the accumulation process inCapital ,
David Harvey (1978) identifies this crisis of accumulation as the result of competition
between capitalists. Harvey identifies competition as one of the “internal contradictions
which exist in the primary circuit” (manufacturing sector) of capital accumulation (Fyfe
and Kenny 2005:112). The contradiction of competition leads to a tendency toward
“over-accumulation”. Harvey argues that this tendency is manifest in a variety of guises.
1. Overproduction of commodities-a glut on the market
2. Falling rates of profit
3. Surplus capital
4. Surplus labor
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If one or any of the above modes of over-accumulation take place they provide “a
preliminary framework for capitalist crisis” (Fyfe and Kenny 2005:112). In the post
WWII America economic crisis was linked to economic and spatial constraints.
Immediately after WWII, manufacturing in the United States continued to operate at an
astounding rate. Conversion from production of tanks, airplanes and other tools of war
back to consumer goods did not stop the industrial machine. The result of this
tremendous productive capacity was an overproduction of many commodities. The
over-accumulation that Harvey discusses and Lefebvre alludes to in his understanding of
the spatial problematic was built on industrialization and the Fordist regime of
production.
Faced with the likelihood of an economic crisis because of falling rates of profit,
overproduction in commodities and aging industrial infrastructure American
manufacturers and the federal government made a series of decisions that allowed them
to stave off a major economic crisis and usher in a period of growth the United States
had never known before. On the manufacturing side Sugrue indicates that the urban
crisis in America, highlighted by high rates of poverty, racial segregation, and spatial
isolation has its roots in economic restructuring that began in the 1950‘s.
As pundits celebrated America's economic growth and unprecedented prosperity America's Midwestern and northeastern cities lost hundreds of thousands of entry-level manufacturing jobs...m ajor companies reduced work forces, speeded up production, and required more overtime work. The manufacturing industries that formed the bedrock of American economy, including textiles, electrical appliances motor vehicles and military hardware, automated production and relocated plants in suburban and rural areas, and increasingly in the low wage labor markets of underdeveloped regions like the American South and the Caribbean. The restructuring of the economy proceeded with the full support and encouragement of the American government.Federal highway construction and military spending facilitated and fueled industrial growth in non-urban areas (Sugrue 1996:6).
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In order to fully understand the mechanisms within the capitalist system itself
that allow economic restructuring to take place we must return to Harvey's analysis of
the circulation of capital. When signs of over-accumulation begin to manifest, there
must exist either established outlets for the investment of surplus labor or favorable
conditions for the creation of such outlets. After WWII American capital and the federal
government faced a number of decisions as to how to deal with the coming over
accumulation crisis. Harvey argues that when crises of over-accumulation develop it
becomes necessary to “switch” capital flows into what he calls the “secondary circuit of
capital” (Fyfe and Kenny 2005: 112). This secondary circuit, for our purposes, is the
built environment which consists of both the basis for production and the consumption of
productive capacity. He continues that, Investment in the built environment therefore
entails the creation of a whole physical landscape for purposes of production, circulation,
exchange and consumption” (Fyfe and Kenny 2005:112).
Because of this tendency to shift capital into the built environment during times
of crisis there were a few choices available during the post WWII crisis. The first was to
remake the already existing urban landscape in a manner that would better reflect the
economic realities of the post war world. The other was to create new spaces for the
consumption of surplus capital.
Neil Smith (1986) argues that there was no "natural necessity for the expansion
of economic activity to take the form of suburban development” (Fyfe and Kenny
2005:133). At it's heart suburbanization is not only the extension of residential areas out
from the city center, it is the decentralization of capital and the creation of built
environments which work to absorb surplus capital. A key aspect of the decisions to
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suburbanize capital was the availability of cheap land on the periphery (Fyfe and Kenny
2005:133). In the urban context, Smith notes, profit rates are location specific...the
economic indicator that differentiates one place from another is ground rent (Fyfe and
Kenny 2005:133). InUneven Development (1984) Neil Smith provides valuable insight
into this reality. Smith argues that the commodification of space places private property
as the basic building block of urban space. Because private property is a commodity it
necessarily has a price and that price sees its realization in the form of ground rent. The
amount of rent a space is worth is affected by many factors, the most important of which
for the purposes of this discussion are its relation to other places such as downtown and
facilities such as transportation systems. The ground rent system flattens urban space and
divides that space into individualized parcels like we see on a Monopoly board with each
space existing in the dimension of exchange value. This occurs “as a means of then
coordinating and integrating the use of individual spaces within urban space as a whole”
(Smith 1986:138). In other words, just as a monopoly square has no meaning beyond its
relationship to other squares and thus the board as a whole, individual spaces in cities
cannot exist in the way we understand them to outside of their relationship to other
spaces and to urban space as a whole.
Uneven development is the result of what Smith calls the seesaw movement of
capita] in search of greater returns on investments. Capital will always be invested in
areas where the rate of profit will be highest and "‘these moves are synchronized with the
rhythm of accumulation and crisis” (Smith, 1986,137). The seemingly easy mobility of
capital results in the development of areas that can provide a high rate of profit and
devalorization in areas where high rates of profit can no longer realized. Ultimately the
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process of development itself leads to increased rents and declining profit, which
opposes the realization of higher profits promised by the development initially. On the
other hand devalorization of specific areas leads to what Smith (1991) has termed, a
“rent gap” representing a disparity between realized land rents and potential rents if land
were put to its best uses. High unemployment, deterioration of infrastructure, building
stock and decline in rent levels, creates conditions that will once again make a given area
profitable and susceptible to rapid development.
Lastly, because uneven development is the result of the seesaw movement of
capital Smith argues that we find it most developed at the urban scale where capital is
more easily transferred from the primary circuit to the secondary circuit. The dispersal
of capital in the growth of suburbs created the devalorization of the built environment in
the inner city. The suburbs were attractive to investors for many reasons among which
was the rapid increase in ground rent that came with development. Inner city ground
rents were high at this time and provided lower rates of return. Investment in the
suburbs and lead to devalorization thus allowing the cycle of capital investment to move
from sphere to sphere in search of the next "spatial fix". Devalorization is a systematic
mechanism that transforms over invested neighborhoods into locations for new
development at a future time.
For the purposes of this dissertation the suburbanization/decentralization of
capital is important for two reasons. First, the outward flow of capital to develop
suburban, industrial, residential, commercial and recreational activity results in a
reciprocal change in suburban and inner-city ground rent levels (Ibid). Second, it was
the economic expansion and production of suburban landscapes in the aid of capital in
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crisis that has created the economic opportunity for the gentrification (restructuring) of
the inner city. While these structural arguments are important to my understanding of
gentrification as a result of economic processes that restructure urban space, structural
arguments are insufficient to fully the impact of gentrification on the ground and in the
moment.
Edward Soja (1989) though not a Marxist theorist has been influenced
considerably by the work of Lefebvre. Soja accepts Lefebvre's basic assumptions about
the production of space as in part a result of the necessities of capitalism. Soja has also
refined them and added his own theoretical insights regarding the effects of into the
production of space. Central to my argument from this point forward is Soja's proposal
of a socio-spatial dialectic. Following Soja I will argue that the structure of space in
cities is simultaneously social and spatial and that as Lefebvre argued, “Space and the
political organization of space express social relationships but also react back upon
them" (Soja 1989:81). For Soja the above statement is the basic premise of the socio-
spatial dialectic, “the central premise of which is that the built environment is both the
product of, and the mediator between, social relations. It is central to the socio-spatial
dialectic of human geographies that are simultaneously contingent and conditioning,
outcome and medium, product and premise (Fyfe and Kenny 2005: 282). Recognizing
as he does that human agency is a key aspect of social relations. Soja, in the socio-
spatial dialectic, brings together Marxist concerns for structural process with humanist
and postmodern emphasis on the multitude of ways that human agents will respond to
the urban restructuring those economic processes bring about.
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By drawing attention to the dialectical nature of the relationship between space
and social relations Soja hopes to bring an even greater understanding of spatiality into
Marxist analyses of the city that he believes focuses on history to the detriment of other
relationships, fdtered through the materialist lens. The goal for Lefebvre, Soja and, by
extension, for this project is the “spatialization of history the making of history entwined
with the social production of space” (Soja 1989:18). Soja further argues that Marxist
analysts failed to appreciate the dialectical nature of social and spatial relationships the
way that they had in linked spheres such as production and consumption. “As a result
instead of sensitively probing the mix of opposition, unity, and contradiction which
defines a socio-spatial dialectic, attention was too often drawn to empty categorical
questions of causal primacy. (Soja 1989:77)
By concentrating on the formulation of space as a material product of urban
capital accumulation over time, which is reshaped with corresponding shifts in capital
investment and social organization, 1 will not take a step toward fetishizing space but
rather move toward a historico-geographical materialism that can be used to examine the
contradictions of urban life that cannot be reached through traditional Marxist analysis.
"It is now space more than time that hides things from us...the demystification of
spatiality and its veiled instrumentality of power is the key to making practical political
and theoretical sense of the contemporary era (Soja 1989: 61)“. In the urban context
spatiality is the result of ideology and politics manipulated in strategic ways to obtain
specific goals. Space is a social product and all human activity occupies a particular
geographic space, that activity in turn alters the social and physical landscape in a
number of ways.
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Understanding that a structural analysis is not sufficient in itself to explain the
gentrification process as it moves from the abstractions of capitalist accumulation to the
on the ground results in Columbia Heights. My analysis will focus on the interplay
between human agents and structural constraints which Soja hopes the socio-spatial
dialectic will highlight. In order to provide an even greater context to this dialectical
thought process I have chosen to highlight the work of John Logan and Harvey Molotch
(1988) who emphasize the work of human agents and their institutions at the local level
in the restructuring of urban space. Logan and Molotch argue that the making of urban
space into a commodity to be bought and sold touches the lives of all city dwellers and
creates an inherent tension and conflict in the urban context. The authors describe the
pursuit of profit or “exchange values” as the motivation for the efforts of real estate
speculators, local officials and landlords to spur development. These efforts are opposed
by the pursuit of "community” and physical continuity or “use values" by those whose
lives would be most affected by development. Citizens and residents who fight for use
values similarly mobilize their individual and organizational resources in defense of their
own goals. Through the efforts of politicians, developers and business elite's to intensify
land use and maximize profits, the city becomes a “growth machine".
People do resist gentrification even as powerful structural processes are taking
place creating the opportunity for profits in a reordered urban landscape. Michael
Reuben (2001) makes it clear urban scholars and policymakers have come to view the
inner-city and its residents from a perspective that erases the political agency of the poor.
To that end as I speak to a greater degree about the organizing I took part in I will
highlight the understanding that #10 became a site for political representations through
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which a group of neighborhood activists were able to make claims to space based on
what Lefebvre and Don Mitchell (2003) have called a “right to the city”.
“The State Lies Massively..
Washington DC is similar in many ways to the other major cities in the Northeast
1-95 corridor. Like Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston, Washington began
with a thriving, bustling urban core that, despite its late beginning relative to larger cities
to the north, soon became the epicenter of a regional economy. The Federal Government
became the engine driving the city and region attracting federal workers as well as others
who hoped to find a happy and profitable niche in the new Nation's Capital. The District
of Columbia has managed to preserve its symbolic and economic role as the focus of a
metropolitan area which includes counties in both Northern Virginia (Arlington, Farifax,
Fauquier, Loudon, Prince William and Stafford Counties) and Southern Maryland (Anne
Arundel, Calvert, Charles, Frederick. Howard, Montgomery, Prince George's and St.
9 Mary s Counties)".
Today the District of Columbia is the focus of thriving tourist, service and
ancillary industries, most of which have been spawned to support the federal government
in various ways. This consistency of focus on the District of Columbia itself is
surprising when weighed against the shocking deterioration of its downtown and inner
city neighborhoods, which were in large part caused by the suburbanization of
population, economic activity and government functions.
9 " There is some debate as to whether Washington shares a single Metropolitan Region with Baltimore because of their proximity and the fact that they have suburban counties in common.
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The factors traditionally attributed to cities like Washington D.C. provides some
detail into the reasons why this deterioration occurred. The reasons generally point to
decaying downtowns, school integration brought about by the landmark Brown v.
Topeka Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954 and the outlawing of
restrictive covenants in 1949 as having led to white flight. The movement of white
families into the suburbs was due to shifting (white) consumer housing choices based on
a fear of falling property values. The real estate industry leveraged the outlawing of
racial covenants by selling homes to black families at inflated prices, while influencing
white homeowners to sell at depressed rates based on the decreasing land values of
neighborhoods gaining in black population. Fears resulting from the urban “riots” of the
bum baby buml960's were to have provided the final straw, breaking the back of the
downtown business/shopping districts hastening the transition of many formerly white
neighborhoods to predominately black neighborhoods. While I do not discount this
version of history entirely 1 do believe it to be merely one version of the story of what
happened in America's cities as well as severely shortsighted in terms of what economic
and social processes changed America post WWII. This story of the general urban
decline also fails to take into consideration the historical specificity that makes
Washington a unique case study.
What makes Washington D.C. unique is it's burdensome and contradictory
proximity to the seat of American power. Indeed Washington is a place, as Brett
Williams (2001) argues, “the state lies massively on the land" and the city itself is a
manifestation of the need to centralize and formalize the United States government. The
centrality of the federal government to the economic vitality of the Washington region
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reaches far beyond traditional government occupations into industries as diverse as law,
finance, services, technology and telecommunications. Simply put, no matter how much
the government decentralizes its less vital white collar operations, the primary industry
of the region is government and it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. This unique
position vis a vis the federal government also means that the United States congress
exerts a tremendous influence on the day to day politics of the city and it’s citizenry. It
wasn’t until 1963 and the passage of the 23rd amendment to the constitution that
residents of the city were permitted to vote for president and vice president. Still today
Washington D.C., the nation's capital city, is only permitted one non-voting delegate in
the House of Representatives and none in the Senate.
Because of the peculiar position of the city and it’s residents to federal
bureaucracy it represents a tremendously illustrative example of the various possibilities
in the manner and shape of urban forms, built environments and uses of space.
What is Columbia Heights and Why Study It?
There are 39 neighborhood clusters throughout the city, each made up of three to
five neighborhoods which the D.C. government uses for budgeting, planning, service
delivery, and analysis purposes.3 Columbia Heights lies in Cluster 2 which it shares with
Mt. Pleasant, a neighborhood west of 16th Street and Parkview which is to the east of
Sherman Ave and north of Howard University. I have chosen to provide demographic
information based on these clusters first because Columbia Heights includes several
census tracts, but comprises the majority of its cluster in terms of acreage. Secondly, the
3 Currently the city of Washington does not maintain statistics on individual neighborhoods.
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city government sees Columbia Heights as the centerpiece of Cluster 2; any planning for
the neighborhood is included within planning for the cluster as a whole. The data
gathered on Cluster 2 is divided into the categories of population, population by race and
ethnicity, family risk factors, isolation indicators, child well being indicators income
conditions, housing conditions and crimes reported.
Thirty percent of the Cluster’s population is identified as Hispanic, a group that
comprises only eight percent of the total city population, while 52 percent is African
American. This categorization of Hispanic is inclusive of Spanish speaking peoples of
any “race”. Children comprise 22 percent of the cluster population. The median
household income is $29,905 far below the $43,000 median for the city and there are no
indications of how many working adults it requires for most households to reach this
cluster median. The cluster totals show that the Columbia Heights/Mt. Pleasant Cluster
has the largest number of residents in poverty (11,328), with 1,994 households in
poverty. The majority of those families in poverty are in female-headed households,
which comprise 61 percent of households. The neighborhood has an unemployment rate
of 9.7 percent.
At first it seems surprising that only 6.8 percent of households are receiving
public assistance. However, the gap between the number of families in poverty and
those who receive public assistance can be traced to the passage of some of the most
drastic welfare and immigration “reform” passed in the United States. This legislation
worked to slash federal public benefits such as Supplemental Security Income (SSI),
food stamps, Medicaid, State Child Health Insurance Program (S-Chip) and Temporary
Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) to U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents.
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The number of African Americans receiving some sort of federal welfare assistance has
declined from. Because the number of undocumented Latinos in D.C. is estimated at
approximately 30,000 people, many of those living under the poverty line, the new laws
cut benefits to thousands of people regardless of their age or ability to work. There are
1,016 seniors in poverty in Columbia Heights. The Columbia Heights community is
home to a large foreign-born population. More than 44,300 residents (56.6 percent)
were bom outside the United States. El Salvador, the Caribbean and West Africa are the
primary places of origin. What is problematic about the cluster statistics is that they
identify residents of the area with narrow census based classifications. The Afro-Latin
population, for instance, is subsumed under the classification of “Hispanic". This
grouping downplays or completely overlooks the more blurry and complex experiences
and identities that cannot be articulated through reified racial categories varied and
complex experiences and identities that cannot be impacts of racial classification on the
lives of immigrants from Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic and Panama.
Cluster 2‘s housing stock consists of several large apartment buildings along both
14th and 16th streets, with the cross streets typically lined with row houses (in various
states of repair) from a variety of historical periods. Only 26 percent of single-family
houses are owner occupied. The main commercial corridor in Columbia Heights is 14th
street from Florida Avenue to Spring Road. Land use in the cluster is largely residential
with 76 percent of land zoned for low/moderate density residences, and 6 percent zoned
for high-density residence. Thirteen percent of land is zoned commercial and the federal
government owns the remaining 5 percent.
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The combination of poverty, diversity, rapid change and new affluence make
Columbia Heights the ideal location to highlight the changes of urban form that
economic changes manifest on the ground in cities. Row houses are now selling for
upwards of a half a million dollars. Construction has begun on mixed use development
projects on what were four large, but vacant parcels of land surrounding the Metro
Station. Condominium development has accelerated in the past two years either as part
of new residential developments or through the conversion of older apartment buildings.
Gentrification, next to the failures of the school system, has become the hottest political
topic in local politics, with local politicians attempting to reconcile pro-business policies
with needs of a population that is still largely minority and poor. Activists and residents
are well aware of the processes at work and are organizing around a number of issues
(such as the preservation of affordable housing) based on use value that are derived from
living in a particular place. Gina Perez (2002) explains that, "people may...create
supportive, place-based networks with neighbors, small business owners, schools and
other institutions that both provide material sustenance and engender emotional and
sentimental attachments to a particular place" (Perez 2002:39). We can then view the
current situation in Columbia Heights as a case study in the possible outcomes of the
simultaneous and contradictory pursuit of use and exchange values in a particular place.
Change and Urban Culture
How do cities change? Understanding gentrification and other changes to the
urban landscape requires more than just a take a look around you method of social
analysis. Part of the process involves the seemingly fickle nature of the urban land
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market in which the movement of capital investment flows through the metropolis
leaving any number of changes to the physical and social landscape in its wake. These
changes are structural and social and are motivated by recurring crises of capital
accumulation. The choice to invest capital in one neighborhood as opposed to another
is based largely on the profitability of that neighborhood. There are changes in the city
however, that arise through the efforts of people who oppose the investment of capital
into city neighborhoods purely in the pursuit of profit.
It is not my intention to develop a static description of “urban culture” or even
culture in Columbia Heights. I will describe the processes, which contribute to the way
cities change over time and how those changes are manifested socially and spatially. In
our everyday interactions and activities human beings make individual and collective
decisions which lead to action. Actions are significant because we base them on our
understanding of two things: first, on how what we hope to achieve is perceived by that
part of society with which we identify and second, on what others are doing and how
their actions and ours articulate in the larger social world.
Raymond Williams understood that, culture is ordinary, “it reflects the shape of a
society, its purposes and meanings.” These purposes and meanings represent what Miles
Richardson (1979) calls the “blueprint definition of culture"; we look at culture for
instructions on what to do and when to do it. Williams further states that a society's
growth (it's process of changing). “is an active debate and amendment under the
pressures o f experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the This land.''"
notion of active debate under the pressures of experience is consistent with Richardson’s
My emphasis
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argument that there is a second definition of culture—culture as creativity, “Culture is not
a blueprint for living which most of us follow most of the time, but it is the living itself.”
Culture is the result of human activity, creativity as an aspect of that activity is the result
of debate grounded in our individual and collective experiences. Creativity begets
change.
This dissertation examines urban culture with an understanding that there are
aspects of that culture, which reflect the purposes and meanings of a society where
capitalist accumulation is the axis around which decisions, both large and small revolve.
The Capitalist worldview often seems fixed and is represented as the common sense way
that a society should organize itself. 1 will historicize these seemingly fixed economic
and cultural forms analyzing their operation and effects on Washington DC from a socio-
spatial perspective.
In opposition to these aspects of urban culture that seem fixed and mutable is the
notion that culture also involves an active debate between its participants, and that this
debate is the fundamental aspect of cultural change. The discursive space for this active
consent exists because as Richardson explains, “we create culture as anexplanation of
what we are doing... Does this mean we share the explanation...your explanation of
what we are doing will differ from mine and mine from yours. We don't share we only
pretend to...the ability to pretend as though we share explanations is situated within the
ambiguity o f culture." The ambiguity of culture lies in our inability to truly share
meanings, and in the context of the city ambiguity begets dissent and conflict.
Because the power-elite reserve a certain amount of control over the production
of space, but the amount of contestation over space is detennined by human relationships
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to each other to space and to power, looking at neighborhoods reveals the relative
effectiveness of hegemonic discourses within cities.
It is often their willingness to agree, in part, with larger hegemonic discourses
concerning citizenship, individual responsibility and the responsibility of the state to its
citizens that prevents poor and working class individuals from voicing objections more
often. The mothers' emotional connections to the physical space that is #10 come from
all that it represents of their childhood and the lifelong relationships that have been
nurtured within its walls. Ultimately it was those connections to space, each other and
the idea of a larger community being threatened that prompted their efforts to stop the
sale of the club. Although they cannot compete on equal footing with the political and
economic clout of the elite their actions represent an opposing view as to how the city
should be structured.
These views counter prevailing assumptions of developers and municipal
politicians that development in the pursuit of profit equals progress. This type of
counter-hegemonic thought is possible because we refused to agree that Greater
Washington's efforts to sell (and make a substantial profit) the existing club would
benefit the community that derives use value because of the club's role as a
neighborhood child care resource and the sentimental ties the presence of #10 has
fostered over the years. The debate that followed over the next 12 months and continues
today, in this particular situation, reinforced the power of regular citizens to create
change, the relationship between non-profit agencies and the communities they serve and
between the state and its citizens.
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As Richardson states we only pretend to share meanings and when opposing
individuals or groups fail to share even that pretense of understanding the nature of all
meaning is open for debate. Just as hegemony requires active consent, change on the
urban level requires active debate.
21st Century Urban Political Economy: Theorizing the City
The focus of my dissertation places my work within the context of almost half-
century of urban anthropology. Sometimes urban anthropologists locate their roots in
the work of the Chicago School of Sociology of the 1930?s and 40's, but the most direct
inspiration for this specialization came from the likes of Oscar Lewis and Elizabeth Bott.
In the 1960‘s and 70‘s urban anthropology was boosted by the work of Clifford Geertz,
Eliot Liebow, Ulf Hannerz, Carol Stack and Betty Lou Valentine. Roger Sanjek (1990)
suggests that some of the key features of these efforts were the exposure of urban
poverty, documenting rural-urban migration, conducting ethnographies of neighborhood
life, explaining role differentiation and network analysis and a fascination with ethnicity
(Sanjek 1990:152). Some of the shortcomings of this work were a concern with the poor
to the detriment of anthropologists studying the middle classes, the rich and policy
makers, overlooking grassroots political action and stressing the order and connectedness
of urban life while ignoring transient or tangential relations were ignored (Sanjek 1990).
In the 1980's the field of anthropology, both in the United States and abroad,
expanded and began to take on many of the shortcomings of earlier work.
Anthropologists managed to “study up" (Marcus 1983, Susser 1982) expand to
investigate the white working classes (Lamphere 1986, Sacks 1984) and white ethnic
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groups (DiLeonardo 1984) all the while maintaining focus on the poor and minorities.
There were however only three urban ethnographies that were produced during that
decade.
Setha Low (1996) has argued that anthropologists in their concern for describing
urban processes have often left urban analysis to scholars such as Manuel Castells
(1983), David Harvey (1989) Delores Hayden (1985), Neil Smith (1986) and Edward
Soja (1989) who draw from history, sociology and geography as well as political
economy. These projects at their heart are theoretical and are often explicitly defined as
contributing to a critical discourse in urban theory.
There was, however, prior to and after Low's observation a considerable amount
of work that contributed to the advancement of anthropology both andin of the city.
Much of the advancement can be located in the work of scholars who chose to focus on
political economy and the ways that structural forces were constantly shaping and
reshaping cities, neighborhoods and the lives of residents. Brett Williams'Upscalling
Downtown (1988) is rich both ethnographically in it's description of the interactions and
conflicts between residents of a Washington DC neighborhood undergoing gentrification
battles, and in her use of political economy to describe the processes that bring newer
residents into the neighborhood while simultaneously forcing older residents out.
Stephen Gregory inBlack Corona traces the evolution of an African American New
York suburb to show how class differentiation and the economics of home ownership
have changed black political organization.
Goode and Mascovsky's edited volumeThe New Poverty Studies (2001) is a
powerful and clear statement toward the usefulness of political economy as social
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scientists and the communities we study negotiate the pitfalls of this new millennium.
Each essay combines political economic and ethnographic approaches to expose poverty
as a result, not of the actions or failings of the poor themselves, but as a “function of
power” in the era of late capitalism. A key goal of this political economy of the 21st
century is to not simply describe the structural processes that create inequality but also to
focus on people’s responses to those processes. A second goal is to avoid treating poor
people as homogeneous; highlighting thehistorical and geographically specific manner
in which poor communities are created. The third key requires the anthropologist to not
only pay attention to people’s responses to structural pressures but to also focus on the
political significance of those responses as we aim to place the agency of the poor back
at the center of urban policy and urban scholarship.
The issue of the emergence of a post-industrial city has largely been the
theoretical domain of Marxist and left leaning sociologists and geographers who have
expanded the study of gentrification to include economic restructuring of global,
regional and urban economies (Smith 1996, Harvey 1989, Jackson 1984, Reuben 2001).
This perspective presents cycles of disinvestment/investment of capital, shifts from
industrial to service and recreation based economies as key processes to be examined in
an analysis of gentrification. The last issue, which is taken up with reference to
gentrification literature is that of the importance of social structure versus individual
agency. The structure and agency paradigm is used to argue that although there are
certainly social structures that guide and inhibit social action, it is individual human
beings who perform social acts and thereby make and change the social structures.
While these lines of inquiry, and Marxist interpretations in particular, have done much to
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contribute to our understanding of gentrification, urban theorists need to synthesize these
strands of thought.
This ethnography will address the ambiguity of culture from a political economic
perspective. Following the work of Williams and Gregory I will emphasize the ways
that current political and economic processes all have historical context. Like the essays
in The New Poverty Studies 1 will examine the way power is exercised foregrounding the
political agency of poor people’s responses to the processes that affect their lives.
Political economy provides me with a clear theoretical framework through which to
analyze urban processes. Also, because it examines the motives, actions and responses
of developers, the municipal and federal governments and landlords as well as poor
people in Columbia Heights, this dissertation is simultaneously an effort to study “up”
and “down".
The significance of this project lies in its unique blend of anthropological
fieldwork, radical Marxist urban theory, historical analysis and cultural geography’s
attention to the social significance of space. Like Logan and Molotch (1988> I will
highlight the organizing that was done to save #10 and the role of human agents and
their institutions at the local level in the restructuring of urban space.
The displacement of poor and minority communities through gentrification and
“urban renewal" is a historic trend in the nation's capital. Spatial restructuring has been
necessitated economic restructuring, a desire to accumulate profit and to reinforce class
divisions. The municipal government facilitates development, which targets investment
to create landscapes of consumption, in order to intensify land use and maximize profit
rather than stabilize neighborhoods and raise living standards.
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The potential sale of #10 provides a lens through which the connections between
the cycles of capital accumulation, the devalorization of the built environment, the
gentrification of Columbia Heights and resident’s fight against certain forms of capital
investment can be clearly seen.
The struggle for Clubhouse #10 is simultaneously a fight against the type of
economic restructuring and government facilitated capital investment that threaten to
restructure social spaces, and a fight to preserve a piece of history that serves as a
geographic reference point in the life stories of residents. It is also a battle to preserve a
safe space that provides young people with activities providing an additional line of
support for parents, often single mothers, who are working to raise families.
In the chapters that will follow I will trace the effects of post-WWII economic
restructuring on the urban landscape in Washington D.C. In chapter 1 I will examine the
history of gentrification and urban renewal in the city using the cases of Foggy Bottom
and Southwest Washington. I will connect economic changes to the dismantling of the
older urban forms-the light industry of Foggy Bottom and shipyards/warehousing in
Southwest-and to the displacement of the diverse working class communities that
gathered close to job opportunities. Chapter 2 shifts the focus to Columbia Heights and
examines it's historical evolution from suburban to inner city neighborhood. These
changes were linked to changes in transportation technology but were also linked to the
same economic and social processes that changed Foggy Bottom and Southwest.
Suburban expansion drastically altered the spatial and social landscapes as blacks filtered
into homes and apartment buildings once inhabited by whites. Chapter 3 more closely
examines the social impacts of suburbanization and economic restructuring on Columbia
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Heights both spatially and socially. Black Washingtonians found themselves making up
a larger share of the city’s population but were locked out of a great deal of the United
State’s economic expansion. Unemployment continued to be a problem without a simple
solution and dissatisfaction grew. The 1968 assassination of Reverend Martin Luther
King Jr. provoked a violent response as blacks protested not only his murder but their
own deplorable conditions. While the protests left much of Washington D.C. in ruins,
the early 1970’s saw the introduction of a number of domestic policy changes that
increased the problems of poverty and decline already evident in the nations ghettos.
Chapter 4 looks at post-1968 Columbia Heights with an eye toward explaining how the
processes and policies of the post WWII world began to bear visible fruit. The
construction of the Columbia Heights metro station inconvenienced the lives of
residents. Metro construction also served notice of the new economic and spatial order
that will become the reality of many cities in the 21st century.
Chapter 5 deals with the various outcomes of economic and urban restructuring
and how they manifested themselves in Columbia Heights. These outcomes worked to
create a neighborhood virtually devoid of employment opportunities and businesses to
provide for the needs of residents. The coming of Green line metro station to Columbia
Heights has begun a new chapter in the history of the neighborhood. In Chapter 6 1 use
an analysis of my participation in the battle over the future of Boys and Girls Clubhouse
#10 to demonstrate how neighborhood residents fight structural pressures as the
neighborhood faces yet another spatial and social re-organization.
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URBAN RENEWAL
In this chapter I point to the histories of Southwest Washington and Foggy
Bottom as examples of both the significant impact economic restructuring had on the
landscape and lives of residents and the conflict between use and exchange values that
they engender. The cases of these two neighborhoods also show that every area of a
city-no matter it's physical appearance to the outsider is two things. First, each is the
result, as Lefebvre would argue, of productive human activity. Foggy Bottom and
Southwest as they were constituted before urban renewal were the result of the lives and
activities of land owners, capitalists who developed light industry as well as the black
and European migrants who settled in those areas. Both neighborhoods today are the
product of decades of conflict and contestation even as the original form of the built
environment has changed. Second, each neighborhood served as the home of the
working class population (both black and white) who helped to shape their development.
While it is necessary to remember that a neighborhood is the product of groups making
space, often times emotional attachments to place are formed as people carve out a niche
for themselves in the city.
Spatial changes have been accompanied by equally profound shifts in social
organization as poor and working class families and the businesses and institutions that
supported them were displaced and dispersed to other areas of the city. Because of the
43
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upheaval and social impact of urban renewal, I believe both examples provide well-
documented historical examples, which highlight the “socio-spatial dialectic” (Soja
1989). Economic restructuring also evidences the conflict and contradictions that exist
between the quest for exchange versus use values. The contradictions of Washington’s
political history also figure significantly into the stories of these two neighborhoods. At
this time residents of Washington DC had no locally elected political leadership,
Congress acted as the city’s legislature while three commissioners appointed by the
president, two civilian commissioners and a commissioner from the military corps of
engineers oversaw the day to day operations of the city. With no elected leadership the
city and its residents were subject to the will of the Congress.
Seeing the work of Neo-Marxist urban scholars as too focused on the
accumulation process as their “primary exploratory apparatus" (10). Logan and Molotch
hypothesize that all capitalist places are the creation of activist developers and growth
politicians who push hard to alter how markets function, how prices are set and how
lives are affected (Logan and Molotch 1987:3). For them a version of Marxian theory
that focused too heavily on the productive process simply avoided “working through
how human activities actually give rise to social structures" (Logan and Molotch
1987:3). Their approach is illustrative of the possible uses of Marxist theory in the
analysis of conflict in urban culture. The conflict between use and exchange values and
the motives and desires that those terms represent provide the language in which I will
ground my understanding of the contentious nature of urban culture.
Washington DC has a long history of gentrification and displacement of poor
communities. Neil Smith (1986) has argued that although the media has emphasized the
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recent gentrification and the rehabilitation of working class residences, there has also
been a considerable transformation of old industrial areas of the city. This did not
simply begin with the conversion of old warehouses into chic loft apartments; much
more significant was the early urban renewal activity which, although certainly a process
of slum clearance, was also the clearance of “obsolete” (meaning also devalorized)
industrial buildings (factories, warehouses, wharves etc.) where many of the slum
dwellers had once worked[and lived] (Smith 2005:136). Taken from this perspective
the “city beautiful movement” of the 1930’s, state formation and consolidation of the
1940’s and 1950"s, situating the nation's capital as a shining example of American
power during the cold war as well as gentrification today, are also all efforts to sanitize
portions of the city and prepare them for reinvestment. Even when displaced families
received assistance to find new housing they were rarely able to relocate back to their
original neighborhoods
In Foggy Bottom it was the primary goal of the Alley Dwelling Authority (ADA)
to reestablish black residents in new Foggy Bottom housing. Construction of
government and private developments, opposition from white homeowners, as well as,
the relocation and expansion of George Washington University made that goal difficult
to achieve. In Southwest, 23,500 people were displaced by urban renewal, the
proportion of affordable housing relative to what had existed before was negligible. The
Redevelopment Land Agency (RLA) helped many of these families obtain other housing
and in 1960 "the Washington Housing Association reported that 46 percent of those
displaced had moved to Southeast, 27 percent to Northeast, and 15 percent to Northwest.
Only 12 percent returned to Southwest" (Levey 2004). Gentrification has been
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underway to varying degrees over the last two decades. When landlords decide the time
is right to capitalize on improving inner-city property values residents are often forced to
move with no assistance in finding new housing. At the same time section 8 contracts,
which allow for the government to subsidize rents for market rate housing, are beginning
to expire. It is at the discretion of management companies of individual properties as to
whether they will renew their contracts, making it more difficult to find properties that
will accept Section 8 vouchers. In the Washington metropolitan region the number of
voucher holders far exceed those properties that have apartments available.
Urban renewal began in the late 1940‘s and 1950’s. The New Deal brought a new
era of activism to the federal government. As 1 have discussed previously the increased
productive capacity of United States industry also brought with it the over-accumulation
of capital. The necessity to find what David Harvey (1989) calls a “spatial fix” collided
with libera] activism geared toward easing social needs particularly those regarding
adequate housing. Government efforts to clean up so-called slums coalesced with
private efforts to manifest the need for a spatial fix through spatial restructuring. In the
case of the redevelopment of Southwest as private investors analyzed the situation they
began to see much more value in the land than was previously believed to be there.
Gradually public officials came to realize the area was much more valuable and strategic
piece of land in terms of total city interests.
The original plans for Southwest made space for an economically diverse
community but constant plan changes had eliminated most of the moderate income
housing and luxury housing had gone up next to public housing. Liberal attempts to
improve the social and physical environment of the poor were undone by building and
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real estate lobbies looking to maximize profitability in the spatial fix. Slowly The
resulting projects displaced large numbers of poor residents thus adding to the problems
of already existing residential areas that absorbed these refugees. The desire of even the
most liberal politicians to clean up slums also shows their complicity in opening
neighborhoods for new development. These types of policies and the rush to profit of
land speculators and real estate developers facilitate the type of spatial change and social
upheaval that drives the socio-spatial dialectic.
In both cases redevelopment and gentrification were a prospective boon to
developers as the reorganization of space opened up new opportunities for super profits.
These super profits were realized in both Southwest and Foggy Bottom through projects
of a scale that had never been undertaken by private development in Washington.
Projects like the infamous Watergate complex (completed in 1967), on what was the
Foggy Bottom waterfront offered residential, hotel, retail and office space together in
one package. In Southwest architects Harry Weese and I.M. Pei (who also designed the
East wing of the National Gallery in Washington as well as the glass and steel rod
Pyramid at the Lourve in Paris) hoped to build a Tenth Street Mall “linking the National
Mall to a rebuilt waterfront and a residential area serving 4,000 families of varying
incomes. Offices, hotel, restaurants and shops would line the new mall" (Levey 2004).
Housing in the new Southwest, largely comprised of large high-rise apartments and
condominiums for upper income residents was contrasted by public housing for lower income
folks. In some cases fences and brick walls were erected to divide the posh swimming pools
and green spaces of the high-rises from the residents of public housing. Retail, rather than being
scattered throughout the area as it was in the old Southwest was concentrated solely in Waterside
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Southwest was concentrated solely in Waterside Mall. There was also a lack of diversity
of retail and entertainment activities in the new neighborhood. One old Southwest
resident who was able to return to the new housing in Southwest noted that “We don’t
have the shopping facilities we had in old Southwest. We don’t have the barbershops we
don’t have the farmer’s market, we don’t have Cadillac’s (a local restaurant that
prepared locally caught seafood) or restaurants we don’t have the theaters, we don’t have
the ballroom, we used to have to go and dance” (Smith 1990). While upper and lower
income housing in Southwest was completed, the moderate income housing and the
Tenth Street Mall never came to fruition. The cultural and entertainment center also
planned for the Tenth Street project was located instead on the Foggy Bottom
waterfront, we know this facility today as the John F. Kennedy Center for the
Performing Arts. This spatial restructuring directly affected the social relations of the
city by way of further racially segregating the population. This segregation in turn
informed decades of decisions concerning where and how public/private capital would
be invested, thereby increasing the uneven development that was significantly slanted to
benefit the wealthier, largely white quadrant of Northwest Washington.
“Funkstown”
The modem neighborhood that is today known as Foggy Bottom began in when
1763 Joseph Funk, a German immigrant, subdivided a 130 acre tract o f land near the
junction of the Potomac River and Rock Creek into 234 lots. The areas official name
was Hamburg but it soon gained the name of “Funkstown” locally. It was Funk’s hope
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development until the mid 1800’s when the population of the city as a whole increased.
German and Irish immigrants came to the area because of the many job opportunities
that were related to industries located next to the Potomac and the completion of the
Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Canal. Black migrants, like whites, were coming to Foggy
Bottom for the light industry that came to exist there. By the mid-eighteen fifties Foggy
Bottom was the second largest black neighborhood in the city.4 There was enough black
community presence that St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, at 728 23rd Street, was completed
as was Stevens Elementary School, one of the first public schools in the city for African
Americans. The existence of those two institutions is a testament to what was a
significant working class African American community. Significantly, between 1850
and 1860 the population of Foggy Bottom more than doubled with the majority of those
new workers being listed as unskilled. During the same period the black populations of
the three largest communities (Southwest was the third) grew without any expansion of
their boundaries, living conditions deteriorated. Health problems, including infant
mortality, tuberculosis diphtheria, whooping cough and social diseases, resulted from
congestion poor sanitation and inadequate medical care. (O'Toole 1979: 378).
Beer was a popular business in Foggy Bottom. Harman's Brewery was already
established prior tol 840 and thel 870‘s brought John Albert's Abner Drury Brewery
and Christian Heurich and Paul Ritter's Heurich Brewery at 20lh street near DuPont
Circle. In 1895, the brewery was so successful that it moved into a new all-brick,
4 The largest centered around Florida and Georgia Avenues. By 1940 4-10 black Washingtonians lived in this section.
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fireproof building at 25th and Water Streets, NW. These operations marked the
beginning of a brewing culture in Foggy Bottom that lasted until the mid 20th century.
The C&O canal, ran from Washington D.C. to Cumberland Maryland, operating
from 1836 to 1924. It did provide an economic boon to the neighborhood until the
Baltimore-Ohio railroad overtook it and eventually bought out the canal company.
Foggy Bottom was divided into two sections with 23ld Street, NW forming the
boundary between the upper income residences to the east and the working
class/industrial area to the west. Two alley areas, Snow’s Court and Hewes’ Court were
among two of the earliest inhabited alleys inhabited in the city. Snow’s Alley served as
an army barracks during the Civil War and following the war construction of additional
alley housing both within Snow's Court and in countless other alleys throughout the city.
The rest of the housing constructed in Foggy Bottom were “modest in scale and
size...Their style and ornament reflect unpretentious circumstances. Their number and
grouping correspond with the cohesiveness of the community. This vernacular urban
housing represents the ethnic background, traditions, and skills of its residents, where the
developers, builders and architects were often successful members of the community
building in direct response to their neighbors' needs.
Early in the 20th century, when the railroad and the automobile began to eclipse the
waterways as means of transportation, most of the industries in Foggy Bottom began to
close. The Heurich Brewery, severely crippled by the stresses of Prohibition, closed in
1960. In 1947 the relocation of the U.S. State Department to a building at 23rd and D
streets and the closing and demolition of the Washington Gas Light Company factory at
26th and G streets opened up the neighborhood to private investment that would
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close. The Heurich Brewery, severely crippled by the stresses o f Prohibition, closed in
1960. In 1947 the relocation of the U.S. State Department to a building at 23rd and D
streets and the closing and demolition of the Washington Gas Light Company factory at
26th and G streets opened up the neighborhood to private investment that would
eventually deal the final blow to the working class neighborhood that had existed.
Old Southwest: “The Island”
For 150 years Southwest Washington was a thriving and virtually self-contained
waterfront community. The area began as a large estate owned by Notley Young, a slave
owner and planter and when in 1791 the area was designated to be the new seat of
government the area was included in the plans. Geographically Southwest, a marshy
piece of land bounded by the Potomac River to the west, Tiber Creek to the north and the
Anacostia River to the east. “The area was called ‘the island’ because the Tiber and
James creeks separated it from the rest of the city” (Levey 2004). These waterways were
the lifeblood of the community in the early days of the capital. Fort McNair, the city’s
first military fortification was established in 1794 on Greenleaf s Point at the confluence
o f the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers.
Wheat Row was the cities first row house group constructed by investors who
believed the area would be extremely important to the new capital because of it’s
proximity to Capitol Hill and die Potomac. Soon, however, the affluent moved on to the
more fashionable Northwest and Capitol Hill and Southwest became home mostly to
dock workers. These houses were to be used by congressmen and other government
workers but the project was abandoned because of poor funding. From that time on
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isolation Southwest was, as early as the 1870’s, a self sufficient community. It was
economically depressed however and became more so as Jews and Italians immigrated
in the late 1800’s and settled in Southwest because of the cheap rents (Levey 2004).
Over time the waterfront became industrial, with warehouses, coal yards,
armories, ice houses and shipyards. In the 1920’s the wharves operated 24 hours a day,
and Washingtonians in search of a late-night meal-or more disreputable pastimes-could
find them in Southwest” (Levey 2004).
The history of Southwest has been one of relative physical isolation from the rest
of the city. As I noted previously Southwest was known as “the island” because of the
waterways that separated it from the rest of the city. That separation was enhanced in
1815 when the City Canal was constructed running from the Potomac, near the present
site of the Lincoln Memorial, to the base of Capitol Hill then headed south to its end at
the Anacostia. Although the canal was paved over in the 1870’s the legacy of separation
was continued first by the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad tracks along Virginia and
Maryland and Avenues and in the 1960’s the Southeast/Southwest Freeway.
By 1900 Southwest was a densely populated lively waterfront neighborhood that
was home to a predominately working class community of some 35,000 people. Jessie
Lancaster remembers a running joke neighbors had in Southwest that “if someone
wanted to go uptown they would leave the pot on the stove and would say would you
mind going in there and turning off the pot when the food is done” (Smith 1990). Joseph
Owen Curtis grew up in old Southwest and after living in Anacostia for many years after
urban renewal came back to live in the new Southwest. He remembers little restaurants
and night clubs and recalls an old saying that “some of the chaps never went north of
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Pennsylvania Avenue SW in their whole lives- didn’t have to- accept to go to high
school” (Smith 1990).
The population makeup was diverse with African Americans, Jewish, Irish and
Italian immigrants comprising the majority of the population. “Even before the Civil
War migrants from rural Virginia and West Virginia, European immigrants, especially
Italians and German immigrants, and then Eastern European Jews-and both enslaved and
free African Americans predominated Southwest (Levey 2004). After the Civil War
freed blacks came to Southwest in the thousands for the cheap housing and numerous
unskilled jobs.
Clifton Meade remembers “4th street seemed to be more or less a borderline.
From 4th street back to the waterfront and 7th street [was white] and the number of whites
was about as many as blacks from 4th street to South Capital. It was just about 50/50 at
that time” (Southwest Remembered). The street itself however proved to be an area
where the groups mixed on visits to the grocers, butchers and cobblers that gathered
there. The Jewell Theater, the African American movie house was located on this street
and 41/2 street also served as the center of activity for the Jewish community. Harry S.
Wender, a product of that Southwest Jewish community, went on to be a citywide civic
leader and a proponent of making DC streets safer and building playgrounds. It was
Wender who helped to persuade the city to tear up the cobblestones on 41/2 street and
rename it Fourth Street as a nod to it’s renewal. At its completion Wender and Don
Rhines got together and decided to rally community support for a parade to celebrate the
renaming and repaving and changing the name of 4th street. The result was the first
integrated parade in Washington (Smith 1990).
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rename it Fourth Street as a nod to it’s renewal. At its completion Wender and Don
Rhines got together and decided to rally community support for a parade to celebrate the
renaming and repaving and changing the name of 4th street. The result was the first
integrated parade in Washington (Smith 1990).
In contrast to the industry that grew up on the waterfront in Foggy Bottom, the
Southwest waterfront grew into a fully built working waterfront community by 1900.
Delores Manhan, notes that “old Southwest had a big fish market and a produce market.
Boats were coming into the pier and it really was a big seaport (Smith 1990).
Southwest wharves thrived as they received visitors, food and building supplies.
The waterfront was also a marketplace where farmers and Chesapeake watermen sold
fresh seafood, produce and vegetables. Warehouses located on the waterfront held many
of these goods for distribution to the rest of the city.
Early Washington and Aliev Housing
Nineteenth century Washington was a rather small city (population of 60,000 in
1860) and had no mode of public transportation. It was necessary for people to live
closer to the city center. “In the early 1800’s Washingtonians walked where they needed
to go, rode in carriages and wagons or traveled by horseback” (Levey 2004). Wealthier
whites tended to live in the urban core while poor and working class white and black
residents were distributed along the periphery primarily along Florida Avenue in
Northwest, in Southwest along the river, around the light industry that dominated in
Foggy Bottom or in alley housing scattered throughout the city. The low lying lands of
Southwest and Foggy Bottom were generally considered unhealthy which precluded the
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already densely populated urban core in addition to individual choices by landowners,
builders and others led to the wide scale use of alley housing in the city.
James Borchart (1980) argues that it was not progressive housing reformers but
the trolley car and the automobile that ultimately led to the decline of alley structures for
housing:
Offering an inexpensive and efficient means of transportation the trolley would ultimately help release the concentrated population of the pedestrian city. As the trolley began to permit population dispersal, the pressure that had helped to create alley housing diminished. At the same time, housing became available on the street, as former street residents moved to homes in the suburbs. The automobile came into wider use in the 1920’s bringing the potential for an even greater exodus. Thus the alley dwelling, a product of the pedestrian city, became an anachronism in the twentieth century city. (52)
Alley housing, despite its necessary role in the housing of poor minority families, at the
turn of the century, was the subject of constant attacks. These attacks were leveled by
civic and government leaders, liberal and conservative. The issues, which seemed to
surface most often with regard to alley communities, were of "sanitation", "crime" and
“public safety" all of which caused the inhabited alleys to be labeled a public nuisance.
In response to a great deal of pressure from inside and outside of the government itself
Congress passed the Alley Dwelling Act in the late 1930"s. The Act created the Alley
Dwelling Authority (ADA), which Howard Gillette (1995) describes as the “nation's
first local housing authority" (Gillette 1995:139). The authority had powers to condemn
property within any square or block containing an inhabited alley and to convert such
areas in the interest of community welfare. “Improvements could include conversion
from residence to a business or community center and could be accompanied by street
paving or alley enlargement, demolition or construction of buildings and furnishings of
utilities (Gillette 1985:139).
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With John Ihlder as the new director, the authority embraced the requirement that
it “care for the alley population” in addition to eliminating the public nuisance that many
saw alley communities becoming. The mandate for the ADA was, however a dual edged
sword. With that in mind “Ihlder quickly announced that he would not proceed with
demolition of existing housing until substitute housing could be found. This action
reinforced Ihlder’s commitment to improving not only the material conditions in which
people lived through the elimination of slums but also to improve their character. While
Ihlder was clearly committed to clearing slums as part of the agencies mission of
improving the lives of slum dwellers, however the clearance of slums were to go a long
way to protecting and expanding the exchange values of the land on which alley housing
and slums stood.
The city, during the 19th century, tolerated alley “mini ghettoes” within the same
blocks where the homes of the wealthy stood, but the twentieth century city beautiful
was based on the separation of people and functions (Borchart 1982) The alley and its
population ran counter to this new social consciousness. Ironically enough it was the
movement to have all alley housing demolished or converted to other uses that
contributed to the initial push to gentrify neighborhoods such as Georgetown. Borchart
states that, “in 1954 citizens' groups involved in the restoration movement successfully
engineered repeal of the ban on alley dwellings that was to go into effect the following
year. The former “slum” houses saved by this maneuver were then mistakenly renamed
“coach houses" (Borchart 1982:45).
The conversion of dwellings that had housed multiple families into single
residency homes brought with it the displacement of a long standing African American
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year. The former “slum” houses saved by this maneuver were then mistakenly renamed
“coach houses” (Borchart 1982:45).
The conversion of dwellings that had housed multiple families into single
residency homes brought with it the displacement of a long standing African American
community which boasted it’s own schools, civic and social clubs, churches and small
businesses. This process of private home conversion spread to the adjacent
neighborhood of Foggy Bottom in the later half of the 1930’s; however, unlike the case
of Georgetown private home renovations met with the public efforts of the ADA to clear
and rebuild alley sites.
THE STATE vs. It’s Agents...
The issue of clearing alley housing was important to a number of different groups
for differing reasons. John Idler and the ADA were seemingly committed liberal values
behind their mission o f improving the physical, emotional and social well being of slum
dwellers. Black civic groups and residents of areas slated for demolition were
committed to better housing but not at the cost of their own residence in neighborhoods
where use values had been developed through church membership (old Southwest alone
had 20 churches) membership in recreational groups and through close friendships.
White civic associations, primarily in Foggy Bottom, were eager to see alley housing
demolished but were not so eager to have those same black residents return to an area
where both public and private development plans held the promise o f higher property
values. Developers saw the agency as a direct threat to their ability to get rich from the
federal funding that could come from a housing program. The nature of national politics
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Washington and it's residents were the prisoners of shifting political winds. Even
bureaucratic agencies, such as the Alley Dwelling Authority, despite it's efforts could
have their goals usurped by Congress.
Staying true to his pledge not to raze slum housing until residents could be
relocated, Ihlder and the ADA wanted to tear down alley dwellings in Foggy Bottom and
relocate displaced residents in new buildings that would be located nearby. This plan
was opposed by the newer white residents of the area who understood the growing
desirability of living in the city to those like themselves. “Noting that six thousand
blacks lived in the West End, (Foggy Bottom) many of them needing better housing, the
planning commission reaffirmed the ADA’s decision to stand by black occupancy.”
(Gillettel 995:142)
While the ADA plan was not popular with white residents there was a great deal
of suspicion both in the black community in Foggy Bottom and the black press as to the
motives of the agency. E.H, Harris, president of the Lincoln Civic society, charged that
the ADA would “ ‘annihilate the Negro from erstwhile Foggy Bottom,' where he had
lived and worked for seventy-two years"’(Gillette 1995:142). Despite the ADA standing
by its choice to locate black housing at St. Mary's Court, an overcrowded alley that
housed many black families already, in 1939 Harris and the Lincoln association called
for the administration's abolition.
Noting that the proposed new War and Navy departments between 21st and 23 rd streets would displace three hundred families, Harris charged that ‘the object of slum clearance certainly does not mean driving people from shelter with no regard as to how they shall exist. A year later in hearings to consider making the ADA a permanent agency, the Lincoln Civic Association claimed that in the seven years of its existence the ADA and the federal government had demolished 173 houses and produced only one 24-unit replacement. (Gillette 142)
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It is clear that despite the desire of the ADA to stay true to it’s mission John Ihlder, as an
agent of the state, was limited in his ability to influence policy and was being judged
more on the actions of the federal government than on his actual actions or commitment
to keeping blacks housed in Foggy Bottom.
In his private journal entries Ihlder reveals how his department’s decisions on
where to relocate housing for blacks was severely limited by racism in the District and in
Congress and that this racism was resulting in the ADA pursuing a policy that would
serve to make segregation more rigid and institutional.
Some Negroes have only one desire, full racial equality. They see in public housing an opportunity to advance a step further by demanding that there be no distinction of race in any public housing property.. .In the District of Columbia and in Congress the preponderant opinion is so strongly against this that such a policy adopted by the ADA would kill it. When I tell these Negroes that our policy is to assure an adequate supply of good rent dwellings for all people irrespective of color, but that I propose to build for Negroes in areas now occupied by Negroes.. .they say it is better to leave conditions as they are. (Borchart 1982)
The desires of black residents to retain the status quo, in the face of governmental
policies meant to improve their material circumstances, speaks to the quality of
community life in Foggy Bottom.
Despite the continual insistence by John Ihlder and the ADA that the agency be
allowed to construct affordable housing and keep displacement of existing communities
to a minimum, during the war years the ADA lost all funding for the buildingpublic of
housing and was ordered to develop war housing. As agents of the state the ADA
despite its lofty mission had been cut off at every turn by the same government that
issued that mandate.
In 1943 the ADA was renamed the National Capital Housing Authority (NCHA)
and was given the power to develop new units throughout the metropolitan area. With
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despite its lofty mission had been cut off at every turn by the same government that
issued that mandate.
In 1943 the ADA was renamed the National Capital Housing Authority (NCHA)
and was given the power to develop new units throughout the metropolitan area. With
this added authority the NCHA worked to regain the ability to build public housing and
asked the Federal Government to embark on a 20-year slum reclamation program.
Housing Authority officials argued that conditions from alley housing were creeping into
block fronts and that blacks faced the most serious housing issues.
Planting the Seeds of Restructuring?
In August o f 1944 the Citizens Committee on Racial Relations identified housing
for blacks as the city’s most important social issue and focused specifically on the failure
to find suitable replacement housing for those who lost homes to demolition (Gillette
1995:147). Despite the recognition by many civic leaders and the NCHA that blacks
faced a serious affordable housing dilemma, white civic associations pushed to expand
control of housing stock in Foggy Bottom by opposing reconstruction of black housing
in a neighborhood where both black and white communities had existed for nearly a
century. These associations placed the maximization of profit, of exchange values, and a
different set o f use values above the use values of black residents, their material and
emotional survival.
While the push by the NCHA to begin building public housing gained support
from federal, local and civic leaders, the white citizens’ associations and the
homebuilder’s organizations vehemently opposed public housing development.
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A much more daunting challenge to the of the NCHA was the opposition of real
estate and building industry groups who hoped that by defeating efforts to build public
housing in the District, that Congress could more easily be persuaded to end the national
housing program. A homebuilders’ spokesman went so far as to describe the NCHA
rehabilitation plan as a “step toward socialism” (Gillette 1995:148). Public Housing did
have proponents in the black community and among those interested in comprehensive
planning. Those citizens" associations with black memberships repeatedly pointed out
the displacement that blacks faced through both private building and public
rehabilitation. The fear was that there would be wholesale displacement if
redevelopment were left to private developers. Planners like U.S. Grant III and other
members of the National Capital Parks and Planning Commission (NCPPC)5 supported
the NCHA because they saw in the development of public housing an opportunity to
claim a more prominent role for comprehensive planning in defining public policy.
As 1 described previously, Southwest was also a diverse and eclectic
neighborhood but by the early 1900‘s it's physical structures had begun to deteriorate.
While much of the gentrification and displacement in Foggy Bottom had been built on
the repair of individual homes and the small inroads made by the ADA, Southwest
offered the congress a test case for the possible solutions to the problems of deteriorating
inner cities and blight that were being faced by cities throughout the country. The first
5 Congress established the National Capital Park Commission in 1926 and gave it comprehensive planning responsibilities for the national capital. In 1952, Congress passed the National Capital Planning Act and renamed the Commission the National Capital Planning Commission and designated it as the central planning agency for the federal and District of Columbia governments. The Commission was also given the responsibility to preserve the important natural and historical features within the region.
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discussions of rehabilitating the neighborhood came about in the 1930’s. On the eve of
U.S. involvement in World War II, at the annual meeting of the Washington Housing
Association the majority of speakers referred to the blemish that slum conditions
continued to place on the Nation’s Capital. John Fahy, chairman of the Home Loan
Bank Board used the Southwest section of the city as the target of his disdain stating that
one has to “look a long time at the White House or the National Gallery of Art to ‘ease
some of the disturbing impressions from one’s mind’ after a walk through the
deteriorating Southwest section of the city” (Gillette 1995:144). Shortly thereafter the
Federal Home Owners Loan Corporation developed a plan to rebuild all of Southwest
Washington. The plan received support by Ihlder, Charles Palmer the Defense Housing
Coordinator, the Washington Housing Association, Howard University Faculty and the
District Commissioners. Among many of these entities there was the underlying
assumption that displacement of a large number of current residents would result, but
riding the city of blighted slum areas took priority. Seemingly accepting his agencies
limited ability to carry out its mission in a way he saw fit or influence federal policy
even John Ihlder testified that the need to clean up the city took priority even though
there was no plan in place to house displaced families. This early plan was never
implemented due to Congress never authorizing funding that would have allowed it to be
pursued.
In 1945 Congress passed the District of Columbia Redevelopment Act. In the
final plan the NCPPC was given control over redevelopment, which it could integrate
into a more comprehensive regional plan. The new bill was not exactly what the
homebuilders had lobbied for but it did include a critical element giving the first right of
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redevelopment to the private sector. The Redevelopment Land Agency (RLA) was
created as the entity through which the city would assemble land to be redeveloped and
offer the parcels up to bidding by private developers. With the shifting of powers of
eminent domain from the NCHA to the RLA the NCHA essentially became a builder of
last resort without even the power to assemble its own sites for construction.
After World War II Washington, like many other major U.S. cities, began to see
significant home building outside of the city limits. As I have mentioned previously, this
suburbanization was a key ingredient of the spatial fix needed to remedy the crisis of
accumulation that was occurring. Although I will discuss this in greater detail in later
chapters, it is important to note that this time marks a period of tremendous social and
spatial change in Washington D.C.
Initial studies in the late 1940's and 50?s indicated that thanks to growth in the
defense and information systems industries, Washington could be compared with
Sunbelt cities whose economies were booming thanks to the decentralization of the sites
of U.S. industrial production. Although the 1950 census showed a drop in the total
population of the District, the city still held the majority of the metropolitan regions
population and held close to 90 percent of metropolitan retail sales.
These indicators buoyed the optimism of local political and civic leaders
prompting a Washington Post editorial, which stated “this is a big country, and there is
good reason why its inhabitants should spread themselves out and enjoy it instead of
cooping themselves up behind city walls." (Gillette 1995:153). This optimism was
misplaced for several reasons. First, following the war federal officials began to
promote the decentralization of some mid level administrative functions to reduce bloat
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in the bureaucracy, aid in civil defense from nuclear attack and to decrease traffic
congestion. The relocation of these agencies to outlying areas removed the necessity for
residence in the city. The city also lost a significant share of the regions private jobs
from 1954 to 1967 declining from 71 percent to 51 percent.
In 1953 Washington joined the list of the nation’s dozen largest cities including Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Boston and Los Angeles, which held less than 50 percent of their metropolitan populations. The 1960 census marked the city’s first absolute decline in population and by 1970 the District’s share of the metro population had fallen to little more than a quarter. In 1957 Washington became the first major city in the country with a majority black population. (Gillette 1995:154)
At this time the RLA was chaired by Mark Lansburgh, adepartment store owner
“who conceived of the agency’s role as attracting higher-income buyers back to the
downtown area” (Gillette 1995:155). White flight to the suburbs had created a panic
among civic and business leaders. Where in the 1940’s there had been a desire to
improve the urban core, while mitigating the displacement of poor black residents, in
1952 the Washington Post described flight to the suburbs as the number one civic
problem in Washington.
It was no secret that many in the federal government and civic leadership viewed
Southwest Washington as obsolete and a model of urban blight located embarrassingly
close to the Capitol. It was true that many of the older structures in Southwest were run
down and alleys such as Dixon Court, which contained 43 small houses with no indoor
plumbing, were often overcrowded. However residents of the neighborhood, black and
white, working class and impoverished, were bound to the place based on the affordable
housing they could find there and the use values that were derived from residence there.
Southwest, by the early 1900’s was a self-sufficient neighborhood and residents did not
need to venture far to fulfill their needs. Even the poorest of residents had access to the
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fresh produce, seafood and meats, the density of the housing provided security as
neighbors looked after one another and children were very rarely out of the sight of an
adult that they knew.
The RLA chose land in Southwest to be its initial redevelopment project. Plans
and proposals that focused on rehabilitation with a minimum of displacement of current
residents and businesses were pushed aside in favor of one submitted by among others,
the president of the Washington Building Congress. “Rather than renovating individual
structures, influential planner Harland Bartholemew and architects Louis Justement and
Chloethiel Woodward Smith called for razing entire city blocks. They wanted to close
city streets and put up sleek new buildings, creating commercial, cultural and
employment centers close to residences" (Levey 2004). While it is true that the plans for
Southwest would test a set of questions about the role of the federal government and
private investment in the rehabilitation of inner cities it also represented, as I argued
earlier in this chapter, an opportunity for a substantial profit to be made by the private
sector.
As with Foggy Bottom the major issue debated in the redevelopment of
Southwest was the potential displacement of thousands of working class and poor blacks
and whites. For close to 15 years the debate had centered not on whether or not to
redevelop but what to do with the large population of poor Washingtonians who lived in
the waterfront neighborhood. Evidence from the cases of Georgetown and Foggy
Bottom provided clear evidence that both public and private revitalization led to the
displacement of black neighborhoods. City blacks tried and failed to discourage the role
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of private developers on the District Redevelopment Act of 1945 and to have a non
discrimination clause added to the 1949 Housing Act.
Civic support for and resistance to the project broke down along racial and class
lines with groups like the Washington Board of Trade and the Committee of 1006 in
support and the Southwest Civic Association in opposition. The Southwest Association
argued that planners had failed to gain community input and ignored requests for more
public housing, more affordable units and that priority be given to current residents.
Goldie Schneider, owner of Schneider’s Hardware, was one of many business owners in
old Southwest that opposed urban renewal legislation. Schneider and a second business
owner, Max R. Morris, sued all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1954 the Court ruled
that nothing in the Fifteenth Amendment prevented the District of Columbia from
determining that the city should be beautiful and sanitary and basing public policy on
those goals.
During the protracted debate regarding the Southwest project, the key question
was: would the project be one that upgraded the area in a way that enhanced the current
community and preserved the housing stock for low and moderate income residents, or
would the redevelopment be used to attract higher income residents who would pay taxes
and spend their disposable income in the city. The implication in that debate was that
the low and moderate-income residents, black and white, contributed nothing to the city.
In fact there was a great deal of residential stability in the redevelopment area and many
of the houses were in good structural condition, not ramshackle shacks. There was also
6 A civic organization founded in 1923, influenced by the city beautiful movement, that worked to influence planning in Washington D.C.
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diversity by income with wealthy blacks living on street fronts while poorer blacks
occupied wood frame houses on street fronts as well as in alleys.
Anthony Bowen was a free black minister and Patent Office Clerk who, in 1853,
started the first YMCA for African Americans in his home on E Street between Ninth
and Tenth Streets SW. Ironically, the YMCA that still bears his name is now located on
W Street at the southern edge of Columbia Heights. Lewis Jefferson Sr. was
Washington’s first millionaire and a resident of Southwest, he lived in a brick mansion at
1901 First Street. He operated the Independent Steam Boat and Marge Company in
1900. “Jefferson’s vessels sailed ten miles south to Washington Park, his amusement
park for African Americans. The businessman, banker, contractor, ship builder and real
estate developer invested heavily in Southwest" (Levy 2004).
Despite all the criticism development boosters doubled their efforts and in 1957
the Washington Post editorialized that: “No doubt many residents of the area will be
loath to lose their homes despite the prevailing slum conditions. They should realize,
however, that the net effect of this great redevelopment effort will be to make
Washington a much more pleasant place in which to live and work' (Gillette 163). As a
part of the 550-acre Southwest redevelopment project, ninety-nine percent of the
buildings were tom down. Of the 5,900 new units constructed, only 310 could be
classified as moderate income. Except for the Kober-Stemberg Apartment complex...no
homes existed in the new southwest for low-income families. More than a third of the
population displaced found alternative homes in public housing, much of it just outside
the redevelopment area. Another 2,000 families moved into private rental units, and
only 391 purchased private homes, all in other parts of the city” (Gillette 1995:165).
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The examples of Foggy Bottom and Southwest illustrate that as Lefebvre argued,
the organization of space is about geography but it is also about competing ideologies,
technological advances and political choices. Early in its history, Washington by
necessity was a very densely concentrated walking city, with whites living in the core
and blacks mostly located on the outskirts of the city in low lying areas, especially near
the Potomac. Without a viable mode of transportation the population was forced into
closer quarters than many today would find acceptable, but even within those constraints
a form of segregation was still maintained. While the separation of the races was not as
rigid as in some cities the racist ideology that permeated much of American thought
manifested itself in the organization of space. The use of alley housing in the core was
spurred by black migration after 1860 and indicates that although there was a significant
belief that the races should be separated there were decisions made by individual
property owners that facilitated the housing of both poor whites and blacks within close
proximity to more wealthy neighbors. Perhaps more importantly, the alley house boom
was a reaction to a demand for low cost housing. The potential for profit represented by
alley dwellings and the gusto with which people pursued those profits is a very clear
example of how space will be manipulated for financial gain. The reality that profit and
not a desire to adequately house black residents were apparent in the poor quality and
overcrowding of alley houses.
Just as the building of alley housing was necessitated by the spatial and social
pressures of increased black migration, social and political pressures once again served
to alter the use of space in the form of alley housing. Public safety and crime in addition
to racism prompted by decisions by local politicians which helped to create the Alley
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Dwelling Association whose primary purpose was to facilitate changes in social and
spatial changes by condemning and demolishing alley housing and relocating the people
that resided in them.
Urban space is a material product, a social product and a product of changing
economics. As I stated above, the increase in the number of black migrants was the
social cause for the increase in use of alley housing, an opportunity for profit spurred
individual home and property owners to build such dwellings. As the number of blacks
in alley neighborhoods swelled a different social pressure was brought to bear. Pressure
emanated from local whites and from members of congress who adopted language that
equated the density of “slums" and alley housing with dirt, disease, crime and implicitly
with blacks. President Roosevelt's New Deal policy played the largest role in changing
the nature of the urban land economy in Washington in two ways. First, it was the first
time that the federal government set out to address many of the nation’s most pressing
social needs, with decent housing being chief among those concerns. In Washington
public housing was looked to as a solution to the limited availability of affordable
housing and as a way to improve the civic quality of the city by destroying slum areas.
Second, as the New Deal government grew it attracted more and more workers to the
city and the housing of the federal workforce was also at issue. Space was needed for
the expanding federal government, which necessitated changes in the uses to which
property was put in the urban core. This conflict over space was framed as one of urban
development, it was argued that rapid growth and increased use and congestion from the
automobile had changed traditional land uses, slum areas did not provide adequate
housing and therefore the land would be better utilized in other ways. As more and more
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pressure was placed on the land market to house the growing government infrastructure
and workforce, ultimately it was the city’s black population that faced displacement.
In the cases of both Foggy Bottom and Southwest Washington battles over space
were perceived to revolve around liberal goals of improving the social and physical
conditions of the poor but the constant involvement of homebuilding associations and
development companies in major initiatives regarding the restructuring of the urban
landscape underscore the interconnectedness of social, economic and political power.
Because the discourses surrounding changes in the way space is used are connected to
liberal ideals and goals any critique of that policy is seen as backward thinking and
against progress.
John Ihlder, to his credit, understood that if government initiatives to provide
suitable housing for poor people failed, private developers would ensure that decent
affordable housing would disappear from the nation's capital, especially for blacks. He
also understood that racism would restrict any effort to relocate blacks outside already
black neighborhoods or within areas for which the local or federal governments had
development plans. While he did insist that the ADA not demolish existing housing
until replacement housing could be found, he never seems to have questioned whether
demolition was actually the best course of action to improve the conditions of poorer
residents. While he may truly have believed in a liberal agenda which aimed to improve
both the social and physical environments of the poor, it is also true that the framing of
the debate precluded him from thinking in any other way about how those goals could be
achieved.
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The stories of these two neighborhoods are stories about competing values and
the case of John Ihlder is an indication of how the choices of seemingly powerful social
actors can be constrained by more powerful entities and discourses. As I stated earlier,
the era of the New Deal also marked a transition of urban space from a commodity
bought and sold on a small scale to a large-scale commodity bought and sold, primarily
by developers with full government encouragement and complicity. The more important
the uses of space became the more lives that were influenced by decisions concerning its
use. The tension and conflict that erupted on all sides in both Foggy Bottom and
Southwest is a testimony to the meaning that space can hold for many people. White
residents in Foggy Bottom for example were well aware of the growing desirability of
living in town and fought against any plans by the ADA to relocate blacks in their
neighborhood. At the same time black civic associations fought for the use values they
had developed in the three-quarters of a century working class and poor blacks had
resided there. Both white and black residents mobilized individual and organizational
resources in order to fight for use and exchange value.
The public debate over the future of Southwest was even more pivotal in terms of
what values would prevail in restructuring the city. This fact was obvious judging from
the forces that mobilized on either side of the debate. Again on the side of use values
were the black civic associations and the black press pushing for redeveloped and public
housing allowing black residents, businesses and churches to remain in the
neighborhood. The NCHA also wanted a more conservative plan in order to maintain
it’s position in city planning because an increase in private involvement would damage
the ability of the department to conduct future projects and fulfill it's mission of creating
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affordable housing throughout the city. White citizens' organizations, such as, the Board
of Trade and the Committee of 100 as well as builders and developers supported a policy
that would lead to the razing and redevelopment of the entire existing Southwest. This
growth coalition, which included the Washington Post, served as enthusiastic boosters
for redevelopment and represented it as a positive for the city. What the wholesale
redevelopment of Southwest was to actually represent was a loss of the affordable
housing, community and associated use values that had allowed poor and working class,
Jews, African Americans and other ethnic groups survive despite limited material
circumstances. It would mean the destruction of churches whose congregations would
have to be reconstituted elsewhere or merge with congregations in other parts of the city.
There was no doubt a tremendous amount of racism was inherent in the feelings of many
white Washingtonians. All parties took a stand, which implicitly or explicitly endorsed
increasing the area's exchange value through redevelopment. The Washington Press
was a particularly powerful ally in the effort to redevelop Southwest with the
Washington Post and the Washington Star before it enthusiastically supporting whatever
development plan was presented. Editorials took the tone that although displacement
was assured with no guarantee that residents would be relocated within the area,
especially under plans with significant private development, that living in a beautiful,
slum free city was more important than individual concerns.
The activities of the Washington Press, developers, civic, business and
government leaders on the local and federal levels, while undertaken with different
motives in mind, all had as their ultimate goal the redevelopment of Southwest
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Washington. Their activities provide us with a clear historical example for the working
of a “growth machine” in the city.
The clearest threat to the power of the development boosters was the role of the
NCHA in the development process. From it’s inception as the ADA the agency had
been opposed at most every turn by white citizens associations, homebuilder’s
organizations and developers who did not want public housing developed. At stake in
the case of Washington’s public housing agency was the support in congress for a
national program to build affordable housing. Although public redevelopment still
displaced poorer residents, the alternative was wholesale displacement if private
redevelopment was the rule. If defeated at this time private builders could possibly have
been granted government subsidies to build affordable housing or the dearth in low rent
housing could have been maintained, forcing poor people to continue to pay too much
for shelter. Ultimately when the NCPPC was given control over redevelopment planning
and the private sector was granted the first right to redevelopment and the RLA was
formed, because it was left to the whims of other agencies the NCHA was no longer able
to assert any positive influence on the redevelopment of in Southwest or in any future
endeavors.
The resolution to the conflict over who would be responsible for the
redevelopment of Southwest Washington, the National Capital Housing Authority or the
newly formed Regional Land Authority was also the resolution to the question of for
whom the redevelopment of the neighborhood would benefit, current residents or the
collection of private developers who would plan and implement the demolition and
reconstruction. Washington DC and Southwest in particular were test cases for what
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role the federal government and private enterprise would play in future urban renewal.
This was made possible because of the political disenfranchisement of Washington’s
citizenry. As Washington moved toward home rule in the late 1960’s and 1970’s
energetic activists, like future Mayor for life, Marion Barry were able to put pressure on
the federal government which prevented highways from cutting through numerous poor
and working class neighborhoods. In the decision to turn the redevelopment of
Southwest over to private interests the United States Congress usurped the authority and
credibility of the NCHA (formerly the Alley Dwelling Authority), an agency created and
charged by Congress with the elimination of slums and the construction of safe, sanitary
and affordable housing. John Ihlder, as an agent of the state, was not subject to the same
lack of focus that plagued the politicians in Congress, he was tasked with a mission that
he attempted to accomplish for more than twenty years but was not allowed to complete
because congressional and local racism made it difficult for the ADA to make any but
the most basic of inroads. Washington was specific because there was no home rule and,
Congress appointed the District commissioners. District residents had few avenues for
redress of their objections.
In looking back on the history of development in Washington we can clearly see
that growth machine politics and government policies that ultimately serve to further
enrich already wealthy private financiers is not a 21s' century phenomenon. In this
period we can also see a growing concern from civic and business leaders regarding the
city's strength and vitality relative to its suburbs. By the late 1950's the District had
already seen a decrease in total population as well as a significant loss of number private
jobs. The panic that these trends caused the growth machine elites provided the impetus
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for shifts in policy away from social concerns for affordable housing and toward policies
designed to attract those with higher incomes into the city to live and shop.
As Reuben argues, creating venues through which the city could be experienced
in a safe sanitized way became the primary goal in development policy. When
Southwest was redeveloped choices were made not to invest in and make the area more
beautiful and livable for the existing population but to provide comfort and safety for the
newly created white suburban subject. Poor blacks were banished either to segregated
public housing a short distance away from their previous homes or to other aging black
neighborhoods already bursting at the seams, hemmed in by a growing downtown to the
south and restrictive covenants to the west and north.
“The spatial organization of society was being restructured to meet the urgent demands of capitalism in crisis-to open up new opportunities for super profits, to find new ways to maintain social control, to stimulate increased production and consumption" (Soja 1989).
In this chapter I discussed the considerable debate waged concerning the
restructuring of space in Southwest Washington and Foggy Bottom. The issues brought
to bear during that debate represented fundamentally different ways of seeing the city.
Being older industrial areas of the city, both areas were experiencing the kind of declines
in building stock that devalorizes urban land and makes it ripe for redevelopment.
Added to the economic realities of the ground rent system were the ideologically liberal
goals of improving slum conditions for the poor residents, the ability to realize profit
through redevelopment proved to be a factor that overwhelmed the strongest of
opposition.
Residents, both black and white, middle class and working class, leveraged their
civic and political influence both for and against redevelopment. Those differing stands
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reflected the reality that people experience the city in different ways. While
redevelopment meant that the federal government slated some areas for demolition
others were thriving for a variety of reasons. The spatial changes that led to the
displacement of so many households also led to a more segregated city as blacks were
forced into the older black areas of Northwest Washington in the area of U street and
Florida Avenue or into newly constructed public housing, in Anacostia and in Southeast
near the Navy Yard. Thinking dialectically allows us to see the ripple effects of
increased black population without a corresponding increase in housing opportunities.
This increase put tremendous pressure on the boundaries of receiving neighborhoods as
they became more densely populated with newcomers. These more densely populated
neighborhoods proved to be a key ingredient in the suburbanization of the metropolitan
region as I will discuss in the next chapter.
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THE HEIGHTS
In this chapter I will detail the history of Columbia Heights and its evolution
from a community of subdivided suburban lots in the late 1800?s's to a varied urban
neighborhood. This discussion of this evolution Columbia Heights underscores not only
the notion that urban spaces are the products of human activity but that different spaces
are produced by different groups in roughly the same historical moment with vastly
different results.
I highlight two periods in history that marked significant changes in the
demography and spatial organization of the area. Each of these periods was facilitated
by advances in transportation technology, the first of which was the electric trolley,
allowing people to move more easily back and forth between Columbia Heights and jobs
downtown. Second was the growing popularity and availability of the private
automobile, which made it feasible and desirable to abandon Columbia Heights and
other inner city neighborhoods for Maryland and Virginia suburbs. Urban space is a
product of daily human interactions as well as larger negotiations of economic and
political power. Lefebvre has argued that a necessary condition for the continuation of
the capitalist mode of production is the production of space into which surplus value can
be reinvested. Thus any analysis of urban space must investigate how human
77
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interactions and political economic decisions facilitate the creation of spaces within the
context of the city and how those spaces allow for the accumulation of and serve as
repositories for surplus capital. Once created these spaces express social relationships at
a particular moment. As part of the socio-spatial dialectic these spaces will alter those
same relationships. As human interaction is altered by the use of space so is the way we
relate to that space. The creation and reorganization of spaces gives evidence that places
are not only subject to the rules of the market but also to dialectical dynamics between
human interactions and where those interactions occur.
As the previous chapter concerning Foggy Bottom and Southwest Washington
demonstrates, investigating neighborhoods enables us to examine the nexus of
interactions amongst residents and between neighborhood residents and those in power.
Real Estate developers. Builders' Associations and others with the political and
economic resources to influence policy have a greater influence on the production of
space. These processes often occur over the considerable protests of residents and even
factions in the municipal and federal governments. Looking at neighborhoods also
reveals the relative effectiveness of hegemonic discourses within cities. Capitalist
notions of the public good often represented by local Real Estate and Building boards
become hegemonic because of the ability they have to mobilize the growth coalition
forces to successfully lobby the public and government agencies. Counter-hegemonic
arguments, such as those raised by the black Citizens' Councils regarding Southwest
Washington, are swept aside in the name of “progress” and what is best for the city writ
large. The arguments that run counter to the “common sense’" assumptions of
development face an uphill battle.
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The same forces that contributed to the gentrification and urban renewal of
neighborhoods such as Foggy Bottom and Georgetown were no less active in other parts
of the city. The goal of remaking downtown Washington and its close in neighborhoods
into a more comfortable and accommodating experience for white suburban visitors was
made both necessary and possible first by the advent and advancement of public
transportation such as the electric trolley, then the automobile. These technological
advances allowed those who were fortunate enough (mostly white) to venture outside the
heart of the city in search of larger properties and homes in less densely populated areas
and helped to create desires for the spatial separation of living and work locations.
My examination of Columbia Heights represents the type of materialist research
of space and social relations Soja has called for. The creation of Columbia Heights as a
neighborhood was about the creation of a new space, a material product, a commodity
and a site of social reproduction. While the space is no longer new it still is a
commodity, bought and sold, that provides a site of social reproduction both to the
people who live there and to society generally.
One of the contradictions of urban space is that it holds different meanings for
people based on their relationship to it within the nexus of relationships that we have to
commodities. Columbia Heights has an exchange value to the developer who sees it as a
site of possible investment and eventual profit. As David Harvey (2003) argues, the
capitalist or developer “operates in continuous space and time” (Harvey 2003:27) while
municipalities and citizens to a lesser extent operate in “territorialized space,” and these
two modes of understanding and experiencing space and time underlie the most basic of
contradictions between the pursuit of use and exchange value. Because developers do
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not reside in the neighborhood they may only have superficial knowledge of it in terms
of its role in social reproduction or the use values that it holds for residents. The Mayor,
city council and urban planners in Washington absolutely understand the neighborhood
in terms of its value as a commodity that, if leveraged properly, can bring in additional
revenue in the form of property and sales taxes.
The city also understands the role of the area in terms of social reproduction,
however; the city Columbia Heights as it is currently constituted socially as a site of
questionable reproduction because the class of people that live there is seen in many
circles as more of a drain on resources than they are a benefit. City officials understand
that by changing the nature of the area so that the social reproduction that occurs there is
undertaken by a more affluent class of people paying taxes at higher rates and whose
social activities may be more heavily involved in the money economy, then the city
benefits from a changed type of social reproduction. The black and Latino residents who
currently live in Columbia Heights create use value through the close cultural and
community ties that often exist between neighbors, and their interactions in public
spaces, such as Malcolm X Park, which are used to facilitate recreational and creative
outlets. Residents benefit from the use values that they derive from living in close
proximity to stores that may extend them credit, neighbors and family to share child
rearing responsibilities, abundant public transportation and social service and non-profit
organizations devoted to supporting poor families by providing job assistance, prenatal
and child care, education and housing assistance among a multitude of other services.
On the level of individual neighborhood analysis Columbia Heights provides
insight into the way the same political and economic goals, which displaced blacks from
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Foggy Bottom and Southwest and altered the face of those neighborhoods were also at
work in other areas of the city, with dramatically different results.
From 1945 through the late 1950’s Southwest was at the center of considerable debate
regarding how best to restructure older neighborhoods. Columbia Fleights, on the other
hand, had grown from its beginnings as a country retreat from the city heat and had
become a fairly self sufficient urban neighborhood. Residents could shop at the
multitude of large and small shops along 14th street and merchants catered to the tastes of
the primarily affluent community. The location of a trolley car turnaround just to the
north of the business district made the neighborhood a popular residential location and
its short distance to downtown allowed relative ease of movement for those who worked
there.
Washington DC, as I have noted before, was a densely populated walking city
throughout most of it's early history. It was necessary and acceptable for the wealthy to
live close to the center of the city for easy access to their places of business. One of the
primary reasons the mini-ghettoes created by alley housing were accepted for so long is
their facilitation of a relative segregation of societies in an area of heavy population
density. Often domestic workers would occupy the alley dwellings behind the homes of
their employers.
In the mid 19th century Florida Avenue was the northern boundary of Washington
City at that time and to the north of the city limits the elevation climbed to heights of 150
to 200 feet above that of the rest of the city which created a more hospitable climate
compared to the low lying heat and humidity of the more densely populated downtown.
Initially these elevated rural areas outside the city were used as summer homes by the
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wealthy where they could escape summer's stifling heat. Columbia Heights has always
been an important hub of Washington transportation beginning in the 1860’s when it was
the terminus for a stagecoach line that ran twice daily to and from the downtown.
During the Civil War the area was used extensively by the Union Army who used
the grounds of Columbian College (the grounds of which ran from Columbia Rd down to
Florida Avenue and over to 14th street) as a site to quarter troops and also as the location
for Carver Military Hospital. There was also a hospital on the site where the Tivoli
Theater now stands. Again, because of the elevation it was thought that the area was a
healthful retreat for the troops from Washington's summer heat and humidity.
It was not until after the Civil War that Columbia Heights began to take shape as
an urban neighborhood. At this time Columbia Heights was part of Senator John
Sherman's Pleasant Plains property adjacent to 16th street and Mt. Pleasant. In 1868
Sherman began to subdivide the area into lots for detached single-family homes. In 1881
and 1882 Sherman purchased the Stone farm, a 121-acre sight that had previously been
owned by General John Logan, for $175,000. The area, which lies between what is
today Sherman Avenue and 14th Street, was laid out into lots, blocks and streets and
called “Columbia Heights". The horse drawn trolley contributed to the very early
development of Columbia Heights and other suburbs and prompted the Washington Star
comment that “many businessmen who formerly walked a great distance to and from the
place of their daily duties would now find it unheralded should they be deprived of the
opportunity to ride the streetcars." The inception of the trolley meant that Columbia
Heights quickly became a suburb. The neighborhood grew quickly and benefited from
conveniences such as good sewage and water service as well as a post office and
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telegraph service. A clue to the nature of the population was evidenced by the
Neighborhood association’s claim that in no other part of the District was there such a
high proportion of the residents who owned the homes in which they lived. Those
houses, in contrast to the smaller and much more modest brick and wood framed
structures in Foggy Bottom and old Southwest, were elegant, stately row houses with
decorative concrete accents. The scale of the homes, even the most modest, was much
larger with most consisting of between 3 and 5 bedrooms. By 1900 the Columbia
Heights Citizens Association was already an active organization petitioning the
Commissioners for the public improvements that would allow the neighborhood to
continue to flourish. Keeping the neighborhood free of the “objectionable classes” was
of utmost importance and published literature from the citizens association states, “all
are alive to the importance of co-operating to that end.”
The Trolley and Development
The first technological advance that had a profound effect on the neighborhood
was the advent of the electric trolley. While the influence of the horse trolley cannot be
denied because it made subdivision of large tracts o f land finally seem profitable, it was
not until the introduction of the electric trolley that suburbanization proceeded apace. As
the city grew a specialization of area and a separation of home and work took the place
of the old walking city where the place of residence was often located on the business
premises or a few blocks away. As residences of the more affluent moved farther out,
the functions of the business district became clustered in more identifiable areas and
racial segregation became more pronounced.
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Today, real estate values often correlate to a property’s relative distance from
transportation routes, whether they are highways or public transportation. This was no
different in the 1890’s when electric streetcars helped extend transit north of Boundary
Street (Florida Avenue) for the first time. Real estate values were often determined by
the closeness of the land to street car lines and a number of lines were built expressly to
develop real estate. While it is not clear that the line that ran through Columbia Heights
was developed explicitly to further develop the area it is clear that there were profits to
be made speculating in lots in the neighborhood. The Citizens Association claimed that
lots could be purchased from $1,200 to $3,000 with home prices ranging from $6,000 to
$20,000 and that larger profits could be made in Columbia Heights than in any other
section of the city. Because Columbia Heights could be accessed by almost parallel rail
lines residential development did not need to be restricted to just a single thoroughfare
although the commercial corridor grew up around the 14th street line. Between 1890 and
1899 with the first extension of the trolley lines north a car bam and turnaround were
located at 14th and Park Road where the Tivoli Theater now stands. In 1907 the bam
was moved north to Decatur Street to facilitate further northern development. The
Decatur Street car bam now houses out of service Metro buses
Street rail service also allowed for increased population density and apartment
living was a part of the social life of Columbia Heights from the early 1900's. The
trolley lines and apartment buildings made it practical for those who could not afford to
buy lots on which to build to live in a suburban neighborhood while still providing
access to downtown. The construction of apartment buildings was significant for two
reasons. First, for property owners and those who were looking to profit from the
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development of Columbia Heights, investing in the construction of apartments provided
a space that would continue to produce surplus value not just the value produced by the
one time sale of a single property. Second, the added population density that apartment
living brought about added to the ability of local merchants to make a profit.
The improved transportation made it possible to subdivide vast stretches of
farmland into plots to be sold for single-family homes. Capital investment and
technological advances were complementary forces in the creation of Columbia Heights
as a material product created at a confluence of favorable events. Suburbanization
allowed for the full realization of area real estate as a commodity. From its inception the
neighborhood was to be a site of reproduction for middle and upper class residents.
Making sure that residents of the same or approximate class (and racial) background
were drawn in as residents was a key goal of neighborhood citizens association.
Columbia Heights continued to grow throughout the 1900’s and by 1930 had
become a densely populated neighborhood dominated by single-family homes but
containing a significant number of apartment dwellers. The 1930 census provides many
indications into the makeup of the neighborhood. While the neighborhood was still
significantly white, census data reveals that blacks did live within Columbia Heights'
borders, mostly in areas adjacent to the African American enclaves of U street-Shaw to
the south and along the 11th street trolley line near Howard University, which was
established in 1867. When blacks resided in these areas it was often in a heavy
concentration by block or by apartment building, but at this time there was virtually no
inter-block mixing. If whites did live on blocks in these border areas they were poor
immigrant families who were thought to be racially distinct from whites at that time.
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Any black families that had penetrated the heart of white dominated Columbia Heights
often did so as domestic workers for white families or as maintenance people in
apartment buildings.
1930 census data also bears out the fact that blacks in the city were relegated
mostly to domestic or service industries as most women listed in the census took
domestic jobs or did not work at all while the men worked at jobs such as elevator
operator, driver, janitor and barber. White occupations were much more varied, with
many listed as government workers, while others owned businesses or practiced law.
Many o f the black residents were bom in Maryland or Virginia in addition to North
Carolina and South Carolina, which have come to be known as traditional Washington
feeding states.
Cold War Suburbs
The second period I will discuss is highlighted by technological advances, but
has roots in much more fundamental pursuits of both capital and the United States
government. The first advance involves the renewed interest in and increased marketing
o f the private automobile as the primary mode of transportation in the United States.
From the late 1940’s into the 1960's streetcar use in Washington began to decline with
the city government moving toward the use of buses as a less expensive transportation
alternative. There was also frustration from the public as well as the local and federal
governments that streetcars were only adding to the gridlock the city was feeling due to
the increase of cars on downtown streets.
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The second advance was in the homebuilding industry as the model of building
small, inexpensive, prefabricated homes used in such models of early suburbia as
Levittown on Long Island, significantly increased the number of homes that could be
built per year.
This boom in production of both cars and homes changed the face of America
and no center city business-district; outlying farm or inner city residential space was to
go untouched. Spatial and social reorganization on a massive level was the result as
business and manufacturing interests relocated to areas where they could build sprawling
campus like headquarters. The workers who could afford to do so followed their places
of employment to the outer reaches of the metropolitan area. The center city and older
middle and working class neighborhoods were left to the poorer black minority.
Neighborhoods once considered suburbs, such as Columbia Heights, began to be
overtaken by more distant, more segregated, less densely populated areas of Maryland
and Northern Virginia where a family could buy newer homes on larger lots more
cheaply than buying or renting in the city. The shift in American priorities these
advances in transportation and housing technology symbolize, subsidizedwere by the
federal government. The motive behind those subsidies appear on the surface to center
on the desire to better the lives of Americans but the true motives lay in factors far
beyond the veil of well manicured lawns and a Hudson in each driveway.
David Harvey (2005) argues that two guiding principles of internal strategic logic
during WWII were maintained during the Cold War and have been used ever since to
determine domestic political and economic strategies. The first was that the social
hierarchy in the United States should not be tampered with. In Harvey's words “no
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control would be tolerated. In order to guarantee this domestic peace there should be an
uninterrupted expansion of domestic capital accumulation and consumption"
(Harvey 2005:19). Suburbanization in the United States was a manifestation of these
strategies.
The American automobile culture was spurred by massive government
investments in roads (3 million miles) and interstate highways (45000 miles) (Mohl
1988:3). Professional real estate groups and homebuilder' associations joined in the
movement to build highways hoping that new highways would cause greater residential
turnover and increased home prices. The promise of a national system of impressive
roadways attracted a diverse group of lobbyists including the Automobile Manufacturers
association state highway administrators etc. (Mohl 1988:230)
The rise in the popularity of the private automobile and its importance to the
growth of the American economy was not a natural evolution of the urban condition.
Neil Smith (1986) argues that there was no natural necessity for the expansion of
economic activity to take the form of suburban development. There was no technical
impediment preventing the movement of modem large-scale capital to the rural
backwaters, or preventing its fundamental redevelopment of the industrial city it
inherited, but instead the expansion of capital led to a process of suburbanization . It
heavily subsidized by the Federal government in the form of the GI bill and Highway
Act of 1956. The rubber and petroleum industries lobbied heavily for the highway act.
The greed of the real estate industry made block busting possible, playing on white fears
that their property values would go down as blacks moved out of their overpriced “black
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belt” neighborhoods. Whites sold their homes at inflated prices to upwardly mobile
black families that were able and willing to pay to get out of older run down areas.
Whites took their own buying power, cars and political influence out to the suburbs.
The true value of suburbanization to the American economy was its ability to
assist in the absorption of the surplus value and commodities produced by postwar
industries. “Investments in education, the interstate highway system, sprawling
suburbanization and the development of the south and west, absorbed vast quantities of
capital and product in the 1950's and 1960's.” (Harvey 2005:57). Suburbanization was,
however, only one method to achieve the above stated goals. Massive amounts of
money were generated through suburbanization and because suburban homes needed to
be equipped with the latest in appliances and amenities the tremendous productive
capacity of U.S. industry was absorbed with relative ease.
In her essay “How Did Jews Become White Folks?" (1994), Karen Brodkin
explains that post WWII economic expansion and geographic suburbanization not only
provided United States industry with a marketplace and repository of surplus capital,
those two events had lasting effects on the idea of what a white American is and the
lifestyle “whiteness" reserved for those fortunate enough to be included. Shortly after
WWII American GI's were returning to their families and hoped that their service in
defense of freedoms abroad would earn rewards at home.
“The United States emerged from the war with the strongest economy in the world. Real wages rose between 1946 and 1960, increasing buying power a hefty 22 percent and giving most Americans some discretionary income. U.S. manufacturing, banking and business services became increasingly dominated by large corporations, and these grew into multinational corporations. Their organizational centers lay in big, new urban headquarters that demanded growing numbers of technical and managerial workers. The postwar period was a historic moment for real class mobility and for the affluence we have erroneously come to believe was the U.S. norm (Harvey 2005:88).
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Brodkin argues that the G.I. Bill, which provided for priority in education,
employment and housing to soldiers being demobilized after the war, was the most far-
reaching affirmative action program in American history, and it was aimed primarily at
white male servicemen.
The G.I. Bill and suburbanization also made a middle class lifestyle more
accessible to millions of white ethnic families who had been discriminated against prior
to the war. The G.I. programs were responses to protest from a working class America
with the Depression still fresh in its collective memory. More workers went out on
strike in 1946 than ever before in U.S. history. The business elite and federal
government were eager to avoid the class strife that besieged the nation after WWI and
their solution was to assist veterans in gaining upward mobility. It was necessary to
expand accepted notions of whiteness therefore expanding that population's access to
wealth. By doing so the government and business interests stifled prospective class
conflict and future strikes, which would have slowed or halted economic expansion and
may have required even greater concessions in wealth redistribution.
American suburbanization was not a phenomenon that took place in a vacuum
nor was it a case of consumer demand creating markets where homebuilders simply were
attempting to fulfill new tastes. The desire of Americans, particularly white Americans,
for a suburban life was the result of willful actions on the part of the federal government
and various private industries that stood to profit substantially from a shift in
urban/suburban demographics. The Highway Act created the infrastructure, the G.I. Bill
the expansion in wealth and homebuilding the attractive new housing that, coupled with
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the relocation to locales outside the city, manufactured the demand for the suburban
lifestyle.
For Columbia Heights the period from 1940 to 1970 marked a time of significant
change in the physical and social landscape of the neighborhood. As the 1940’s ended
and the 1950’s began it was becoming apparent that the suburban trend was changing the
city.
By 1952 many in the District bureaucracy understood that suburbanization was
having an increasingly profound affect on population and employment trends in the
region. Although the population of the city and the metropolitan region both grew,
within the District itself the white population grew by 9 percent while the black
population mushroomed by 51 percent. In 1950 the District's ratio of white to black
residents was 65 percent to 35 percent. Government reports indicate that the reason for
the sharp increase in the ratio of blacks to whites was that almost all the net migration
from the District to the suburbs was from the white population.7 This trend would
indicate that while whites were leaving the city they were being replaced mostly by
blacks migrating into Washington from areas outside the metropolitan region. Where
did these black migrants come from? It has long been common knowledge that there is a
migratory connection between Washington and the Carolina's and while census data
does show many migrants originating in North and South Carolina they also came from
Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, New York, Ohio, Missouri,
Cuba and the British West Indies. Prior to 1950 segregation forced these black migrants
'j Population Change and Governmental Planning in the District of Columbia, District of Columbia Budget Office, May 1, 1952
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into an increasingly overpopulated “ black belt” or what Kennesaw Landis called a
“racial enclosure”. Two-thirds of migrating blacks were forced to live in an area whose
total area was slightly larger than downtown itself.
The combination of overcrowding in the black belt along with urban renewal in
areas like Foggy Bottom and Southwest led to an unsustainable crisis of housing for
blacks in the city. There were also a considerable number of educated blacks, who
despite segregation in many facets of everyday life, were able to attain middle class
status. Columbia Heights was located adjacent to the black belt on two fronts at Florida
Avenue and 11th Street. Significant numbers of blacks inhabited the houses and
apartments along the edges of Columbia Heights but the primary areas near the business
district of 14th Street and Park Road remained solidly white. Between 1940 and 1950
however the number of blacks in the neighborhood increased by several thousand
primarily east of 14th street while the number of whites increased only in the area around
Meridian Hill Park. Before 1950 no census tract in Columbia Heights had a black
population of over 50 %, in 1950 the area between Spring Rd and Harvard St bounded
by 11th and 14th streets saw that population become the majority. It is not surprising that
this area was the first where this transition took place because it was adjacent to black
areas east of 111'1 street. It is also likely this area was the first blacks could afford in the
neighborhood due to the smaller size of the houses and lots.
In the city as a whole population increased significantly in areas outside of what
was an enhanced monumental core and federal enclave. These areas had been the
primary residential areas when Washington was a walking city. The neighborhoods with
the fastest growing populations were east of the river in Anacostia. In Columbia Heights
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as in other parts of the city this shift in demographics was not a matter of neighborhoods
becoming more diverse racially or economically, but one of neighborhood succession.
One of the few areas that lost black population between 1940 and 1950 were the black
belt sections immediately surrounding Columbia Heights. Although it is difficult to
determine which occurred first, a confluence of events highlighted by white migration to
the suburbs, black upward mobility and in migration to Washington, a severe post WWII
housing shortage, that was particularly hard on blacks, and the cyclical nature of capital
accumulation all converged to change the face of Columbia Heights demographically.
It is important to note here that with all the demographic changes that took place
in the neighborhood between 1940 and 1950, not all whites left Columbia Heights.
Those who remained were most likely those too poor to follow their fonner neighbors to
the suburbs or who refused to allow racist fears to chase them from the neighborhood
they called home. By 1970 the number of whites in Columbia Heights numbered only in
the thousands. Census tract 37, which is bordered by 16lh Street, was the only part of the
neighborhood that saw an increase in the number of whites in the previous decade, saw
that same population decrease by 88 percent from 1950 to 1960.
Of equal importance is the understanding that Washington, by 1968, was a
legally integrated city. Restaurants, barbershops, theaters, swimming pools, hotels and
bowling alleys were no longer allowed to discriminate, but de facto segregation in
housing, and employment kept true integration from becoming a reality. Affluent whites
lived in still largely segregated areas in the upper Northwest quadrant of the city while
an increasing number of middle class blacks moved into homes in previously all white
areas.
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Tracing this portion of the evolution of Columbia Heights was important because
it reinforces the argument that space is socially produced. Examining this evolution
through changes in transportation technology allows us to further recognize that all
cultural activity-human activity-can contribute to the making and remaking of space.
The transition of the neighborhood from mostly white to predominately black was
hastened by a number of factors. The postwar urban renewal and displacement of blacks
into already overcrowded neighborhoods set the stage for the blockbusting activities of
the local real estate industry that promoted white flight to the suburbs. These same white
families were important pieces to an evolving consumer culture that, along with
suburbanization, was a realization of the processes David Harvey described as necessary
to the subversion of a crisis of capitalist accumulation.
As private and public money left the inner city as part of the effort to save
capitalism from it's own contradictions working class and poor blacks were left with
neighborhoods with aging buildings and infrastructure as well as social service, health
care and school systems that proved to be ill-prepared for the challenge of an
increasingly poor population.
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BUBBLING CAULDRON
The post war period was one of tremendous economic growth in the United
States. As the arguments of David Harvey and Karen Brodkin illustrate this growth was
protected through a series of tactics that allowed enough prosperity to filter down to the
American people to preserve the prevailing economic and political logic. These tactics
included the American G.l. Bill and an expanding notion of whiteness that came to
include those from recently immigrated families. This newly minted whiteness allowed
ethnic Europeans a clear (and freshly paved) road to the suburbs and unrestrained
consumerism.
As the suburbanization of the Washington D.C. area continued a process of
ethnic succession was taking place in the central city. In the 1940N the levees began to
break on the old black belt. Arnold Hirsch (1983) in his treatment of post-WWII
ghettoization in Chicago notes that there was a push-pull effect to the migration of
blacks into previously white neighborhoods. Renewed black in migration from other
parts of the country, and a housing shortage-that for blacks proceeded the war and grew
worse during the 1940‘s- created produced horrendous conditions among blacks already
living in overcrowded, aged, and deteriorating housing (Hirsch 1983:16). Ethnic
succession and the form that it took were not particular to Chicago. Hirsch's treatment
of the process complicates our understanding of ethnic succession.
95
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White flight left vacancies on the borders of the black belt and the Supreme
Court’s ruling against the use of racial covenants in 1948 provided the final blow to the
racial homogeneity of white neighborhoods beleaguered by mounting economic and
social pressures (Hirsch 1983:16).
The factors that led to this type of black movement were not significantly
different in Washington. Census data shows that blacks had begun to live within the
borders of Columbia Heights as early as 1930. By 1950 areas bordering the black belt
were becoming predominately black. Propelled by a shortage of housing, a new wave of
black migration from the south and incorporation of displaces from urban renewal blacks
began to cross into what had previously been all white neighborhoods such as Columbia
Heights.
In Washington D.C. blacks found themselves making up a larger share of the
city's population but were locked out of a great deal of the United State's economic
expansion. As unemployment and dissatisfaction grew a violent response to
discrimination hastened the decline of the physical environment in Columbia Heights.
Since the end of WWII blacks had made progress in the capital. One out of every
four federal employees in the Washington area was black and the mayor was black.
There was a black majority on the new nine-man city council, on the school board.
(Gilbert 1969:1). Perhaps more than in any other city in the United States, blacks had
attained a level of success that tied their ongoing prosperity to the prosperity of the city.
There were however cracks in the edifice of peace and security in the city
despite the relative success of blacks. There were two reasons for unrest despite what
could be considered quantifiable progress by blacks in Washington as a whole. The first
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was an employment market where racism was still rampant especially in the trades and
among union apprenticeship programs. The second was the continual decline of black
inner city neighborhoods in what Hirsch has called a government sanctioned and
supported ghettoization of blacks after WWII (Hirsch 1983: 9). In a June 1963
Washington Post article Jean White noted that blacks made up 54 percent of the
District’s population in 1963. For every 10 unemployed people in the city 7 were black.
The median income of blacks was 70 percent that of whites and the average black family
earned 56 cents for every dollar earned by the average white family—and that 56 cents
represents the work of more people in the family working.
Economically, although blacks were beginning to make a few inroads into sectors of work that they had been completely locked out of previously, they still received opportunities and compensation lower than that of their white counterparts. Banks and utility companies were beginning to give blacks jobs besides the most menial they had to offer. Private businesses were allowing blacks to wait on customers but many times did not give them access to cash drawers to make change. Few skilled black mechanics held cards in the elite craft unions. Of the 75,000 Civil Service blacks in Washington 20.000 of them earned less than 7,000 dollars a year . In the late 1960‘s the city’s unemployment rate was only 4 percent, but this statistic does not show that a disproportionate amount of those unemployed were young, black and products of an inferior school system. In the parts of the city tom by the riot the unemployment rate was more than 2-3 times greater than in the city as a whole Building after building was condemned and many that appeared to be livable on the outside were often overcrowded and unsanitary. The school system was a model of mismanagement and neglect with more than a third of its buildings constructed prior to WWI. One in three students who enrolled in the 8lh grade completed high school. Only Mississippi had a higher infant mortality rate than the District. Hospitals were so crowded that people had to be turned away and the city's Tuberculosis, syphilis and gonorrhea infection rates were as high as any other city in the country. (Gilbert 1969:3- 4).
As early as 1963, the press as well as the federal and municipal governments, were
keenly aware of the problems posed by what seemed to be persistent unemployment.
The federal government took concrete steps to stem the tide of unemployment promising
750 jobs for city youth aged 16-18. An employment office was opened in Cardozo High
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School, located in Columbia Heights. In the center’s first week of operation 700 of the
750 government jobs had been filled. The teenagers who were lined up for applications
and interviews expressed various reasons for wanting or needing the $1.25 an hour jobs.
Geraldine Steele seeks to earn ‘my class fees for next year.’ Christina Tompkins wants ‘to help out my parents.’ James Lewis intends to go to business school after high school graduation and needs tuition money. Preston Hursey wants to be ‘self-sufficient’ (Edstrom 1963).
It was however going to take more than just a summer jobs program to address the
problems of employment in Washington and the federal government could not do it
alone.
The flat out racism of trade unions was one among a number of barriers that
stood in the way of increased employment opportunities for blacks.
In order to get into the apprenticeship programs, an applicant has to be screened and tested,’ Frank Hollis, manpower director for the United Planning Organization, points out. ‘After the subjective part of the screening process, he has to take the general aptitude test battery and he has to score well on it. Not many of the non-college bound youngsters are able to score high enough. He pointed out too that many applicants ‘bomb out during’ the interview before they even get around to taking the test. Others are eliminated on the basis of 'moral character’ (Raspberry 1968).
The practices of the trade and craft unions denote a strange brew of racial prejudice and
pragmatism geared to protect the interests of already existing craftsmen. But those same
practices served as a great deterrent for young men who may have been interested in the
trades but who could not or feared they could not overcome those obstacles.
Racial discrimination was also pervasive in private business, the agencies and
training schools that helped supply much of it’s prospective employees. The
discrimination in business school admittance was fostering, “a growing feeling of
tension and unrest among minority groups," according to Walter Tobrinier, president of
the District Board of commissioners. In June of 1963 the District Commissioners were
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urged to enact an ordinance for fair employment practices that would “strike at the heart
o f‘widespread and substantial’ job discrimination in Washington” (White 1968). This
recommendation came as part of a report by the District Advisory Committee to the
United States Civil Rights Commission.
The Nation’s Capital, the report states, is not yet an integrated city despite advances made during the last 10 years. ‘It is not integrated in education’, the study says ‘It is not integrated in housing, and it is far from integrated in employment. The denial of equal job opportunity is cited in the report as perhaps the most significant factor in the high incidence of crime, unemployment, social dislocation, school dropouts and political apathy among Washington's Negroes.
The Committee recommends Federal and District executive action to ban discrimination in all govemmentally supported vocational training and apprenticeship programs, strict enforcement of provisions calling for cancellation of Government contracts when non discrimination clauses are violated and action by national and international unions- assisted by Federal and local authorities-to eliminate discrimination by local unions. (White 1968).
Ben D. Segal, education and international affairs director of the International Union of
Electrical Workers, who headed the subcommittee, added: “We have what maybe the
last opportunity in Washington to show that racial segregation and discrimination can be
eliminated by peaceful means” (White 1968).
In the face of discrimination of some form at all levels of government and in
private industry, trade and craft unions, blacks grew increasingly impatient with the slow
process of integration. In many instances black men looked to circumvent the processes
that kept them out of work by hiring themselves out directly. They would gather at
shape-ups8 at places like River Road and Eastern Avenue, 5lh and K streets and Georgia
and Eastern Avenues on the District Maryland Border. The men would often arrive
8 Shape-ups are places where skilled and unskilled laborers congregate hoping to get work as day laborer. They typically are filled with men who cannot find steady employment elsewhere in their given trade or have skills that are not marketable enough to earn a living.
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before dawn and their expectations for the day are modest. They hoped to get work for
the day and make enough for food and perhaps a bus fare home for the night.
The informal hiring system has been a fixture of the neighborhood since World War II, when gasoline rationing made it difficult for District workmen to get to construction sites in suburban Maryland areas not served by bus. Just west of the Georgia and Alaska Avenue bustop [location of the Georgia Avenue shape-up] the site is still convenient for one-day job seekers who come out 16th street for a crack at the suburban job market.
A District man said that he’d been unemployed for three months and received unemployment benefits. His wife a, domestic, works. They have three children. He is looking for a full time job, but has no use for the U.S. Employment Service. ‘It takes too long,' he said, ‘and you have to wait all day'
Shape-up wage scales are low. Most jobs pay $1.25 to $1.50 an hour. The better ones pay $1.75 to $2.25 an hour. These jobs go to men who possess skills like bricklaying. By comparison, union bricklayers employed full-time receive about $4.30 an hour. Non union bricklayers employed full-time receive about $4.00 an hour (Washington Post 1963).
At first blush these men seem to be taking a huge risk standing around for work
that may never come for the chance of making peanuts compared to what they may get
in full time employment. But the key here is that if they were able to get a job they
could be almost certain that they would take some money home. When compared to the
wasted days in an employment office downtown it is no wonder these men went out day
after day. Certain money is better than no money at all.
Reinforcing the fact that racism was the main cause of high unemployment
among black men and women was the fact that there were full time jobs to be had in all
sectors of the Washington market. Racism in hiring at all levels of government, in the
trade and craft unions and in private enterprise kept many blacks from experiencing the
type of upward mobility that was part of the promise of the Civil Rights movement. In
1968 the realities of de facto segregation and institutionalized racism combined with the
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assassination of the Rev. Dr Martin Luther King Jr. hastening the decline of inner city
neighborhoods like Columbia Heights.
The “Uprisings”
Mike Davis (2002) details how disinvestment of central cities spearheaded by
banks, backed by federal policies was, “reinforced by ensuing local fiscal crises and
contraction of lifeline municipal services.” (Davis 2002 389). Hirsch argues that the
nature o f racial succession actually led to the beginnings of disinvestment and
deterioration in inner cities.
As the expanding black belt approached white residential areas, those neighborhoods entered what realtors called a ‘stagnant period’. Whites no longer bought homes in the community and blacks had yet to make their first appearance. Rents and purchase and purchase prices were lowered in the futile attempt to attract white residents, lending agencies refused to grant mortgages to whites in such ‘threatened’ areas, and, of course they demurred in providing financing to the first blacks to break a block. With the homeowners often cut back on the maintenance of their properties. Deterioration thus frequently set in before blacks moved into the community (Hirsch 1983:31).
Hirsch’s point should not go without emphasis as blaming the victims is often a
consistent theme in writing about the inner city, especially in representations by the
popular press. It is important to realize that the type of physical deterioration of the
inner city typically blamed on blacks is, in reality rooted in the decisions of real estate
speculators and agents of the Washington D.C. municipal and United States federal
governments.
In 1968 Columbia Heights was visually a photo negative of itself 30 years prior.
It was now primarily a black neighborhood with a minority of white families who had
made their homes there for decades in some cases. The majority o f businesses were
located along the 14th street corridor but were still owned by whites. People shopped in
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any number of stores that sold everything from medication to hardware to the latest
clothing fashions. The larger department stores were still located downtown but within
walking distance, a Columbia Heights resident could fill most of their day-to-day needs.
Because Washington was legally integrated blacks were free to come and go in stores as
they pleased and many neighborhood residents were employed in neighborhood
businesses. One of those local businesses was Smith's Pharmacy a small soda/chemist
shop at 2518 14th street. Smith's was owned Larry Rosen, a native Washingtonian who
grew up in old Southwest. He bought Smith’s in 1959 with the help of his older brother.
L.R.: It was a mixed neighborhood then, a very crowded block with a lot of businesses. We had a thriving soda fountain, which you don’t see today. A very friendly neighborhood. I knew everybody. I worked hard and made a good living by putting in a lot of hours.
Over the years, more black people came into the neighborhood. Toward the end, people said it was a rough neighborhood but 1 never got held up. I think the people liked me; I tried to do well. I had a black pharmacist working for me and four or five other people, all from the neighborhood. With the exception of a few broken windows, we never really had a problem. I remember we had two eggs, toast, bacon and coffee for 59 cents.
When Mr. Rosen begins to speak about owning his shop it is obvious that for a
humble Jewish kid from Southwest, owning his own business was his proudest
accomplishment. The soda fountain sold hamburgers for 15 cents and special
Smithburgers for 39 cents. Local kids darted in and out of the store buying up ice cream
and sodas as they went, while adults finished off 60 cent plates of bacon and eggs.
In 1968 thick black smoke and flames consumed Smith's as looters darted in and
out of stores along the 14 Street corridor. The 1968 uprisings were a blow to merchants,
residents and the entire neighborhood and recovery has been slow to come despite a
lengthy 30-year hangover.
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To white Washingtonians and in popular portrayals in the media the 1968
uprisings are known as the Martin Luther King Riots, but to black residents of Columbia
Heights they were more. Richard Wade states that the demographic changes, of the
type I have described in this chapter, have profoundly altered the social structure of the
metropolis. The middle class rapidly evacuated the old city in favor of the suburbs. In
turn black migrants from the south and replaced them. The newcomers were mostly
poor and racially distinct.. .mostly they needed jobs but industry and commerce had
followed the outward movement of people (Wade 272). While this is a correct
description of the scenario in the 195Cf s and especially the 1960's Wade further points
out that as the migration of rural blacks into cities like Washington swelled their
numbers, the experience of these newcomers began to diverge significantly from other
immigrant groups that came to America's cities earlier.
There would be no G.I. Bill for blacks in the inner city, there would be no
government assistance to help them gain secure economic footing and de facto
segregation kept them locked into crowded substandard housing.
Wade asserts that blacks were locked within the black belt and that black belt
rather than dispersing after a matter of years spread out as it was crammed with more
people coming to the city to seek opportunities. Wade argues that, “the immigrant
ghetto had been tolerable because it was thought to be temporary, a rough staging ground
for upward and outward mobility. Blacks increasingly perceived the ghetto to be their
permanent home. And each federal census fortified this apprehension as the index of
racial segregation moved steadily upward. There was, of course, some modest leakage
here and there, but the barriers to escape remained formidable. (273)
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I disagree with Wade in his assertion that all black people began to see poverty
and life in the ghetto as permanent and inescapable. It is an overly simplistic way of
examining the way that people respond to being spatially restricted. Even as the ghettoes
grew the civil rights movement challenged the plight of blacks throughout the country.
That movement was fed by anger and hope and though it ultimately ended leaving many
disillusioned there were and still are those that believe the inner city areas or ghettoes
can be made into livable communities and do indeed call them home not because of what
they have materially but the strength that they draw from relationships to people in their
neighborhood.
Clarke has been a resident of Columbia Heights whom 1 have met in community
forums hosted by Project South ,an organization whose stated goal is to create spaces for
movement building by developing leaders and working with communities in order to
create social change. Project South's Washington office is located in St. Stephen and
the Incarnation Episcopal Church in Columbia Heights and Clarke works there a few
days a week on a volunteer basis. It was his work with Project South that led to him
becoming an activist within his own building.
During our interview Clarke asserted that the riots happened because of anger at
the situation of blacks in the city not by their acceptance of their lot in life.
C: Well first of all I don't know if riot is the correct definition for it.I mean this is how people perceived it in most cases, but 1 think it was an unorganized rebellion or protest. First of all they protested against the assassination of their leader and they rebelled because within them they hate this stuff for real they hate it for real you know. This was an outlet its just not that they wanted to loot even though poor people gonna loot because they need the stuff you know but it was all this pent up frustration over the years man. Black residents of Columbia Heights and the rest of Washington DC were
rebelling because of the assassination of a great man and leader. According to Clarke’s
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analysis they also were protesting their condition of menial jobs for low wages and lack
of upward mobility after many blacks had fought and died in WWII only to have the
government turn its back on them when they returned. They were protesting their
relegation to the status of second-class citizens through housing segregation and most of
all they were protesting the lack of support that they and their neighborhoods received on
a day-to-day basis. In 1968 Columbia Heights was no longer a sprawling estate nor was
it the suburban hamlet it once was and as blacks moved into the area as part of an
expanding black belt their social and economic conditions did not improve by crossing
that arbitrary border.
It is understandable however, that people did move into the neighborhoods
beautiful and spacious row houses with a sense of hope that the new surroundings would
bring additional blessings. They did not and in addition these people continued to be
bombarded with images and propaganda romanticizing and selling the suburban lifestyle
and the unbridled consumption that accompanied it. According to Clarke it was the
striking wealth that the rest of America seemed to be getting a piece of, the consumption,
the freedom and open space that money seemed to buy that was the ultimate goad to
black people in Columbia Heights.
C: Right... the scarcity amongst abundance that's the word thaf s what they were rebelling against the scarcity among abundance that's where the rioting came from but the anger was because of the assassination of MLK you know and they burnt their own neighborhoods down because deep down inside there was a fear to go any further.
The question of why blacks in Columbia Heights would destroy their own
neighborhood is one that Larry Rosen asks himself often. Perhaps merchants were the
most immediate manifestations of the gap in wealth that permeated the city. Mr. Rosen
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would dispute the claim that his little store made him a wealthy man as he had to
routinely work upwards of 80 hours a week in order to turn a profit. Rather than
blaming the residents of Columbia Heights as one may expect, Mr. Rosen sees another
culprit.
LR: I don’t think it was a black-white issue. I think the people rioted because it was so easy. I never had anti-black feelings. What 1 did have, after the riots, wasfeeling a of helplessness. I talked to the police and other people and the story was, it was just too much. Nothing could be done. The National Guard came with unloaded rifles. The government had a problem. President Johnson and Mayor Washington had a problem: what to do with the people. They decided to just let the people take what they want. Nobody was able to protect us.
It was not surprising to hear Mr. Rosen express such resentment toward the federal and
District governments as both played significant roles in the geography of the uprisings
themselves. The spatial isolation of black neighborhoods grew more pronounced after
WWII. In Washington D.C. the total number of whites in the city fell by several
hundred thousand as more and more families moved to surrounding suburbs. In 1968
only one of the cities four quadrants (Northwest) maintained a sizeable white population.
This white minority lived primarily west of Rock Creek Park which served as a natural
barrier between whites and increasing numbers of blacks east of the park. National
Guardsmen and police, the same ones who were deployed without ammunition were
deployed to protect property both downtown and west of the park and to keep the
burning and looting relegated to black ghettos. The federal and local governments
sacrificed small businessmen like Mr. Rosen intentionally in order to preserve more
valuable property both downtown and in white neighborhoods.
Ultimately it was the uprisings and their aftermath, the physical, spatial and
psychological effects that were to define Columbia Heights for 3 decades.
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C: When they assassinated MLK, that was the thing that broke the camels back. They just let it out you know what I mean, they let their anger out and that's what they did. The funny thing about it as far as I'm concerned [wasjthe way society is structured when they let that anger out and it’s the same thing with the OJ situation it impacted the white consciousness of America if frightened them you know what I'm saying and they’re still collectively responding to thatfear.
The fear that Clark discusses led to a departure by many of the remaining whites that
were living and doing business in the neighborhood prior to 1968. Mr. Rosen spoke of
the helplessness that he, as a merchant, felt upon hearing that his store had been
destroyed. Small business owners who lost their stores were uncertain of the future.
LR: It was a terrible thing. Dr. King was a great person, but I still don’t understand why people took their frustrations out on the merchants. Merchants didn't have anything to do with it. Merchants were there to make a living. The people in the old neighborhood were hurt too. The shops were gone, the whole area was gone, they had to move. There was a Farmer’s Market, that was gone. So were other stores that were afraid to reopen. And even a lot of the big stores that were in the ghetto, the food chains, they pulled out.
In addition to the departure of white residents was the removal of the last vestiges
of capital investment, at least the large-scale investment that was represented by some of
the chain stores that had served the area for decades. Clark does indicate however that
the looting and burning of stores was not as indiscriminate as it may have seemed at the
time.
C: Oh the businesses some survived and the reason why that was, is that they put stickers on certain businesses don’t touch this one like the House of Jerry's unfortunately it had been in the neighborhood for a long time and they did something to his place. It was a store called the House of Jerry’s and Jerry was a neighborhood person and he was just in business selling clothes and everything and he knew everybody but they did something to his store. There were some stores that they never touched and there were some proprietors that had guns and they said if you come in here I’m going to shoot somebody and the ones that were strong enough to defend their own property were able to maintain. I'm talking about the comer stores, but the stores that were initially up and down 14,h street as being a shopping strip and all that, the big stores they got to those. Lemer's and stores like that Woolworth’s stores like that man the large ones that represented the large corporations yeah they got to those but there was a lot of black small businesses that were able to survive the riots and they're still here today!
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Many black owned stores remained untouched and larger stores; stores that could be
associated with money power or white business entities were burned to the ground. The
burned out stores on 14th Streets eventually were razed, because larger scale
development projects, both residential and retail, were taking place in the suburbs.
At first blush it would seem that large-scale enterprises such as Lemer and
Woolworth’s and smaller businesses such as Smith’s did not reopen for the same
reasons. However, upon further analysis, in addition to uncertainty about the future of
the neighborhood, Larry Rosen and other small merchants were the victims of the
insurance industry.
LR: A lot of people say, ‘Were you insured'? Well, insurance supposedly replaced the merchandise and the fixtures, and we were paid some business interruption, the so-called profit you would lose while you rebuilt the store, if you wanted to go back.
While the insurance companies did compensate merchants for the tangible losses, they
did not compensate them for the loss of “good will". Mr. Rosen described the loss of
good will as the degree of profitability of successful livelihood generated by the business
and believes it is any merchant’s most important asset. The amount of good will value a
business has provides the majority of its worth when it is sold. When local merchants
were not compensated for a loss of good will by insurance companies they turned to the
District government for redress. Although the city council recommended that merchants
be compensated for things like good will, not covered by insurance, Mr. Rosen says he
never saw any such compensation. Larger chain stores chose not to reestablish
operations in Columbia Heights, although their larger structures may have allowed them
to absorb losses more readily than small shops. Those smaller shops were forced to not
reopen because of failures by the insurance industry. The District government could
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have done much to rebuild goodwill throughout the city by supporting businesses that
wanted to rebuild. The city chose not to do so and the results proved to be catastrophic
for the neighborhood.
Because larger retailers refused to rebuild or reinvest in the neighborhood, the
services, shopping and entertainment outlets that they provided were lost to residents for
many years. The 14th Street shopping district had been reduced to a series of vacant lots
and in addition to the lack of investment by private capital there was little done by the
District government to facilitate the use of the land for the benefit of residents. The
Redevelopment Land Agency (RLA) assumed control of some of the most important
vacant properties in what had been the commercial district. The land remained fallow
for some future use, which remained unknown until the late 1990's.
Mr. Johnson does acknowledge that businesses seemed to just disappear after
1968 but he also notes that it was apparent prior to the uprisings that things in the
neighborhood were changing.
DJT: So you would say that you would attribute the vacant lots that are up here to people reacting to the riots generally and not to what happened right here in Columbia H eights?
CJ: Yeah and you know it was in different spots and right up there by Riggs bank [at 14th Street and Park Road] it was a few things messed up in that area too. But they didn't come all the way up the street it was just in a few little spots. Because ahh but it seemed like after the riots that things that really wasn't tore up during the riots but after the riots stuff just started happening and people didn't go like to the movie up there they're fixing up now .. .they didn't bother the movie theater or nothing like that during the riots. People just stopped going to it. It wasn't really that popular here no way because it was getting old and everything so it wasn't kept up and people stopped going because the thing just started getting old and they closed it down but it wasn't cause of the riots.
DJT: And you are talking about the Tivoli?
CJ: Yeah, and uh some of the stuff didn't really happen during the riots but it just seemed like it went down after the riots.
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DJT: What do you mean by went down? You mean people didn't...?
CJ: People didn't go to it, there wasn't anywhere to go and you couldn't buy clothes you couldn't buy anything down off in there for a while. The barbershops got closed a whole bunch of stuff and for a while all that area was just about dead.
While Mr. Johnson lacks a comprehensive frame of analysis outside of his own
experience, through his words, he confirms that deterioration of the neighborhood was a
fact. His acknowledgment of the fact that many places, such as the Tivoli, were in
declineprior to the riots is key to my argument that despite the seemingly strong
position of blacks in Washington D.C., the willful actions of real estate, banking and
insurance industries caused devalorization and decline of the built environment in newly
minted black neighborhoods. More importantly, that disinvestment was the product of
hyper-investment in the suburban land market. The decline of poor and working class
neighborhoods was the result of disinvestment in inner city neighborhoods. Hyper
investment in the suburban land market and these were calculated moves made by
individual and larger capitalist interests in the name of profit and supported by the
United States government through policies that encouraged suburban development and
population growth.
What were the psychological effects of the uprisings on the residents of
Columbia Heights themselves? Clark provides a glimpse into the mindset of men,
women and children as they woke up after a week of unrest outside their front doors.
C: The aftermath was like a hang over. You know how you go out and party all night then the next morning you wake up and you're back to your you know your right mind so to speak and you're like damn what did 1 do last night? Why did 1 do it? It was like that man you know it was like that. With the drugs coming in that's the way to forget it or to ease that pain or to sink deeper into whatever people sink into to isolate themselves from the realities of life. Yeah that's kind of what happened man because people would liked for it to not have went that way but they couldn't change it back again. They
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looking for the authorities to help them with it and the disinvestment that you talked about so the community as a whole man was just in this kind of state that well nobody gives a shit so Fm just gon do what I gotta do that's how it boiled down. The drugs, selling drugs to each other you know whatI mean? Trying to make that money and everything became a way of life. Then the young people got into it with the crack cocaine you know it just became a way of life, but people will tell you right away that they cant bring those drugs in here they’re not stupid they know they gotta come from som ew here.
Clark’s description of the months and years after the uprisings as a hangover could not
ring more true. The demographic changes in the neighborhood had been evident for
some time and the stagnant period of housing succession that Hirsch describes led to the
beginnings of deterioration of housing stock.
While the area was hemorrhaging white residents, the black population grew, but
at a much slower rate gaining only 5,000 additional residents. Part of this discrepancy
could be due to blacks spreading out into blocks left vacant by exiting whites. In
interviews it became apparent however that while whites left the neighborhood in greater
numbers following the riots, the black families who could afford to buy, mostly in
suburban Maryland, left as well following shopping and entertainment venues that had
left the city. Spatially Columbia Heights would not be the same again after 1968, vacant
lots and burned out buildings replaced businesses and homes.
The riots, as Clark and Mr. Rosen indicated, had a profound psychological effect
on the entire Columbia Heights community. Both merchants and residents experienced
feelings of anger, fear, helplessness and resentment. This psychological damage
manifested itself in different ways and while merchants and some residents were able to
leave and rebuild their lives and livelihoods elsewhere, some residents were left in an
increasingly contradictory economic, social and spatial situation. Charles Johnson, who
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came to Columbia Heights after being discharged from the Air Force in 1964, recalls
that:
CJ: People started moving away but a bunch of people who got homes here those were the people who had worked for government and retired and they had homes and junk well they stayed around. A lot of people started moving away started moving out into Silver Springs and because that’s where all the shopping was then.
Mr. Rosen was one of many Columbia Heights merchants who employed neighborhood
folks in their businesses. Prior to the uprisings, blacks were already more likely to be
unemployed than whites in the city. The District and Federal government, in their
failure to assist local merchants to relocate in the same neighborhoods, helped to deepen
this situation.
For millions of black Americans left in the inner cities both their dreams and
their neighborhoods were beginning to crumble. Developers and government
economists understood that suburban expansion would not, by itself, be able to continue
American economic expansion in perpetuity. In order to truly ensure continued profit,
they would have to ensure that cheap land would be available for capital investment once
suburban markets were saturated. Money and investments were withdrawn from inner
cities and loans from banks were almost impossible to get and this situation was
exacerbated by the refusal of the FHA to insure loans given in these mostly minority
communities.
In seeking, however, an explanation of the place Columbia Heights was to
become based on this history it is necessary to understand how changes in the
organization of space was interpreted and confronted by residents and how those
changes worked to alter relationships amongst residents and between the neighborhood
and the rest of the city.
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By allowing vacant lots and burned out boarded up buildings to remain as well as
allowing infrastructure such as damaged street lamps and sidewalks go un-repaired, the
municipal government sent a not so subtle message to the residents of Columbia Heights.
The signal was that there was very little concern with the poor and working classes, and
even less concern for the trials of their day-to-day existence.
These factors, these spatial changes, fundamentally changed the way that
residents related to their environment and to one another. But the Columbia Heights that
developed post 1968 was not a one-dimensional backdrop for scenes in “New Jack
City". As Clark discusses above, there developed an attitude of self-interest, especially
among the younger chronically underemployed young men and women. For many
people the informal economy, represented primarily by the drug trade, became one of the
few viable employment opportunities with more and more jobs that once would have
been available to them, moving to the suburbs.
There were, however families and individuals like, that remember the
neighborhood with fondness despite the realities of the uprisings and the deepening
poverty and drug trafficking that developed in the years following. After living with
another young man for a number of years Mr. Johnson and his soon to be wife moved
into an apartment in Clifton Terrace at 13th and Clifton St. It was from then on that they
really began to call Columbia Heights home and accept for a brief stay in Florida, the
family never left the neighborhood. When I asked him to describe the area to me Mr.
Johnson noted:
CJ: Well the neighborhood was ummI don't know it was typical black neighborhood but you know we are there was a little bit of everything going on around here just like I think it was a little bit worser than it is now.
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I asked him why that was his impression and he confirmed that a lot of the
entertainment that had been available was either destroyed or owners relocated after the
uprisings. He also described the sometimes-dangerous conditions of his particular
apartment complex.
CJ: Sometimes in the building where we lived at uhh that building was I don't know how to describe it sometimes when you would go down there if you lived in a certain part of the building it was so dark you was almost scared to go home. It was everything going on and that Clifton Terrace used to be a hell of a place I don't know if you heard anything about it but it was a hell of a place Clifton terrace used to be hell. It was everything going on in Clifton Terrace. You could go down the hall sometimes and people would be sitting in the stairways smoking their junk it was just that bad and they didn’t have much like they do security around here they didn’t have security back then they might have security down there but he was most time right there with the rest of em just as bad as the rest of them and like I said if you worked on the night shift I used to work on the night shift and come home 12 o'clock or something like that and you'd be kind of skeptical that you might walk down some of the halls and the lights might be out. It would be dark and you wouldn’t know what was going on and it used to be kind of scary down there it was scary there for a while When we first got to Clifton terrace up here at where this used to be all white when I first moved up here it was still whites up here and that's the reason like I said from ahh Florida avenue going that way it was mostly you know 95 % black but coming back up this way it was mostly white it was blacks up here but the majority were whites. Like these two buildings here they was white. And then they started after the riots everybody started moving at least the whites did they started getting away from here.
All of Mr. Johnson’s adult memories, both good and bad, have been formed on
the stoops and sidewalks in Columbia Heights. It is his home and he views it through a
lens that allows him to speak about it’s flaws as well as speak eloquently about its
sentimental appeal and importance in his life and the life of his family. 1 asked him why
he and his family never really left Columbia Heights despite the declining conditions.
He said that he never thought about moving because he had been in Columbia Heights
ever since he came to Washington. He and his wife raised their kids in the
neighborhood, his wife was from Washington and all her family lived in the city. His
wife died in an apartment on Fairmont Street.
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CJ: Well all the people we knew was here, was in this area. Her [his wife] mother and her sister lived down here. All the people that I met, all the guys and stuff the majority of them [lived in Columbia Heights]. I knew some people across town and stuff like that but they were some guys I met on my job working downtown. I met some people like that but like I said I never have been a guy that runs back and forth to nobody’s house. We may be friends or whatever but I wasn’t running back and forth to your house. People had these parties and I didn’t w ant... I’m a country boy and I guess I’ll always be a country boy and I never ran around like that. I was used to going to work and we was doing pretty good nothing to brag about. You know I’d go to work and on the weekend couple of days I was at home with the family. Like I said sometimes I would get the kids and we would go out to the park and umm if I wanted the kids to go to the park with me I’d go to Malcolm X park over here. We would go out to the park and I’d bring em back to the house, if I wanted to just go out myself I’d come out and talk to the guys and when I was done I’d go on back in the house. That’s what I did
DJT: So basically you stayed because you didn't need to go anywhere else?
CJ: That’s about the size of it [laughs]! We never did get into the situation where we thought about buying no home or nothing like that. Maybe if we had bought a home or something we would have moved out far out in Northeast or to Maryland or somewhere, but we never sat down and talked about buying a home or nothing like that. And we was satisfied.
It is important here to remember that the apparent decline in the quality of life in
Columbia Heights was a product of disinvestment, the flight of private capital the inner
city to the suburbs. This disinvestment happened not only in Washington D.C. but in
cities across the United States. Columbia Heights in the early 19 from 60's was a
community becoming more integrated despite racism that still existed in many arenas in
society. Racism in the real estate industry led to blockbusting, and as more white
homeowners succumbed to the fears of declining property values they also took the
opportunity for Columbia Heights to become an integrated urban neighborhood.
Merchants such as Larry Rosen remained in the neighborhood until the 1968 uprisings,
highlighting the fact that the neighborhood was still a viable community economically
and socially despite its demographic changes. Just as fear and anger some blacks felt
about their status in the country and the city relative to whites, played a major role in the
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uprisings. Fear, anger, helplessness and apprehension all played a role in why small
scale merchants did not return. Larger chains made the conscious choice not to return
and the absence of business in which to shop and work tore at the social fabric of the
neighborhood. Black residents who chose to or were not fortunate enough to move away
were forced to live with the psychological effects of living in the burned out aftermath
and then with vacant lots where there once were thriving businesses. It was the willful
withdrawal of both large and small-scale capital that led brought about the level of
degradation that Mr. Johnson describes above.
In the aftermath of uprisings that took place across the United States both
Republican and Democrats began to reorient domestic policy away from the
commitments of the New Deal and the War on Poverty. Goode and Maskovsky (2001)
indicate that these changes, “especially tax policies and policies related to social
spending, exacerbated the tendencies toward polarization brought upon by economic
restructuring" (Goode and Mascovsky 2001:5). Conservatives argued that it was the
dependency of the poor on welfare and other safety net programs and not poverty that
had provided the fodder for the uprisings (Goode and Mascovsky 2001:5).
Columbia Fleights from as early as the 1940's was subject to the same spatial and
social shifts that were economic restructuring had forced upon Foggy Bottom and
Southwest. While profit was being pursued through the wholesale displacement of
black neighborhoods, Columbia Fleights was providing a financial windfall for the
developers of suburban tracts. Increases in the populations of streetcar suburbs like
Columbia Fleights improved the bottom lines of the companies that operated trolley
services throughout the region. But as we saw in the examples of Southwest and Foggy
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Bottom neighborhoods are not static creations and are subject to the whims of the market
and Columbia Heights would prove to be no different. Every decline, it would seem, is
followed by resurgence and in the next chapter I will examine the apparent revitalization
of Columbia Heights and tie it into the same mechanisms that led to its decline.
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THE GREEN LINE COMETH
In Columbia Heights at the end of the 1960"s firefighters were still putting out
the smoldering embers of the 1968 uprisings. They were simultaneously setting off a 30
year long demographic, spatial and social transformation that would leave so many inner
city neighborhoods across the country hobbled. Blacks had succeded whites as the
predominant racial group in the neighborhood and the city. The uprisings left much of
14lh Street from U Street to Park Road burned out and abandoned.
In this chapter I will examine Columbia Heights post 1968. 1 will further
examine the relationship between the realization of what Neil Smith (1991) calls a rent
gap in the value of land in Columbia Heights with economic restructuring and the
physical deterioration of Columbia Heights after WW1I. The actions of the banking,
insurance and real estate industries, as well as, land speculators lead to devalorization
and abandonment. These processes were set into motion in the early 1940's and began
manifest in the 1950‘s as blacks began to cross the barriers from the Black Belt into
Columbia Heights. Real estate industry block busting practices precipitated the
deterioration of the built environment. White homeowners, anticipating the eventual
transfer of their block from white to black hands, refused to invest further money into
improvements to homes they would soon be selling. As blacks began to move into
homes and notice the effects of age, wear and tear they went to banks for loans. These
118
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tactics and the federal governments implicit acceptance of them served as a reminder
that, through the functioning of institutionalized racism, the United States still treated
blacks as second-class citizens. It was that feeling that provided the underlying rage of
the 1968 uprisings.
I will highlight how the presence of Latino immigrants beginning in the 1970's
further complicated neighborhood dynamics, as well as began to give the neighborhood
the diversity for which it is now well known. Latino families settled first in the adjacent
neighborhoods of Adams Morgan and Mt. Pleasant, in later years moving from those
neighborhoods east of 16th Street because of gentrification. They took up residence
beside blacks in the same disintegrating apartment buildings and row houses. Finally,
the current gentrification of Columbia Heights will come into focus as I trace the way
that the warehousing of devalorized land in the neighborhood began to attract capital
investment and development again with the announcement of a metro stop in Columbia
Heights.
The bottoming out of inner-city land values has coincided with a relative decline
in the profitability of suburban expansion based on rising land values. The see-saw
movement of capital investment is in full swing back to the city just as economic
restructuring is creating new understandings of city and metropolis.
The coming of the Green line station to Columbia Heights and the construction
and destruction that it begat will highlight the ways that new economic and spatial
priorities are overwhelming minority neighborhoods. In his bookThe New Urban
Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist (1996), City Neil Smith builds upon his
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work with “rent gap theory", uneven development and the production of urban space.
He argues that the gentrification is the result of more than just middle class optimism
about living in the city. It was also the result of a decade of government deregulation
and privatization. The revanchist city is a term encapsulating the political, economic and
social shifts that are part of a movement to reclaim the city from those historically
oppressed groups that inherited it.
I will return to Logan and Molotch and their understanding of the competing
values of use and exchange to highlight what Matthew Ruben (2001) calls a “a neo
liberal government facilitated development model" in order to highlight the vital role the
District government is playing in the gentrification of the neighborhood.
In the years following the uprisings residents of Columbia Heights appealed to
the District government for development projects that would make use of vacant lots and
bring jobs to a community whose residents were often underemployed. The irony is that
the District government itself was beholden to the same private and federal dollars that
were being invested in suburban expansion. Smith (1996) highlights the impact of
domestic policy in the condition of the inner city. Public discourse against the liberal
politics of the 196Cfs highlighted rollbacks of welfare benefits, budget cuts and severe
governmental economic crisis. Smith reads this all out attack on the New Deal system as
revenge against minorities, the working class, women, environmental legislation, gays
and lesbians and immigrants. In the public discourse, attacks on affirmative action,
street violence, drug policy, the homeless and political correctness were the most visible
vehicles of this reaction.
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As I mentioned in the previous chapter cuts in spending for certain life-line social
services began in the 1970’s. The District felt these cutbacks as acutely as any city
because of its tenuous political position and dependence on congress to authorize its
budget. This fact made the city more dependent on private development dollars for land
projects and with so much capital sunk into the suburban land market, the few private
projects that were undertaken were directed toward restructuring the downtown and
shifting its location further to the west.
While the municipal government was focused on the buildup and restructuring of
downtown, neighborhoods like Columbia Heights were suffering from the disregard they
were being shown by banks and insurance companies. The city bulldozed large parcels
of land and replaced once thriving businesses with vacant lots and former family homes
with boarded shells. As Mike Davis (2002) notes inDead Cities, as buildings are
allowed to deteriorate they ‘'blight the rest of the neighborhood: attracting crime,
depressing property values, and encouraging more abandonment” (Davis 2002:391).
Underlining Davis’ point, buildings deteriorated because landlords either refused to
improve their properties or were unable to get affordable loans from banks to provide the
necessary improvements. The refusal of the insurance and banking industries to provide
enough capital to businessmen whose property was damaged or destroyed during the
uprisings meant that business did not return. As Mr. Rosen testified, even when
businessmen were open to the possibilities of returning to do business in areas that were
destroyed, they were not given adequate settlements from insurance agencies and the
District government could not or did not do enough to assist those merchants. The city,
through the RLA (Redevelopment Land Agency ), took control of formerly privately
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owned land and held it until such time as the right private development could be
implemented.
Thinking through these changes to the landscape of the area dialectically calls for
us to ask questions about the effects of this type of drastic change to the community
landscape on the social psychology, organization and relationships among residents and
between residents and the rest of the city. How did living in the ruins of devalorization
affect the people of Columbia Heights and how did the unattractiveness of the landscape
and resident's reactions to it serve to further socially isolate the area?
In the preceding chapter, Clarke noted that waking up after the riots was like
waking up from a dream. In the years following the riots he argued that the community
looked to the government to help address the physical state of the neighborhood. If the
federal or District governments had reacted with an ounce of compassion, instead of with
bulldozers and a turned eye, the psychological effects of residents may not have been as
profound. Those residents who lived in the ruins of what the neighborhood once was
also had to deal with a tremendous amount of poverty along with retreating social
services. Clarke notes that once people saw that no one outside of Columbia Heights
cared about the state of the community, some residents began to care less and less as
well. The loss of commercial activity exacerbated the unaddressed unemployment crisis
that had preceded them. Survival became a primary goal, with some residents going
about trying to survive by legal means and some by other means. Drugs became a major
issue in the community and Charles Johnson described to me what he could see of the
struggling neighborhood from his apartment window.
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C J : After the riots it seemed like when they fixed something up the people never took care of it. Like the little park out behind the building they came down and they fixed that park up and the people never did take their children out there you’d go out there and they'd have a group from the college used to come over and clean that park out pick up all the trash and everything clean it out and you never found no body taking their kids over there and all you’d see was somebody over there smoking crack or something like that see o n e d a y w I as o ff th a t day and it was wholea bunch o f people out there anda man and a woman was out there and she was giving him a blowjob right there in the middle of the day time right in the park that type of stuff goes on over there.. .and stuff like that would happen and at night that’s what it was it was just like a hangout for people and a couple of people got killed right there on the other side and that was a place you could see all types of people standing out there late at night and stuff and people driving by in cars 1 mean they knew where there was the different spots where you could go pick up whatever you wanted and they would hide their junk in the park
Mr. Johnson describes what, from his perspective as a long time Columbia Heights
resident, as nothing less than a breakdown of social norms as public spaces like parks
become places where one was as likely to see a drug deal as children playing. The
reality of the situation is far more complicated. It is significant to note that Mr. Johnson
provides a narrative of the neighborhood in which he is an observer pitting himself and
other aging, working class residents against younger deviant residents. Unlike Clark,
Mr. Johnson never acknowledged the unequal nature of life between blacks and whites
in Columbia Heights or in the wider city. In actuality it was that inequality, as Clark
describes, that provided fuel for the fire of the uprisings. After the riots massive flight of
private and federal dollars left the inner city deserted, even retail jobs caught the last
train for the suburbs. Mr. Johnson was able to retain his job parking cars downtown and
continued to help provide for his families. Younger black men and women, who were
more likely to be unemployed before the riots, found the going especially tough because
there were few enterprises in the city that could absorb the glut of available labor.
Calvary Bilingual Multicultural Learning Center, started in 1986, first operated
out of the basement of Calvary United Methodist Church on Columbia Road in
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Columbia Heights. Since it's beginnings, serving 15 children in that church basement,
Calvary is one of a handful of non-profit organizations that have developed significant
influence among Latinos in Columbia Heights and in citywide politics. The center has
also benefited significantly from the ability of Ms. Otero to build relationships with both
municipal politicians and local business elites. In 1995 the organization relocated just a
few yards away to a four-story building that had served as a Bell Atlantic switching
station for many years. B.B. notes that in Calvary's first few years of operation:
B.B.: It was such a harsh environment the drug scene in particular was probably the worst piece of the experience. This street [Columbia Road] is the corridor for folks coming in from Maryland because if you're coming in from Silver Spring or anywhere else you are shooting down Sherman, 13,h 14th and you're cutting across Columbia Rd. So the white-collar workers who pick up the drugs have to pick it up somewhere on their way to work and it was just unbelievable at 7 o'clock in the morning and there was a line out in front of the building!
The increased drug activity in the neighborhood is largely the outcome of the dearth of
work suited to a largely unskilled workforce. Those young people especially who were
looking to the informal economy to make money were products of an under funded and
mismanaged public education system.
During my conversation with Clarke he argued that many poor and working class
people in the neighborhood felt helpless against what was happening to them and to the
community. Helplessness and hopelessness were no doubt a part of the experience of
living in Columbia Heights during the “warehousing" years, psychologically negative
effects of living amongst physical destruction and decay was part of the equation, as
were changes in the ways that people relate to their surroundings in light of that decay.
The vacant lots, crime, high infant mortality and poverty that residents
experienced can all be traced back to long range plans to rescue capital in crisis after
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WWII. Those plans hinged on the transfer of large amounts of surplus capital into the
built environment which led to urban restructuring in Foggy Bottom and Southwest
Washington, converting older industrial and residential spaces into spaces for residence
and consumption for wealthier Washingtonians. Suburban expansion was a key
manifestation of the commitment to reinvest capital and the ability o f the movement of
capital to create spaces for capital accumulation. The federal government supported this
expansion through the passage of the G.I. Bill (1944) and the Federal Highway Act
(1944). Suburban expansion was to be the rule until such time as the rate o f profit from
that expansion began to decline at which time capital could be refocused on fallow inner
city lands with low rents and a populace very likely to welcome any type of development
regardless of the limited benefits offered to the community.
Chocolate City Gets a Different Flavor
As we have seen Washington had long been a destination for migrants. These
migrants however, tended to be African Americans coming in hopes of securing
employment and building better lives outside of their debt addled sharecropping
existence. In its history, Washington had not been a city that touted a large foreign-born
population. In 1900 only 7 percent of the Districts population was immigrant whereas
37 percent of New York’s population originated overseas. By 1960 Washington’s
immigrant population had reached a low of 4 percent but began to slowly grow in the
following decades, and by 1988 12 percent of the population was foreign bom. Of that
12 percent approximately 8 percent are Latinos primarily of Central American origin.
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Terry Repak (1995) describes the immigration of Central Americans into
Washington in the 1960’s and 1970’s as idiosyncratic primarily because the movement
was pioneered by women. In these years 70 percent of immigrants from Central and
South America were women coming to the United States as domestic help. Repak states
that “Ironically it was employees of the U.S. government and of international agencies
such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund who helped to instigate the
migration stream that eventually brought tens of thousands of undocumented migrants
into the capital city” (Repak 1995:2). Another fascinating aspect of this immigration of
Central American women in the 1960’s and 1970’s is that it coincides with a time in
history when African American women were moving away from domestic service
occupations. The dearth of labor available for domestic service jobs in the Greater
Washington Metropolitan region was the subject of a number of Washington Post
articles beginning in the mid 1960's. Black women who had resorted to domestic
service occupations for two generations were allowing their disillusionment with low
wages and inappropriate treatment to shine through.
The civil rights movement had opened opportunities for black women to take
white collar and clerical positions as well as more visible positions in retail industries.
They see workers in other industries earning more money, moving up the ladder, and gaining sick leave and retirement benefits-and they are saying with [48 year old] Carrie Simmons no more... ‘Carrie do this. Carrie do that. Carrie wash windows. Carrie scrub floors. But then they go away in the summer and Carrie is out of a job. Or I get sick and I don't get paid.' (Washington Post 1968).
As Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women stated in
1968, “The days of slavery are over.” (Washington Post 1968) This movement created a
vacuum of available labor not only for diplomatic families but also for wealthy and
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middle class families who needed childcare and/or housekeeping services. Latin
American women and their female relatives quickly filled this vacuum. Soon they were
able to filter outside the realm of domestic labor into various industries and positions all
over the city.
The gendered nature of the immigration of Latinos to Washington also reflects
the political economic and social realities of the sending countries as well. In the case of
Central America women were not strangers to migrating great distances in search of
work. In El Salvador, for instance the concentration of more and more land into the
hands of what became a ruling landed oligarchy demanded more mobility from landless
peasants who were forced to become seasonal agricultural workers. Cash crops such as
sugar cane, coffee and bananas replaced subsistence crops and few poor families derived
any benefits from increased cash crop production. Changes in the nature of agriculture
also altered family structure and the division of labor between men and women.
Women’s work was often unpaid or underpaid while men were preferred for agricultural
wage work. Because agricultural work was becoming less and less of an option more
women began migrating to cities in search of work. In some Central American countries
if a girl was not married they were forced to enter the wage labor market since girls were
excluded from any inheritance rights. The city, with its abundance of domestic service
jobs made for an easier transition to this type of work for young women.
While urban women were paid less, they found work more easily than did men
and tended to have more economic security. Repak sites several studies that highlight
the fact that large numbers of households in El Salvador formed ‘free unions’ instead of
legal marriages, and that nearly 40 percent of households among the urban poor were
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headed by women. El Salvador has had one of the lowest marriage rates in the
hemisphere partly because both men and women were forced to migrate for work and
because there was little purpose among the lower classes to secure inheritance through
marriage (28-29).
Many factors contributed to the migration of Central American women to the United
States. Lacking work opportunities in their home villages, these women experienced the
necessity and increased responsibility of migrating to larger cities in search of work.
Migration to cities for work brought with it increased freedom from domestic partnership
ties. It was these factors coupled with expanding economic and political ties with the
United States that facilitated the migration of many women from their Central American
homes to Washington DC.
Men, who came to the city in a second migratory wave, were prompted to leave
El Salvador after 1980 to escape the terror campaigns and death squads who aimed to
eliminate all opposition to the military dictatorship and to avoid being drawn into the
fighting on either side. Many of the young men who migrated to the States learned about
the glut of construction and service industry jobs in Washington from the social
networks that had developed in the preceding two decades amongst women who had
already settled in the area.
Though the reasons for choosing Washington as home for these new migrants
becomes clearer as we understand the political, social and economic dynamics of both
sending and receiving communities, those dynamics do not necessarily explain the how
or why these Latino men and women and their families eventually came to populate
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Columbia Heights so heavily. B.B. Otero provides insight into what made this area of
Northwest Washington so attractive
B.B.: A lot of it has to do with Sacred Heart church. I mean a lot of why Latinos are here and not in other communities in the city. Because its really not.. .there is no written sort of... there is a lot of oral history but if you look at.. .you should read the obituaries on Sunday there is an obituary of a woman named Campos, one of the very early women. She died at 93, and she raised a family here and it is very interesting to look at and the heart and soul of her life is Sacred Heart church. Sacred Heart and St Matthews cathedral in the 1960’s had Spanish mass and so you had folks who...that first wave of immigrants from Latin America really were the help of diplomats and foreign service workers who came in the 60s and they came to the IMF, IDB the World Bank and the embassies began to flourish. That combination of people brought a lot of help with them, the nannies and the drivers and the this and the that, and most of them were live in a large number of them. So it wasn’t immigration directly by people who were in bad situations in their countries, which required them to come up, it was really bringing them up. Those folks had weekends off or Sunday off and there was somewhere where you congregate with your peers. And the churches served that purpose form very early on in fact Sacred Heart church... the nuns had a home for single women and they would rent rooms so if you were a live in at somebody's house and you got out Saturdays and had to be back Monday mornings where did you stay? So they would stay in these rooms and that began and you realize why there was this sort of the concentration. At that time immigration rules were such that once you were here you had 2000 dollars in the bank you could get your green card and that’s really all it was to it. So there were the immigration laws were very different so many of those folks immediately started small businesses.
The young female migrants were initially attracted by Sacred Heart's Spanish mass and
available rooms that they made use of on weekends off. Relationships formed at and
around church life cemented these women’s relationship to the church, each one another
and to the neighborhood. As their families began to come to the Nation’s capital these
families chose Adams Morgan and Mt. Pleasant as neighborhoods to settle in because of
their close proximity to Sacred Heart's location at 16th St and Park Road. There was also
an established New York Dominican community at this time which was concentrated
along Park Road between 16t]l and 14th streets which B.B. indicated had the comer on
hair salons. No doubt the comfort of having other Spanish speakers with businesses
further aided in the transition for these early migrants.
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The majority of immigrants in this initial push found housing in Adams Morgan a
neighborhood nestled between Rock Creek Park to the west, Mt. Pleasant to the North
and Columbia Heights just to the east across 16th street. Adams Morgan much like
Colombia Heights was a casualty of disinvestment, especially after the uprisings of
1968.
B.B.: So you had laundries and you had the shops that began to pop up in Adams Morgan in the 1970s and early 1980s period. Then it began to be this neighborhood [Adams Morgan] that was neat because it had all this variety and it had all the diversity and all of that and then Adams Morgan just boomed [gentrification hit] for a number of reasons. It just began to really boom and we saw building after building just go condo and lose families you know and interesting thing is to look at the population . Oyster Elementary, for example, andI know 1 am going off base but... why Oyster elementary was the first bilingual elementary school in the city was where it is. You come in now and you say why is it there, why would you bring a bilingual into what now appears to be a predominately white affluent neighborhood? Well if you look at the boundaries of what was oyster elementary and became oyster bilingual in 1972 or 1973 the boundaries were all of Columbia Road and Calvert Street. The Latino community was never on the west side of Connecticut Avenue some on Connecticut but Calvert Street where Ellington Bridge is and Columbia Road up to where I live because we were within the boundary all of those houses on Calvert Street were rooming houses they were all rooming houses and so you had lots of people. The building on the comer of Adams Mill rd sort of diagonal from the gas station that kind of looks like a ship was called el Parico which means ship. It was the arrival point for a lot of folks. 1 would say 80% of my kids lived there and you had courtyards in there and you had people raising chickens in there I mean it was really that and Park road were really big places and huge numbers of families lived there.
When I asked her about the transformation B.B. notes that many of the condos that are
now for one person used to house 10 to 15 people. She describes an ethnically diverse
neighborhood where Latinos were able to gain a tenuous foothold in Washington and in
America. Adams Morgan is now primarily known as a mainstay in Washington D.C.
nightlife. During the day Columbia Road still resembles the working class Latin
American neighborhood that it was in the late 1970's. There are still a number of social
justice/service organizations and small businesses that serve the Spanish speaking
population, and there are still a few apartment buildings where the rents have not gone
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too high to push out Latino families. The building that B.B describes as El Parico is
now a building filled with posh Condominiums. A number of “variety” or dollar stores
with Latino owners line Columbia Road as do women selling mango withchile sauce
and other fruit sidewalk stands where you can buy the latest movie releases, belts, hats
and compact discs. There are still some bars/restaurants in this neighborhood that caters
less to the middleclass suburban tourist or city dwelling hipster where Latino men are
still welcomed and feel comfortable.
When the first waves of gentrification swept the city of Washington, Adams
Morgan and Mount Pleasant were two of the first neighborhoods to change over. The
reasons for this can be attributed to warehoused land in the form of homes and
storefronts, both neighborhoods location adjacent to Rock Creek Park and easy access to
downtown. In describing the movement of Latinos into Columbia Heights B.B. spoke
about the segregation in the city and she noted that for a long period 16th street was the
cutoff between white and black Washington.
B.B.: 16th Street was the demarcation and the height of the African American community. The U Street corridor, the whole 14th Street [corridor] as the primary commercial district was for the African Americans you[as a Latino] didn't come to this side of the city you know when 1 was growing up we would sneak down to the Lincoln Theater for example but god forbid if anyone had caught us or we would sneak down to ______but 16,h was that line. Well the Latino community didn't know that line they just needed housing and they didn't come with all of the issues around the black/white stuff it came with its own issues not so much with black/white but with class all those issues that come from Latin America.
Latinos did not migrate to the United States with a view of race that mirrors the
perspective of those of us bom here. However, it is naive to think that the way blacks
and whites are portrayed in the media along with the stark wealth differences between
blacks and whites in the District do not continue to color the perspectives of many Latino
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newcomers about their neighbors. But despite whatever feelings they may have had
about African Americans, Latinos sole reason for crossing into the majority black
community was inexpensive housing, and Columbia Heights was ripe with run down
apartment units and row houses that could be bought or rented on the cheap. One thing
though that Latinos and African Americans had in common was their poverty. Although
many Latin American men and women were able to find steady work most of that
employment came from the low paying service industries jobs that could be found in
abundance in Washington. Many Latino families would crowd into a one or two
bedroom apartment in order to make ends meet and in many cases to make remittances
to family in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala etc. Today Columbia Heights is known
as one of the most diverse neighborhoods in all of Washington. Other immigrant
communities found and continue to find their way to Columbia Heights in search of
affordable housing that is disappearing faster than Dick Cheney in a roomful of
microwaves.
The experience of living in Columbia Heights was not uniform for blacks or
Latinos although each resident suffered the mental effects of living in an abandoned and
derelict physical environment. Some individuals and families went through bouts with
unemployment while others simply cycled from job to job in search of better wages. It
was also not uncommon for children to have five maybe six home addresses in their
adolescent lives as families moved nomadically from building to building or rented
house to rented house looking for less expensive rents. While I am not familiar with the
history of this individual phenomenon of nomadic living, my observations indicate that
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this type of movement has increased as gentrification has helped to create a crisis in
affordable housing.
Initially blacks relationship to Latinos moving into the neighborhood was marked
by differences in language and culture and were also accentuated by some blacks belief
that immigrant families were being given preferential treatment over blacks themselves.
Gracie Rollins, Director of CHANGE a neighborhood Social Service agency, elaborated
on some of those early feelings.
D.J.T.: Umm, so okay well lets just go ahead and talk about the relationship between Latinos and blacks in this area and you referred to it as a black neighborhood ...
G.R.: Well no it's a ...1 consider this I’m sorry to say I consider Hispanics on the same level as the blacks. Its blacks and Latinos um the Latinos that came here well we had two sets we had the Cubans that came here that were all mentally ill people all of them. They were all put on welfare and the city gave them money and they thought it was the grandest thing in the world they would walk around I mean they didn't have to work they got food stamps they got housing and they got money, got a check every month. When the Cubans came here well this made it real bad it made it bad feelings among black people black people were working and here the city is giving all these people checks they got Medicaid, they got food, they got put in apartments that was not subsidized but suddenly they opened that up and made it available for them. They had apartments that black people had been waiting for they got put at the top of the list for housing subsidized housing. They got put on the top of the list and they sort of worked it so you had to have a percentage and you know well we need a percentage of Hispanics and we don't have that percentage so you would get it off the top. You would just get an apartment you would go sign up and your apartment came immediately through well that made it bad feelings you know they weren't w'orking the Cubans that came here did not go to work they were on welfare.
D.J.T.: And you said they were all mentally ill?
G.R.: Mentally ill ...the ones that came here, Castro took them out of the jails that came here they came out the mental institutions and jails that's...
D.J.T.: So were they families?
G.C.: No they were individuals they were not families. The first ones that came were not families and um that made it real bad for black people as far as their morale was concerned you know. To see these people get all this they felt they had been working for years and all of a sudden these people come get a check and um get all this stuff. Then on comes a different group they found they couldn't use them .. .they wasn't workers because they were mentally ill because they were draining the resources...so they let this
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happen for about four years and one day they cut off all of those peoples resources cut enr off! They didn't get a check that month.. .they didn't get their food stamps were cut of and those are some of the drunks that you see around here now they cut them off from services they gave them everything and then they cut them off. Some of them that were so bad mental health kept them and that is how they kept their checks but those that sort of got missed became homeless people and so they went back and they brought in Salvadorans. They were farmers, workers-laborers. They brought them in and some lessons that the Salvadorans have brought to black communities is that you can survive if you think in terms of space and not umm a whole apartment. They will take a space, ten of them will take a space and they will live in a nice place but they got a space. Six of them in a space you know they will have a house but all of them pool their resources. They pool on a pot of rice and beans whatever have you and you know they’re hard workers and now so they’ve gone and you no longer find black waiters because we’re not pretty enough you find Hispanics, Mexicans and Salvadorans and any other Hispanic group are waiters in all the main hospitality businesses.
From the Ms. Rollins" perspective Latinos, especially the first groups of immigrants
were receiving benefits from the District and United States governments they believed
should be given first to blacks who were struggling based on their status as U.S. citizens
and the fact that they worked hard to live within the guidelines set up for them. The
mentally ill Cubans that Ms. Rollins mentions are most likely detainees from the Mariel
Boatlift in 1980.9 Among those who were boat lifted out it were an estimated 2,700
Cubans who could be considered criminals under United States law. Ms. Rollins is
quick to point out that she sees blacks and Latinos as being on the same level in many
ways and notes that there are many lessons that blacks can learn from the way migrants
organize themselves in order to survive with little in the way of monetary wealth. She
does however express, dissatisfaction with the way that service industries have moved
almost completely away from hiring blacks in visible ‘‘front of the house" occupations
based on the idea that blacks, being darker, are not “pretty enough’’ for these
occupations. Ms. Rollins does miss out on some of the nuances of the Latino migrant
9 Fidel Castro declared all Cubans free to leave in the wake of dissent stemming from a job and housing shortages. Approximately 125,000 Cubans made it to the United States between April 15th and October 3 Is' 1980.
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experience and seems to be unaware of the exact circumstances that led some to the
United States. She is however correct in her assumption that part of the reason that
Latinos have achieved success in some industries is based in part on racism against
blacks, as I have highlighted in the preceding pages, many of the jobs which have seen
growth in the number of Latinos they employ were seeing fewer and fewer black
applicants. Today as the service industries expand and other job opportunities evaporate
more and more blacks have returned to find that Latinos have gained a firm foothold in
these occupations.
B.B. also discussed the relationship of her organization and the black residents of
Columbia Heights. She highlights some of the ways that services were recreated for
both communities and the effects those types of separations had on relations between the
two groups.
B.B.: I really very much wanted to stay on this block 1 felt and understood the kinds of shifts that were happening. Underlying all of our work has always been utilizing the work at the center, the education, as a way to bring the Latino and the African American community into a safe space which was not something that had been done. I had worked in both schools and other non-profit organizations and again CHANGE was for blacks Wilson Center was for Latinos they did the same things but one was for blacks, one was for Latinos and that was it. If you look around you still see a lot of that by the names of things the Spanish Education Development Center, I directed that for several years [and] there was no way that I could open the doors to get African Americans into that program it was very interesting and it still happens.
D.J.T.: Why would you say is the reason?
B.B.: Because 1 think that there still is umm I think the tensions that have always existed between communities between the African American and white community in this city roll over to the Latino community. There is a lot of distrust on both ends. A lot of it is because we don't know each other, we don't know each other well enough. You've got to be simplistic about it, you've got the African American community that has been struggling as it has and here come these folks that look like they're white and you know they may not act like they're white but they can pass. You've been an African American all your life and you know within the African American community you have this whole stratification of color also. The lighter you are the more you can
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pass and passing is a big piece of being able to cut through this. You look at these folks and these folks already have a leg up and they are walking into the same neighborhood, the same spaces and the same places, they are starting businesses in places where you couldn’t start businesses. All of that stuff and that has been in this community and in this city forever and its not unique to DCI mean that’s all over.
While she acknowledges the divisions between the Latino and African American
communities and the role that social service providers and organizations have played in
helping to maintaining those divisions, B.B. maintained that for Calvary it was important
to begin to bridge those divisions. Her most interesting and illuminating remarks
revolved around the feelings that blacks had about their own experiences vis-a-vis what
they saw of the experiences of new migrants. Like Ms. Rollins B.B. understands that
from the perspectives of blacks, Latinos, because of their skin tones, or simply by virtue
of not being African American, have had an easier time of it in their American
experience.
It is significant that B.B. mentions space as an aspect of the relationship between
blacks and Latinos in Columbia Heights. The adding of Latinos to the Columbia Heights
milieu indicates that the restructuring of space and social dislocations in one locale can
have profound impacts on spatial and social relationships in locations a great distance
away. The restructuring of agricultural land in many Central American countries and the
Civil War in El Salvador necessitated many young women and men migrate further and
further away from home. The women were recruited by diplomatic families to come to
Washington D.C. Spouses and other relatives quickly followed to comprise the initial
push of Latino migrants into the city. Further restructuring of the Washington urban
landscape pushed these families into Columbia Heights where they encountered an
African American community that was somewhat hostile to newcomers who many felt
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were treated better even though they had only been in the United States a short time. In
Columbia Heights as early as the 1980’s blacks and Latinos lived side by side. Latinos
were traumatized by the horrors of war, the fear of migrating far from their home
countries. Once in the United States they faced the difficulty of rebuilding families and
creating survival networks. Blacks by the profound and intentional disinvestment in
their neighborhood living among the ruins of burned out buildings and vacant lots. Soon
the residents of Columbia Heights would find their lives disrupted by the dirt and
disorder, which accompanied the redevelopment envisioned for the neighborhood and
the city.
Metro Wasteland
In 1989 the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority began construction
of the Columbia Heights station on the Green Line of the Metro rail system. The station
took a decade to complete, and beyond its expense in terms of the resources consumed to
complete it, the station also created significant changes in Columbia Heights itself as
neighborhood residents bore the costs of “redevelopment”. Columbia Heights residents
had spent two decades living among the ruins of a federally backed war on the poor that
helped to decimate the inner-cities of America. The people who lived and worked in the
neighborhood had to endure another decade of Metro construction, during which the
only population who saw their lives improved were the rats that poured from
underground sewers and tunnels as backhoes churned and chewed the ground beneath
the streets. The opening of the Metro was, to many, a signal that Columbia Heights was
changing and soon after more visible signs of reinvestment began to appear. Ironically
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enough the tracks of development had begun to be greased long before the first
scaffolding was erected and sidewalks closed along 14th St.
In the time since the Metro has opened the Tivoli Theater has become an
interesting symbol of gentrification in the neighborhood and in many ways the fortunes
of the theater have mirrored those of the community that surrounds it. Thomas Lamb, a
New York architect, originally designed the theater in the Italian Renaissance Revival
style. The stucco exterior, red roof tile, ornamental cornices as well as the use of arches,
all are aspects of this style. The theater was completed in 1924 and for many years was
one of the most elegant movie houses in the city. In addition to the main theater
auditorium, the building contained offices on the upper floors and several shops along
thel4th Street and Park Road frontages. In the 1920s, the Tivoli had its own ballet
company and an orchestra whose concerts were recorded for radio. In the mid-1920s,
Columbia Heights was a popular entertainment district, with five movie theaters and an
amusement arcade lining 14th Street NW between Columbia Road and Monroe Street.
Just like the rest of the neighborhood the theater began to show signs of decline in the
1960's and while it went unharmed in the “uprisings" of 1968 the theater was unable to
escape the disinvestment that plagued the area and it in 1976.
During its fallow years the Redevelopment Land Agency (RLA), the agency that
oversaw the Redevelopment of Southwest Washington in the 1950's, acquired the
Tivoli. In the summer of 1997 a full two years before the construction began on the
Columbia Heights Metro station the RLA began to lay the groundwork for the rebirth of
the Tivoli. The agency chose three hundred community members to develop a plan for
the development of Columbia Heights in anticipation of the station opening. The RLA
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issued Requests for Proposals in 1998 the and in September of 1999, the same month
that construction began on the Columbia Heights station, the RLA granted exclusive
rights to develop the site to Tivoli Partners. Tivoli Partners is a collective of
development interests headed by Homing Brothers with the Development Corporation of
Columbia Heights as the partner which they hoped would give the project community
credibility. Still with the participation of a select group of residents and the pro
development Development Corporation on board the Homing Brothers found it difficult
to push through their initial plans.
The anchor tenant in the new Tivoli development is a gourmet Giant Supermarket,
which has replaced an older, smaller grocery store operated by the same company.
Initially the developer planned to gut the entire building leaving just the facade reminder
of the theater's history. Residents stopped this initial plan because they wanted to see
the buildings historic use as a live performance venue preserved. The 14th street side of
the building contains ground level retail with a Wachovia bank branch, a Ruby Tuesday
restaurant, and a Cinnabon recently completed. The Monroe street side of the Tivoli
parcel has been transformed with 32 townhouses called Tivoli Towns. The homes are
priced from five hundred to seven hundred thousand dollars.
There is no question that this new retail and shopping space is welcome in a
neighborhood that has not had major retail for nearly 30 years. However, due to the
nature of land markets it is unlikely that the majority of the people who have lived in the
neighborhood will be able to remain due to rising rents. As I described earlier in this
chapter because private property is a commodity, its value is dependent on its
relationship to other properties. Ground rent is the realization of that value and the rent
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of a particular property can increase or decrease based on what surrounds it. Apartment
complexes and private homes that had been rented previously in Columbia Heights for
relatively little are becoming more and more valuable as new attractions are developed in
the neighborhood. The same lower income residents and those on fixed incomes due to
old age or disability will find it increasingly difficult to keep up with rising rents as
landlords take advantage of a hot housing market. The residential space that is being
added to Columbia Heights are typically out of the reach of even two income working
class families nor are they designed to accommodate large families. The attractions
being developed are also not geared towards the needs of poor people and the jobs that
they may provide will not be enough to help pull anyone out of poverty.
What residents of Columbia Heights can count on is that their lives will be
disrupted by these construction projects as sidewalks are closed and building materials
dangle precariously from construction cranes. For many residents this type of disruption
is not new. For 10 years disorder was the rule while work crews and machines churned
and chewed the earth beneath 14th street.
I discussed the Metro construction with B.B. and she noted that it was an
interminable period in many respects. She could not remember specifically when it
began, sometime in the late 1980‘s, but that it must have been ten years before it was
completed. She also runs through a litany of businesses that were forced to close
because of the upheaval surrounding the construction process.
B.B.: Yeah and it just took forever and this street (14,h St.) was just tom up. It was just a mess. Any stores that were left [disappeared], the flower shop, the Five and Ten, Mary Ann's clothing store, which was very much traditionally an African American umm you know a kind of store for poor folks. The shoe store you know you could go down the line the hair dresser, this comer space here where there is a youth program now or whatever was a hairdresser forever so um those kinds of things.
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Nancy Morales who was raised in Columbia Heights and Mt. Pleasant and now works at
CentroNia, remembers that there was a comer store operated by Asians, a fish carryout
restaurant and an Asian Dry Cleaners all on 14th St right around the corner from the
center. Each was forced to close as the metro construction made it more difficult for
pedestrians to access them. Scaffolding was put up on either side of the street on the
western side of 14th St between Harvard and Irving Streets in order to support the
buildings as they burrowed underneath them. Nancy recalls that one particularly nasty
winter snow combined with constricted streets due to the construction put traffic at a
standstill and that there were at least two other occasions when they had to halt
construction during winter months. During these months of hiatus the scaffolding was
left up and the neighborhood was left with the reminders of its transitional state with
steel plates where asphalt should be.
The stores that remained on 14th St., the Five and Ten, dry cleaners and
hairdressers and their disappearance are significant. No matter how run down or sub par
they many have been to the outside observer or even the neighborhood resident who
simply notes their disappearance with indifference, those businesses were some of the
few remaining businesses aimed to serving this communities poorer residents. Most
residents you find, however, have quickly forgotten the inconveniences that may have
come with the construction of the metro because of the added conveniences that it has
also brought. Many residents that 1 have spoken to, much like Nancy, expressed that
they were happy to see the metro open. Nancy referred to the metro as “a seed” to
redevelop the area. She continued that metaphor nothing that the roots of seed are the
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upgrades to the community that have been made because of the metro being opened.
Nancy sees these upgrades as an acknowledgement of how nice the neighborhood was
and can be again. Nancy sees the changes that he Metro is and will continue to bring
about as a change back to what the neighborhood had been when her family came to 14th
street for a day of shopping and a movie at the Tivoli.
The irony of the situation, as I mentioned to Nancy during our interview, is that as
the changes that accompany the metro continue to multiply, longer term residents who
will most be able to appreciate those changes will likely not be able to keep up with the
increasing rents and property values. As greedy landlords face more and more low and
working class tenants with eviction, more residents are forced to face the reality of the
situation.
Why is it that so many residents have been caught off guard by the displacement of
their neighbors and now go to bed with the fear that they may find an eviction notice
taped to their door? In my interview with Clark at the Project South office he mentions
the helplessness that most low and moderately income people in Columbia Heights feel.
C: In their minds this is the white man doing it to us one more time because the analysis is not going any further than that. Some think that it's a good thing because they see all these buildings going up in the neighborhood and the neighborhood is beginning to look better but its not for them they automatically think that its for them right and the reason is because I think that if not consciously, then unconsciously, they have bought into the concept of democracy. So they figure that when these things happen that the government is going to take care of them, that the government is going to make everything all right and that's who we got to depend on you follow what I'm saying that's who we get our subsidies from so that's who we have to turn to. So they turn to the city council for redress and they go hat in hand beggin'. and I'm just being honest, hat in had begging you know for what it is they're supposed to have anyway hopping that they can move the city council you know to do some things for them.
That reality is that for all the posturing by developers and retailers and the government of
the District of Columbia, the development that is underway in Columbia Heights is not
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for the poor. For residents who witnessed the decline of the neighborhood, who walked
past boarded up buildings, vacant lots and slum apartment buildings. Those who dodged
cars, walked on plywood sidewalks and dealt with dirt and disarray of the metro
construction, the green line station at Columbia Heights is a reminder of the goals of the
state, and development elites.
The goals of neighborhood residents to maintain use values, the ties, relationships
and daily activities that make a neighborhood a community are diametrically opposed to
the goals of development interests who view an area in terms of its exchange value. The
District government is in no position to help its most disadvantaged citizens because it is
beholden to Capital and the development projects and tax revenue that it can deliver to
the front door of the Council chamber and Mayors office. Nancy was correct in noting
that the construction of the Metro station was a significant step in the redevelopment of
the neighborhood, but the metro is more a physical manifestation and a catalyst for
additional physical changes. The seeds of redevelopment and gentrification had been
planted decades earlier when the announcement of the Metro prompted behind the
scenes purchases of property and buildings that could be quickly turned over for a profit
when the right time came, or were among the first buildings to undergo condo
conversions.
'In my conversation with Clark he mentioned that the previous mayors had been
reformists who wanted to institute programs to help the people. Mayor Williams
however, “is a neo liberal, his bottom line is profit and his relationship is with the
Federal City Council and with what their agenda is and he makes no bones about."
Reuben (2001) notes that in the past two decades municipal governments have worked to
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facilitate development. He notes that “rather than targeting investment to stabilize
neighborhoods and raise living standards, it redevelops the city as a ‘growth machine’,
creating landscapes of cultural consumption for suburbanites and visitors...The subject of
the postindustrial city is a suburban one” (Goode and Mascovsky 2001:438). The
renovation of the Tivoli along with plans for DC USA, which will include thelargest
Target in the region, along with a Whole Foods Market and Washington Sport and
Social Club, both built on land once owned by the city, are representative of this type of
development.
Both the Tivoli and DC USA projects, their scale and the effort of municipal
representatives to make them happen, clarify any doubt about the goals for
redevelopment of the neighborhood. The planned development is slanted toward
building these “landscapes of consumption". The largest Target in the region (along
with the construction of a 1,300 space underground parking garage) would only be
constructed in hopes of luring vehicle traffic from the suburbs, attracting visitors to
consume both the goods inside as well as the quickly vanishing diversity of city life
before driving away in their cars. But how is it that a neighborhood that has seen such
disinvestment that buildings and lots were left vacant for decades, can begin to attract
“suburban tourists” as well as new residents who are drawn by diversity but are not
deterred by reputation of the neighborhood as “rough” or “unsafe"? Sharon Zukin (1995)
highlights the necessity of using economic and cultural power to manipulate symbols in
creating the image of the city that is acceptable to a mobile and diverse public. Zukin
argues that an analysis of the symbolic economy is critical for study of cities and in
actuality the symbolic economy and the cultural meanings that represent it imply the
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workings of real economic power. We have seen this ability to manipulate symbols,
primarily during the initial white flight to the suburbs when white residents were
convinced that the city was becoming too crowded and neighborhoods becoming too
black to continue to live in either with the same security and dominance that they once
had. The symbols of that time, the automobile, single family house with all of the
conveniences, and the space one had to roam were combined with the reality of over
crowding, aging inner city infrastructure, school desegregation and an end to public
school segregation in giving whites the rationale to migrate out of the city.
The restructuring of the physical landscape provides proof of the type of
economic power that can be marshaled by the growth elite. In order to create an
atmosphere in which the profitability of their developments positive cultural symbols of
"fine urban living” and negative symbols concerning crime and disorder are deployed to
make Columbia Heights attractive to middle class residents, while simultaneously giving
cause for the displacement of existing residents. Dwight Conquergood (1992) discusses
the use of negative symbols as playing on, “middle class fears and ambivalence about
difference, density, deterioration and demographic change." (Conquergood 1992:134).
Density and deterioration are links in a causal chain that sets up development as a moral
necessity...underneath all these terms is difference, that which cannot be spoken without
disrupting the discourse of liberal pluralism upon which the rhetoric of redevelopment
draws” (Conquergood 1992:134).
When such symbols are deployed effectively, the neighborhood becomes a trendy
residential destination in advance of becoming a shopping or entertainment destination.
In this way, those who choose to locate or relocate to gentrifying neighborhoods will be
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recouping what Pierre Bourdieu (1990) refers to as “symbolic capital". Urban living
becomes a marker of the gentri tiers' aesthetic tastes as well as their material success.
The Tivoli Theater and its appropriation as a symbol of revival is an example of the
operation of the symbolic economy. The theater itself could have just as easily been
used as a symbol of decline and neglect, but with so many other obvious cases of the
troubles of Columbia Heights it was largely ignored. During the debate as to how the
restructured space would be used many issues were raised as to what cultural meaning
would underpin the new development. What types of stores would be sought as tenants
and what types of consumers would those businesses cater to. Would the development
serve the needs of the current population or would they serve the needs of as of then, yet
to be determined group of residents? The end result was a development that included a
new Giant Supermarket, Wachovia Bank, Blockbuster Video with additional space
reserved for smaller minority owned businesses. The main theater space was given to
the GALA Hispanic Theater in an effort not only include Latinos but to play up the
neighborhood cultural diversity that their presence represents. Economic power enabled
developers and the city to restructure the space and that power once deployed also gave
those developers, in this case, Tivoli Partners the power to use symbols to define what
their creation was and what it was to mean to old and new residents as well as the entire
city.
The Tivoli theater project has been used as a symbol of unification of the future
of Columbia Heights to its past glory and with each red tile replaced and each restored
comice the theater returns closer to its former glory and stands as a reminder of what the
neighborhood used to be. The physical restructuring of the Tivoli allows growth elites to
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gloss over the less appealing period of the last 30 years when the municipal government
dangled vacant parcels of land out to private developers like a carrot only to find no
takers. This history is intimately tied to the working class history that was characterized
by a long period where land-including the Tivoli-was left fallow awaiting the time when
private developers could derive the most exchange value from their investments. The
physical restructuring of space lead the way open to a symbolic restructuring of history
by linking the future to a fictionalized past erasing 25 years of purposeful disinvestment
and abandonment of the neighborhood. Rebecca Sunlit (2000) notes that fantasy is often
used as a substitute for history, it proposes a fictional history while “it participates in
erasing the real history of a neighborhood wracked first by urban renewal and then by
crack and gentrification" (Solnit 2000:22). The historic assets of the Tivoli theater are
used to mask the economic power which was necessary to renovate the space but which
also uses that same renovation to create and legitimize that history.
The Columbia Heights that is being built is not the community that Nancy
remembers from her youth and it most certainly will not nurture and support the
community that grew here after the riots. It will possibly increase their living standards
but they will have to spend their money in suburban Maryland. The DC USA project is
being touted for its job creation potential, however the vast majority of those jobs will be
minimum wage, entry level positions which will do little to raise the prospects for the
multitude of households in poverty. And as property values and rents continue to
increase such work will not allow residents to keep up with those increases.
When we initially began our discussion Nancy did not buy into the notion that
gentrification has to be a negative outcome. She noted that when she hears gentrification
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she hears that it is just the white man doing it to us again. Nancy believes though that it
is not wrong for people to come in and build up the neighborhood to make it safe and a
safe place to raise children. Clark believes that many people in the neighborhood, both
Latinos and blacks:
C: a very forgiving people maybe to a fault they want to blend and they want to be nice to people and they have this thing where they have to prove that they hold no hostilities for whatever happened in the past you know. And again that is a collective tendency among us, they want to embrace they want to get along with these people right. As we said before, the reason there is no blending is cause its two entirely different ethos right? They're not complaining not in that respect I mean they look around and they see that you got a lot of whites in the neighborhood or professional blacks in the neighborhood you know but they are willing to accept these people in you know what I'm saying.
D.J.T.: As long as they are allowed to continue to do what they do.
C: Yeah and they feel as though they will be able to and they take it for granted which is a mistake.
Through his work with Project South Clark has done a tremendous amount to
improve the living circumstances of his neighbors and preserve working class history in
Columbia Heights.
C: The building that I live in, Trinity Towers, in 1997 and 1999 the building totally went down. We had no we had no security! We had drugs, people coming in and out, people urinating in the halls. After coming back from a retreat in Atlanta umm we myself and two more other people decided to organize around what was taking place in Trinity Towers and we formed this group called STICS, Stand Tall in Community Struggle. So we began to organize the tenants through popular education, there were volunteer students from American University and Howard University. They came in to help document the things that were taking place. Project South came in with the popular education and STIC did the in house organizing. We were able to consolidate the tenants and change those ideas. Its not just the white man there is a global connection between these things and show them the broader picture. Once they got the concept of the broader picture we were better able to deal with the problem.
In his work to organize his neighbors Clark showed a commitment to making the
building more livable for them. He also helped cultivate the understanding that, by not
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providing security and repairs in a timely manner, the management company bore some
a great deal of the blame for the state of the building.
He argues that many of the neighborhoods residents suffer from a state of denial
and a lack of any analysis of the situation beyond “the white man is doing it to us again”.
These factors in addition represent psychological barriers that limit the manner in which
people have reacted to what is going on around them.
C: Man when you don't have an education, you don’t have a job, you don’t have a lot of goals in life, you gotta cling onto something. It’s the neighborhood, it’s the comer and yeah I'm going to be here all the time. When I look around I see all my buddies here, the stress don’t come I mean the epiphany doesn’t come until they look around and they don't see anymore of their buddies. They gotta go because you can’t go over to Georgetown and stand on nobody's comer you know what I’m saying or shoot craps in the playground or whatever you do in the hood. The other day I saw a guy with a lady come into my building he puts his cigarette out on the wall on the outside and she said no don't do that don't put the cigarette out where I gotta live and he said ‘well baby we in the hood’! I thought about that for a long, long time man. Its certain things that they think they can do in the hood its their sanctuary so its okay as long as I’m in the hood They fail to realize that everyday it becomes less and less the hood that they remember. They see it but don't see it you know what I'm trying to say? I mean their whole psyche of America is based on denial the contradictions are so glaring but you know everybody turns a blind eye to it. It's the only way they can live with it you can't live in evil and be fully conscious of the fact you're living in evil. You just can’t do it you have to kind of spruce it up a little bit but this whole system is evil man you know and anybody with a real analysis knows that.
Clark sees a tremendous amount of denial among the residents of Columbia Heights to
the changes that are all around them. Much of that denial stems from the fact that there
are still people in the neighborhood that are familiar and even though the backdrop to the
daily round is changing slowly there has been little drastic upheaval. Nancy has been
surprised at how slowly things in the neighborhood have actually changed.
I found Clark's words to be especially poignant Ias found myself increasingly
surprised by the wide range of emotions and responses that 1 got during my interviews
with people who either lived or worked in Columbia Heights or both. I was equally
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surprised with the amount of acceptance that seemed to exist among neighborhood
residents and it appeared that most did not become acutely aware of the problem that
gentrification represented until they were or someone they knew was touched by it. I
began to wonder if the poor and working poor in Columbia Heights had bought into their
own political neutering. If the reason for acceptance of so many things in our society is
that we are living in denial as to the evil of the system because the reality that we live in
a society where the government would purposely partner with business interests to
disinvest and leave in ruins the inner city just as the nation’s most vulnerable populations
were coming to dominate it demographically, if we choose to live a dream about what
America is, what does it take to wake us.
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FOR THE CHILDREN
In this chapter I will bring together earlier discussions of the movement of capital
in crisis, economic restructuring in the United States, urban renewal, gentrification,
reinvestment and disinvestment in Washington D.C. and my concern for the effects of
these same processes on the lives of young people. Devalorization, deterioration and
abandonment have caused the loss of green spaces in Columbia Heights and the absence
of these spaces for recreation have negatively impacted the lives of children. Through an
analysis of the battle over the future of Boys and Girls Clubhouse #10 I will demonstrate
that although structural factors have once again begun to spatially and socially
reorganize the neighborhood, residents can and do have the political resources and
strength of will to subvert the movement of capital across the landscape.
This chapter is also where I will speak to the convergence of the history of capital
accumulation and the collective history of post-1968 Columbia Heights for which the
Boys and Girls Club is a physical manifestation. The threat to the continued existence of
the clubhouse #10 is also a threat to the continuation of everyday social interactions and
traditions that represent the use values some residents draw from the club. The
gentrification of Columbia Heights is about use and exchange value, the see-saw
movement of capital in the urban context and economic restructuring.
151
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However as I have noted earlier in this dissertation structural arguments are not
sufficient in and of themselves to explain the phenomenon. It is also necessary to
understand agency and history-how the individual and collective decisions of living
breathing humans have helped to create the conditions necessary for gentrification to
occur.
I would be a revisionist if I were to claim that the work we did to save the club
was supported by each and every person in Columbia Heights or that the entire
community that uses the club was equally supportive of our efforts. I had dozens of
conversations with friends and people 1 met in the neighborhood who did not realize that
the club was in danger of closing. For every parent that we did have attend one of our
meetings or a forum we held to inform the community about what was happening with
the club, we had many more who did not participate. However, we were able to form a
coalition of support with activists both within and outside of the neighborhood. With
their help and the help of key local government officials we were able to slow down the
machine.
In the Introduction I briefly detailed the life and death of Ronnie and noted that
our life chances are in large part dictated by our geography. Our geography, our
surroundings and our attachment to certain spaces intertwine with our life histories.
Much like the case of Iris and Linda Edmundson, Ronnie's sisters, familiar places can
elicit both positive and negative memories. Since the 1960's residents of Columbia
Heights have experienced a decline in the recreational spaces available to them and
largely have lacked the resources to remedy that situation alone. The lack of recreation
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space accentuated the use value of those spaces that did exist. For many kids who grew
up in the 1980’s in Columbia Heights #10 is such a space. The centrality of the club in
their lives instilled an intimate sense of connection with the club. The vital role #10
plays in the life stories of many neighborhood residents served to politicize a group of
women when the site of so many memories was threatened. These women did not
become activists based on memories; they also organized to save the club because of the
vital use value that it represents today.
Children have been some of the most unfortunate victims of both devalorization
of the neighborhood and its subsequent gentrification. Disinvestment and abandonment
of the inner city created an unsafe environment for their physical safety and life chances.
With crumbling infrastructure and schools, the education that a child got in the District
of Columbia was no longer on par with schools in other jurisdictions. Violence
associated with the drug trade exacerbated by excessive policing methods precipitated
turf wars robbing those same children of the safety they may have enjoyed in wealthier
parts of the city or in the suburbs. Deteriorating housing and the search for cheaper rents
kept families moving from place to place usually only moving a few blocks away from
the previous location. There are children at CentroNia that have lived in five or more
different rental properties by the time they are twelve years old. A nomadic existence
places undue stresses on families trying to hold onto social networks they have built in
the neighborhood. Gentrification on the other hand robs children of the comfort of at
least knowing if their family has to move it will probably be within an already familiar
neighborhood. Today if a family moves from a Columbia Heights apartment in search of
cheaper rent, that search is likely to take them out of the city altogether. Black and
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Latino young people are often harassed by police and are the victims of punitive policing
measures that often include curfews for those under the age of 21, but as recently as the
summer of 2006 began to include surveillance cameras in residential neighborhoods.
One consistent aspect of both the disinvestment period and the current
gentrification has been a lack of places for children to play. Green space and trees have
a tremendous positive effect on quality of life and health. Trees improve our health, the
environment, and our quality of life. They absorb storm water runoff and reduce the
flow of pollutants into our rivers and streams. They filter air pollutants (which now
contribute to a childhood asthma rate in Washington D.C. that is among the highest in
the nation). Trees keep the city cooler in the summer and increase property values.
Research has demonstrated that tree-lined neighborhoods have lower crime rates and
stronger communities. Taylor et. al (1998) conducted a study at the Ida B. Wells public
housing development in Chicago. They observed children at play and their interactions
with adults in courtyards that separated some of the low-rise buildings. The only
significant difference in the courtyards was the amount of tree cover that existed. The
authors argue that, “Low income urban children are at high risk for developmental
problems, including academic under achievement, juvenile delinquency, withdrawal,
apathy, aggression, depression and more. In seeking ways to offset these negative
outcomes, studies in the past have concentrated on children's social and economic
environments.” (Taylor et. al 1998). They further state that, “urban trees create oases
for some of the very activities that give disadvantaged children the skills to succeed in
life: creative play that builds language, communication and collaboration skills; and
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higher levels of adult child supervision and interaction where values and
communications skills are instilled in the younger generation” (Taylor et. al 1998).
In a separate study conducted by the University of Illinois College of
Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences research teams made 100
observations of outdoor common spaces at the Robert Taylor homes in Chicago. They
discovered that both adults and children gather more in spaces with trees. Frances Kuo
states that, “By drawing people out of their homes, the trees created an opportunity for
neighbors to interact and develop community relationships”. Kuo also notes that other
studies have shown strong neighborhood ties contribute to better physical and mental
health. "Imagine feeling irritated, impulsive, about ready to snap due to the difficulties of
living in severe poverty," she added. "Having neighbors you can call on for support
means you have an alternative way of dealing with your frustrations other than striking
out against someone. Places with nature and trees may provide settings in which
relationships grow stronger and violence is reduced."10
Trees make demonstrable contributions to the mental and physical well being of
neighborhoods. When trees are prevalent in a location they create spaces where adults
can come together and children can play in semi-structured ways furthering their social
skills. Trees can also give children access to different types of people and different
lifestyles. When 1 worked summers at CentroNia I would cajole my group into the trek
west on Columbia Road into Adams Morgan to Kalorama Park. Some would sit in the
shade and talk to me, others would climb trees or organize games for themselves or
10 Trees Atlanta website, Tina Taff writer for The Illinois Steward and a writer with Information Technology and Communication Services in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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simply roll down the grassy hill over and over again. They would crowd around any
poor person who happened to be walking a dog and ask a million questions of the patient
owner or dog walker they were interacting with. They had opportunities to see and
interact with children from outside the center and their immediate neighborhoods. The
children were often better behaved, had fewer attitude problems and were happier when
we went to the park in the mornings. This emphasis on the effects of green space to the
health and well being o f children is key in my discussion of the importance of Clubhouse
#10. It underscores the fact that the club provides valuable recreation space to children
in a neighborhood virtually devoid of the type of green space that would benefit them.
Summer in the City
During the summer of 2003 a wave of violence gripped Columbia Heights.
Police alleged that it stemmed from the growing influence of gangs, especially among
Latino youth, throughout the metropolitan region. The first murder happened at the
comer of 14tV» St and Columbia Road and the man murdered was the neighbor and
relative o f several of the kids that I worked with at CentroNia. Just a few weeks later
another murder occurred on Chapin Street just a few steps away from the building of
another family whose kids had been at the center all their lives. Ironically a few months
earlier, during a walk on Chapin Street where a murder occurred Hector, whose family
lived on that block of Chapin street, had pointed to a spot of green among the brown-
bricked buildings and said “gangsters hang out there.” He said it in much the same way
that little boys talk when they are acting like spies, with an air of seriousness that betrays
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their youth, almost mimicking the things their parents or older brothers and sisters have
said.
Another shooting took place on Mt. Pleasant Street in the adjacent neighborhood
of the same name. This particular incident was reminiscent of a scene from the Wild
West with three young men firing at another from across the street in broad daylight.
The lone man returned fire as he ran south toward 16th street. He made it to 16th Street
before one of the assailants shot him in the leg. He continued to run down 16th street
where the police finally caught up to him. Unfortunately at the intersection of 16th and
Columbia Road a stray bullet hit a bus driver. The intersection where the bus driver was
shot was also the intersection where 1 made the turn onto Columbia Road from 16th St on
my way to work. 1 missed the most exciting part of the shootout by thirty minutes.
The spike in violence elicited an immediate response from both community
leaders and municipal leaders as a curfew for youth under age 18 was instituted and
police presence was quadrupled as units were deployed to sit full time at intersections in
the neighborhood. This rapid response from both community and municipal leaders did
not go unnoticed by long time residents of the neighborhood. Iris noted that when she
and her siblings were growing up in the 1980's when Columbia Heights was still very
much an African American community there was no such response to the violence that
was going on. “When we were growing up in the [19] 80‘s people were killing each
other and they just turned a blind eye, my brother was killed out here and that is what
made last summer so weird for me because I feel like once they [Latinos] started killing
each other there was all this press and attention.”
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There is obviously resentment in the tone of Iris’ comment and no one could
blame her for resenting a law enforcement structure that failed to ever find the people
responsible for the murder of her brother. The response of the city to the violence was
much more complex than it would initially seem. There was intense pressure from
leaders of the Latino community for the city and police to step in because of the
indications that the killings stemmed from an increased Latino gang presence in the area.
Outside of the center there even seemed to be a spike in gang colors worn in an overt
manner that I rarely recall seeing in the neighborhood. Since that summer competing
gangs have increased tagging and graffiti used to mark out their territory.
However as I mentioned previously Latinos began to move into Columbia
Heights in the late 1970‘s and when B.B. Otero first opened Calvary in the early 1980’s
she did so because the necessity existed to help Latino families already living in the
neighborhood. If the police and the city ignored Columbia Heights in the 1980‘s it is
most probable that they ignored Blacks and Latinos equally not because of their ethnicity
but because they were poor. It is very likely that the city responded to the violence in
Columbia Heights so quickly because of other newcomers to the area. By 2003
gentrification was already well underway and it is difficult to attract young upwardly
mobile families and single people to a neighborhood where they may have to dodge
bullets.
The violence that took place during the summer of 2003 does highlight the
importance of providing children and teens with healthier options for how they spend
their time. The Boys and Girls club on 14th street is such a place, providing the type of
enriching activities that allowed neighborhood kids to stay off of the streets and out of
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trouble. As a place where children have the space and freedom to play, the club also
attracts adults, some in the role of police officers/mentors, some as volunteers and
coaches, but all in the hopes of enriching the lives of the children who come through the
doors.
Wake U p !
Denise Credle has spent her entire life affiliated with the Boys and Girls Club,
she grew up in Washington D.C. and was a member of clubhouse #2 as a child. She
married Detective Mitch Credle who mentored Ronnie while working at clubhouse #10.
Denise sent her children to #10 volunteers for almost every activity, and is still active in
the Parents Association. In the summer of 2004 while in the club office Denise noticed
a white folder that she had not seen before. Being the curious person she is when it
comes to the business of #10 she opened the folder and was shocked by what she read.
What she had found was a Request For Proposals (RFP) that Greater Washington Boys
and Girls Clubs had sent out to developers interested in bidding on the property the club
sits on. She quickly brought the contents o f that folder to the attention o f other parents
who were at the club that night and they in turn passed the information on to other
parents and community members. The next day when the parents lit up the phone lines
of the Greater Washington offices in Silver Spring demanding an explanation, it marked
the beginning of a struggle that continues today, the threat of such a vital neighborhood
resource disappearing had finally forced people to wake up and say no.
The phone calls had been so persistent and the anger and opposition, just in their
beginning phases so vehement that Greater Washington decided to hold a community
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meeting the following night at Cardozo High School to explain the situation. In
attendance at this meeting was Pat Gunnin the area director responsible for supervising
not only Clubhouse #10, and Pat Shannon the president of the organization. Also in
attendance were representatives from the developer, identified as Trammell and Crow,
an international firm headquartered in Dallas. Also on hand was a broad range of
neighborhood residents, some who had come angry, some who had come resigned and
some who had come to see what exactly this project would entail. There was a
considerable amount of displeasure expressed to Pat Shannon about how Greater
Washington had tried to sell the club out from underneath the community in such an
underhanded manner. It was also at this meeting that the community learned details
about what the proposed development would include. The plan shown by Trammell
Crow was of a condominium building that would be built on the property that the Boys
and Girls club sat on. This building would take up the entire lot including the area that is
now comprised of trees planting beds and the parking lot. The development would have
a garage for resident parking and controlled access. Lastly, the developer had agreed to
build a space that would house the Girls and Boys Club in the basement of the
development and this club would have its own entrance on the block opposite that of the
condo residents. The price tag of the condominiums was projected to be close to
700,000 dollars.
Clubhouse #10 was opened 25 years ago on land donated by Mary & Daniel
Loughran. The clubhouse is currently operated by the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater
Washington (Greater Washington) who, in 2003, merged with Metropolitan Police Boys
and Girls Clubs which had provided boys and girls in Washington DC with police
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mentors and athletic activities for 70 years. At the time of the merger, Metropolitan was
in severe financial trouble with a 2 million dollar budget deficit with clubhouse #10
running a deficit of anywhere from five hundred to nine hundred thousand dollars a year
depending on your source.
Parents are drawn to the club, many as spectators when basketball season begins,
but for parents who grew up at #10 it is an opportunity to visit a place that is integral not
only to their childhood memories but also to the creating and maintenance of
community. These parents (mostly mothers) meet together as the Parent’s Association to
discuss the club and ways that they can help to improve the club for the sake of the
children who use it. They stand on the sidewalk and sell hamburgers hotdogs and fried
fish to raise funds for the athletic teams. They help organize and work the concessions
stand inside the club during basketball season and at Cardozo High School during
football season. They even organize a Clubhouse #10 Homecoming weekend that
includes t-shirts they sell and a parade of the teams in uniform from the club itself over
to the field at Cardozo. It is not unusual to walk into #10 at 6 or 7 pm and see two or
three mothers helping in some way or talking with one another when they come to pick
up their kids.
The fact that the main participants in the organizing efforts for #10 were women
is also an important piece of the story. There is no shortage of historical evidence of
black women becoming activists surrounding important issues. Many times however,
women are not the vocal or public face of activist struggle. Steven Gregory (2003) uses
the activism of African American women in a Queens apartment complex to investigate
how “racialized groups contest and rearticulate racial ideologies and meanings and in the
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process construct new, potentially empowering political subjectivities and alignments"
(Gregory 2003:24). Tellingly Gregory observes that although women were the primary
force behind the movement, men were placed as the spokespeople for the group.
Gregory argues that this is an example of how women can appropriate patriarchal
ideology in order to present a stronger face to those in power and to combat negative
images of black men that exist in the discourses of those institutions.
Focusing on how women in the Lefrak City apartments contest images, projected
by white activists of their complex as crime ridden and drug infested Gregory highlights
the ways that this group was able to “generate cultural meanings and symbols" that ran
counter to dominant ideologies and power relations. In much the same way that the
Lefrak City women worked to counter negative perceptions of their community, so too
did the women I organized with around the issue of Clubhouse #10 work to counter
negative perceptions of their children as simply loitering around the club, making
mischief and intimidating white residents. In our initial meeting, Linda in particular,
brought up police harassment of her son and other teenage boys in the neighborhood as a
worsening trend. “If I see those police messing with those boys in a way I don't like
they are gonna have me sleeping on the green bed, and 1 ain't trying to sleep on the green
bed, I done that before and I ain’t trying to do it again." The green bed refers to the beds
in the D.C. prison and Linda, although adamant that she does not desire to visit the place,
is equally as adamant in her determination to defend neighborhood boys from what she
sees as unfair targeting by the D.C. police. In addition to countering the views that
others may hold about their children, organizing around this issue also afforded these
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women a mechanism to counter much of the discourse concerning black women, single
mothers and their families.
The notion that activists, and female activists in particular, can generate cultural
meanings and symbols counter to hegemonic discourses is significant when analyzing
the organizing efforts that I took part in. Patricia Hill Collins (2000) argues that
knowledge “includes the everyday knowledge shared by members of a given group"
(Collins 2000: 750). It is through this type of knowledge and the black cultural
institutions, such as the church that nurture it that women are able to pass on
understandings of womanhood to younger generations. In the introduction to this study 1
cited Raymond Williams in arguing that culture is ordinary, meaning that it is possible to
gain knowledge and understanding of culture through everyday experiences. It is
through debate under the pressures ofexperience that we enact change. In their work to
save #10 from sale the women activists involved challenged general perceptions of the
club and its meaning to the neighborhood by generating new meanings based on their
everyday experiences and by placing the club at the center of their own life narratives
and to the experiences and narratives of their families.
It was the following week that I attended the meeting for the Safe Summer
Kickoff Parade. There I learned about the Boys and Girls club, and many of those same
folks having had a few days to think about what they had heard at the Cardozo meeting
were even more infuriated by the actions of Greater Washington. In attendance at this
meeting were several people who would eventually form the backbone of the small
group that fought to save the club. Linda and Iris Edmundson, as 1 noted in the
introduction, grew up across the street from the club in Clifton Terrace apartments.
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They were adolescents when the club opened and were active participants in club
activities as children. Denise Credle was there as was the late Rita B. Bright whom I met
the week before in the apartment of Cookie Wilson. Ted Butler, who was the ANC
commissioner for the block of 14th street that Clubhouse #10 is on was also there
although his participation with the group decreased as the months passed. 1 was the final
participant in this initial meeting who was consistently involved in the organizing efforts.
There were other participants in that meeting who supported what we were attempting to
do. They would stop into our weekly Wednesday night meetings in order to get caught
up on the latest news and to offer advice and opinions, but they did not maintain a
consistent level of participation. Rita was the first of us to point out the obvious
connections between what Greater Washington was hoping to do with the club and the
gentrification pressures that the neighborhood is facing. There was also an
understanding that there are not as many programs in the city that keep children safe and
keep an eye out for kids who would otherwise end up on the streets.
From the outset Linda, Denise and Iris were vocal participants in the meeting and
they both spoke about quite a few problems with not only the proposed sale of the club
but also with the quality of the programming and the management of the club since the
merger of Greater Washington with Metropolitan Boys and Girls Clubs. Linda
commented that that Greater Washington had shown a lack of understanding of the
difficulties that would be involved in a transition from the existing club to a new space.
Linda also noted that no forth plan was put forth for how they would deal with the
transition period while a new club was being built. They did not have a space where the
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clubs’ activities could be continued during what would likely be a lengthy demolition
and construction process.
Linda argued that if there was to be a replacement during construction that it had
to be in the neighborhood because parents would not want their kids getting on buses
headed for other parts of the city and returning in the evening as most kids stay at the
club until it closes in the evening. Denise complained that many of the club many
people had grown up in was at that point completely devoid of programs to engage the
kids who were spending their afternoons there. If you were to walk into the club on any
weekday afternoon you would see kids playing pool and ping pong in the main reception
area or playing basketball in the gym while others would be hanging out maybe
watching television. To the untrained eye there would appear to be very little going on
in the clubs of an enriching nature.
Linda agreed recalling how she was able to take classes in sewing and cooking
and the club even organized double-dutch teams to compete in competitions in the city
and region. It was not as if the parents were saying that playing pool or basketball is less
worthy than double-dutch. They were arguing that besides team sports there are few
activities at all in the club currently. The railed against the fact that several laptops were
donated to the club to create a computer lab but no programs had been created to take
advantage of such a wonderful gift. Those in the meeting who had long time ties to the
club felt that since Greater Washington had taken over the day-to-day operation of the
club any worthy programs had disappeared. From the outset Rita was a major proponent
of getting the community more involved in the decision making apparatus of Greater
Washington. She argued that the community should try to get the non-profit to sign a
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Memorandum of Agreement stating that the community should have a seat on the board
of Greater Washington and that the community should begin to have a greater voice in
the programming at all the clubs. Eventually this point about parent inclusion in
programming became one of our most consistent demands of Greater Washington. A
second complaint relating to the operation of the club concerned the new manager of
#10. Linda in particular was adamant that the man who was hired got the job in large
part because he is Latino who the non-profit hoped would be able to extend the club’s
services to that community. She was insistent on that point not because she disapproved
of his being a Spanish speaker but because it seemed that his heritage were the only
qualifications for the job that he met. Greater Washington hired Bernardo at #10 in
hopes that he would bring more Latino youth into a club that historically had been used
primarily by black families.
While parents said they had no problem with opening up the club to others, they
argued that Bernardo was (he has since been replaced) completely unqualified to work
with children or interact with a diverse community. When I enquired as to what his
qualifications were, Linda told me that Bernardo’s previous job had been managing a
liquor store. A lot of the anger that the parents felt regarding the decision to hire
Bernardo as the manager of the club stemmed from the fact that the position was not
well advertised in the neighborhood. 1 asked in subsequent meetings if the problem with
Bernardo was that he was Latino and 1 always got a resounding no from the parents. I
believe that some of the hostility directed toward Bernardo was based on the fact that he
was Latino. Quite a few of the people in the meeting believed that if the job had been
more well advertised it may have attracted more local interest. The parent’s argument
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was that a community member would have been an ideal match for clubhouse #10
because that person would know how to communicate with the population that is
currently using the club. The implication here is that Bernardo, not being black and not
being from Columbia Heights, has no idea how to communicate with the children and
parents who come into #10. The comments from Gracie Rollins of CHANGE Inc. and
Iris concerning the influx of Latino immigrants into the neighborhood and the cities
response to the summer violence of 2002 evidence a frustration. That frustration is
however rooted in the persistent treatment of black people as second class citizens and
the lack of attention that these women feel the municipal and federal governments have
paid to the inner city since the 1970s.
From this initial meeting it became clear that there were many strong feelings
surrounding the future of #10. It became equally clear that by no means did some of the
people in that room intend on saying goodbye to the club without a fight. At that time
though it was difficult to imagine a scenario where we could turn back the tide of
gentrification. We decided that Safe Summer Kickoff Parade down 14th Street would be
a convenient way to bring the attention of the community to what was happening with
the club to the unfair and underhanded tactics that Greater Washington used to sell the
club from underneath the community. The parade was already slated to conclude at the
club end we believed that it was now even more important that this happen and that the
media and Greater Washington see how strongly people felt about the club remaining in
the neighborhood. We agreed that the rally at the club would be a way to claim it as our
space, a significant part of the neighborhood and anchor for a community of fate.
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Obstacles
There were a number of barriers that stood in the way of organizing a successful
campaign against the sale of #10. Chief among these barriers were the class and race
based perceptions of Greater Washington of the communities that it was meant to serve
and the negative perceptions of the club held primarily by its newer middle class
neighbors who did not appreciate the presence of rowdy lower income black kids in their
midst. Greater Washington is a suburban oriented non-profit that has its headquarters in
Silver Spring Maryland and did not have any clubs in the District until it’s merger with
Metropolitan Boys and Girls Clubs in 2003.
It was in the upper echelons of leadership that it became apparent that arrogance
had replaced compassion as the primary motivation for the decisions regarding the club.
How does the suburban orientation of the non-profit affect its view of clubs in the city as
well as the communities where those clubs are located? Matthew Reuben (2002)
suggests that the subject o f the post-industrial city is a suburban one and this gaze tends
to erase the poor as active political and civic agents. Our primary points of contact with
the Greater Washington organization were board members Ken Slaughter, a Washington
D.C. attorney and partner at Venable L.L.P. and Bill Eacho, who at that time was the
Chairman of Greater Washington’s board. Their involvement in our ongoing
negotiations spoke clearly to the level of importance the organization and board of
directors placed upon selling Clubhouse #10, one of their few valuable assets. Both Mr.
Eacho and Mr. Slaughter made it abundantly clear to us on several different occasions
that if we would not allow the club to be sold then it would be closed along with other
clubs. They made the decision to sacrifice Clubhouse #10 for what they considered to be
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the greater good before examining all other avenues for fundraising. Linda was
especially adamant about the fact that Greater Washington had not tried to tap into
community resources automatically assuming that working single mothers would have
little to offer in the way of finding a solution to this problem. Through their actions they
actively erased the civic agency of the Clubhouse #10 community and in doing so
assumed decision making responsibility.
In this dissertation I have shown repeatedly that since the late 1940’s efforts to
restructure space have been to facilitate the suburbanization of capital and American
citizens. Many of us view the city from the outside in, the city limit is a barrier between
idyllic suburban surroundings and the crime and poverty of the inner city. This
orientation breeds feelings ranging from liberal paternalism to outright disdain for cities
and their inhabitants. The leadership of Greater Washington believed that they saved the
Metropolitan clubs and the poor people that use their services. Implicit in this
understanding of their organization and themselves as saviors the board of Greater
Washington, expected these communities to be grateful. This point was driven home to
me forcefully as Greater Washington representatives reiterated to us time and again that
if #10 was not sold, Greater Washington would be forced to not only close it’s doors, but
the doors of other clubs as well. The notion that communities and families that avail
themselves of the services that these clubs offer should somehow feel beholden to the
organization represents the height of arrogance but also assumes that poor people have
no aspirations beyond everyday concerns. Greater Washington's efforts to sell #10 took
for granted that very little resistance would be put forth because poor people are passive
and not active civic agents.
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The reasons why the proposed sale of the Clubhouse #10 was so significant and
sparked these women into action are twofold. First, as the story of Ronnie’s life and
death attest, the club is a significant part of the memories and knowledge o f the
community. The spaces that give us geographic reference points for our life stories are
the places with which we identify most strongly and any attack on thosereferential
spaces evoke powerful and emotional responses. Secondly, the club is one of the few
places in Columbia Heights has the physical space to offer recreational experiences and
activities to children year round. The activists I worked with understood this point
clearly and in a neighborhood where the life chances of children are negatively impacted
by a lack of recreation space, we were willing to fight to see that such a space was
preserved.
The story that unfolded surrounding the work done to save #10 is representative
of larger forces at and there are two issues that should be kept in mind as the story is
detailed. First, are the issues of political economy such as the decline of Columbia
Heights, which was facilitated by disinvestment/abandonment, the construction of the
Metro that represents a return of capital investment, displacement of residents and small
businesses because of rising rents and property taxes. The sale of the Boys and Girls
club would impact a particular group but also is a powerful symbol of the destruction of
the working class history of the neighborhood.
Kickoff
It was at the rally to conclude the Safe Summer Kickoff Parade of 1994 that I
realized I would be doing much more work with the Boys and Girls Club organizing than
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I had anticipated when going to the initial meeting. I did not take part in the parade but
did come to the concluding rally at the club. My first impression of the event was that it
seemed to be more like a family reunion than a rally concerning an important cause. We
had intended this event to be a way of getting the word out with regard to the danger of
Greater Washington closing the club. While it was a topic of conversation among
individuals I don’t recall there ever being mention of the issue over the P.A. system. As
I observed at the rally I had the chance to speak to Linda and Iris for the first time at
length. Linda and I stood as she spoke about the importance of the club to her
community a go-go band unloaded equipment and plugged in speakers in front of a small
crowd of kids waiting to hear the music. Linda told me that they consider it the
“neighborhood band" and that her oldest son was a member. “I grew up with most of the
guys moms", Linda told me, and I began to understand some of the connections between
the club, the mothers, and their children that had caused such an outrage to the proposed
sale. Neighborhood life in Washington is unique, it is wearing your fresh white t-shirt to
summertime cookouts in the park on the sidewalk or anywhere else a group of people
can squeeze in a grill and charcoal, it is football and the Redskins come fall, Basketball
and North Face Jackets in the winter. Go-Go music and bands are also an aspect of life
that is uniquely Washington, and for the “neighborhood band" to be comprised of young
men whose mothers grew up together and who themselves had grown up playing sports
and socializing in the club is an indicator of the centrality of the club to their lives.
These thirty something single mother’s roots in the neighborhood, their
understanding of time and history with regard to their own lives and the club is equally
important when looking at why and how they decided to organize and the discursive
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stance that they took against the sale. As the previous 4 chapters have served to
illustrate, Columbia Heights has only been a minority neighborhood for a short period of
time.
In that time a generation has come of age and their apprehension of the place as
the inner city minority neighborhood is based very much on their experience in a
particular historical moment. Their decisions and motives have been are on a short
amount of time on a grand scale, but because it encompasses all that they have known of
the neighborhood, it is their reality.
I spoke to Iris, a single mother of one, at the front entrance of the club as the
Summer Kickoff was winding down. She told me that her family moved to Columbia
Heights, to Clifton Terrace when she was just a year old. Columbia Heights has always
been home to her. Clubhouse #10 opened when she was twelve years old and it has
“helped to ease hardships and has been a helping hand keeping kids out of trouble". Iris
told me that the club has really been a force in the community for a long time for those
reasons and she feels that it is vital to both kids and parents.
I.E.: When you are a single mother it seems that the city won't give a lot of help. You feel a lot of pressure and you work just to maintain. Like me for instanceI am in between area because I make just enough not to receive a lot of assistance and if you are in that in between area there is not a lot of help. I have a voucher but only about one hundred dollars of my rent is subsidized. The restI have to come up with myself.
Much of Iris' frustration surely stems from the shrinking resources available to the
poor and working poor, a category it is difficult for many single mothers to escape from.
What the Boys and Girls Club is able to provide to Iris and other mothers is a safe place
for their children to come after school that provides structured activities and presumably
enriching activities for a fraction of the cost of a more traditional day care center.
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Iris also made it a point to bring up the fact that much of the housing in Columbia
Heights developers are building is not family friendly. With the cost of a two-bedroom
apartment in Columbia Heights averaging twelve hundred dollars a month, Iris worries
about the viability of other single mothers being able to find affordable housing. “A
single mother might need that room they’ll get a 2 bedroom if they can afford it and a
single mother may need a lot of people [to afford the rent]." When she was growing up
in Clifton Terrace, there were two and three bedroom units that provided space for
families. When Clifton Terrace reopened as Wardman Court Apartments architects
converted all of the three bedroom units to two bedrooms and the floor plans actually
worked to make the bedrooms smaller. This was a sentiment echoed by Ted Butler
when we sat down for an interview at Clubhouse #10.
T.B.: The majority of the people who are moving in are white, they are single and a lot of them are gay and no children okay. They probably wont have kids here when they decide to have kids they'll gather there little properties out and will probably move out into the suburbs and if not they will send they're kids to Georgetown Prep but most of these apartments are being built and the two bedrooms are not being built for families with kids people with kids.
For Iris and Ted the half million dollar condominiums that Trammel and Crow hoped to
build in place of the club would be doubly negative for the neighborhood. It would
disregard the needs of the current community for recreation space for kids, but it is also
an implicit admission by both the Greater Washington and the municipal government
that the city is indeed becoming a playground for young single professionals and
suburban/out of town tourists. Neil Smith (1996) sees the processes of gentrification as a
method of “cleaning the city of working class geography and history. By doing so they
simultaneously rewrite its social history as a preemptive justification for a new urban
future.... physical destruction of original structures effaces social history and geography.
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If the past is not entirely demolished it is at least reinvented-its class and race contours
are rubbed smooth (Smith 1996:30).
Extending the Legacy: Planning America’s Capital for the 21st (1997) Century
clearly represents this new urban future. The National Capital Planning Commission
published Extending the Legacy as a long range plan building on the L'Enfant and
McMillan plans in hope of radically altering the look of the nation's capital. A primary
goal of the Legacy plan is to preserve the open space of the mall by “extending the
monumental core” by redeveloping North and South Capitol streets as "civic gateways
and making East Capitol Street a major link between central Washington and
communities across the Anacostia River” (NCPC 1997:20). Included in the plan are
graphic representations of what these new gateways will look like, often contrasted with
photographs of their present incarnations.
What is most surprising is that in the artist's renderings there is no hint of the
working class geography that now defines those areas. RFK stadium at East Capitol
Street is replaced with a “memorial” and their are no signs of the Lincoln Park, Stanton
Park or Kingman Park row houses that sit adjacent to the site. The desire to erase the
working class presence and geography becomes apparent in statements like, “East
Capitol Street will become the link between the traditional Monumental Core and the
Anacostia River. While the existing Capitol Hill neighborhood of quiet streets and
historic row houses will remain undisturbed” (NCPC 1997:20). While the NCPC
identifies the gentrified and much wealthier Capitol Hill as a neighborhood worth
preserving, the working class neighborhoods mentioned above, are erased from
existence, because they are not mentioned at all.
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Building a Movement
I received an email from Linda several weeks after the Summer Kickoff Parade,
she invited to a follow-up meeting to discuss what strategy, if any, we would take to stop
the sale of the club. It wasn’t until June 16th that we held our second meeting, deciding
to meet this time at #10 in a room that used for tutoring and study halls. This meeting
was not as well attended as the first, but did include faces that would grow very familiar
to me over the course of the next year. Among those in attendance Linda, Denise, Iris
and myself were to become the most active throughout the yearlong struggle. Also at
this meeting were Ted and Shonta, another single mother and member of the Parent’s
Association, and Robin a woman from Southeast, who heard about the sale of the club
from Denise.
There was no set agenda and much of the discussion centered again on the sale of
the club being another aspect of the gentrification of the neighborhood. Denise argued
that it was Greater Washington’s intention from the outset to sell the club when they
merged with Metropolitan two years earlier. From the outset, Denise was the one of us
who argued that the issue surrounding the club could also be an issue of civil rights and
the access to proper recreation. She went as far as to call the NAACP to see if there
were any merits to a court case on those grounds.
We discussed whether or not we could prove that Greater Washington had indeed
planned this move years in advance. Greater Washington made a series of changes that
the parents had viewed as making it more difficult for them to be involved. For
example, the Parent’s Association often conducted fundraisers such as fish fries in order
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to raise money for the club's sports teams to travel if they qualified for out of state
tournaments and to offset the cost of fees to participate on teams and for uniform costs.
When Greater Washington took over the club they requested that money earned by the
Parents Association be put into a general fund that could be accessed by other Greater
Washington clubs. The parents saw this change to the way they had done things in the
past as a lack of respect for the efforts of involved parents.
Denise conjectured that perhaps stripping down everything at #10 to the bare
bones was done in order to make up for a budget deficit that Greater Washington was
using to justify the sale of the club. Surely making the club less attractive to children
and parents to the point that attendance actually declined would make it easier to make a
later argument that club usage had gone down therefore a sale would not negatively
impact the neighborhood. The removal of programs in the afternoon and the failure to
bring back the Tom Jones Summer AAU league, played at the club for more than a
decade, were signs to the mothers that Greater Washington was not going to bring
significant improvement to the club. After Greater Washington assumed control of #10
they tried to require that the Parent's Association turn those funds over to the non-profit
so that the money could be used in clubs other than #10.
No matter the initial goals or plans that Greater Washington held for #10 when
they merged with the Metropolitan Boys and Girls Clubs it had become obvious, as we
learned more about their deal with the developer, that the Greater Washington Board of
Directors was now treating the land that the club sat on as a commodity to be traded
rather than a valuable community resource. The deal the board struck with Trammel and
Crow was initially worth 13.5 million and the club had sold the rights to build to the
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developer but it was keeping ownership of the land. The not for profit was apparently
planning to go into the real estate business and it’s first foray into the role of landlord
was going to be selling a recreation space for children off to the highest bidder.
If Greater Washington was allowed to do this in Columbia Heights those of us in
the meeting felt they would also try to sell off other assets. There was also a clear fear
that if the club was indeed sold that once the kids were gone they would not be coming
back. We questioned the logic that someone who paid upwards of 700,000 dollars for a
condominium would want to have a Boys and Girls club located in their basement and be
faced with children gathered on the sidewalks under their windows into the evening. It
was decided that what we really needed was a meeting with Greater Washington so that
we could find out exactly what their goals and motivations were for this sale and to
discuss possible alternatives to selling the club.
At this point meetings had been informational meetings open to anyone and we
had yet to formulate objections to the sale based on anything more than hearsay and
innuendo. A week later Linda, Iris, Denise, Rita, Ted and myself met with
representatives from the Boys and Girls Club. Greater Washington was represented by
Pat Gunnin, the area representative who oversaw the operation of other clubs in addition
to #10, Francine Levinson, a local business owner and noted Republican Party activist
who was the chairwoman of the board of the Metropolitan Boys and Girls Club, Steven
Schaff another member of the Metropolitan Board and Paul Saldit who was the architect
for Greater Washington.
This meeting was important for several reasons. First also in attendance at this
meeting was Zein, a resident of the Ella Jo Baker Cooperative on University Place. I
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met Zein several years earlier during my brief stint as a member of the Washington
Chapter of the International Socialist Organization. Zein was soon to become the fifth
mainstay member of our organizing group. Secondly, we also had our first of many
contacts with the D.C. city council in the form of Calvin Whitlaw a member of
Councilman Jim Graham’s staff. In the coming months Calvin and Councilman Graham
proved to be valuable allies in our struggle. Jim Graham personally spent time at several
of our meetings and I have to admit that without his support and political clout we may
not have been as successful against Greater Washington than we were.
Steven Schaff assumed the role of spokesperson for Greater Washington and the
now defunct Metropolitan Board. He introduced himself and by way of his introduction
mentioned to us that he does work with affordable housing in Wards 7 and 8. Mr. Schaff
told us that it had seemed as if Greater Washington's behavior with regards to the sale of
the club had seemed secretive because they did not have accurate information to share.
Now that they had accurate infonnation they could begin to have a dialogue with the
community. Denise made it a point to remind him that it was the community who
finally began the dialogue by demanding meetings with Greater Washington so that they
could explain their actions.
He explained to us that when Greater Washington merged with Metropolitan that
they had also taken on their debt which combined with the Greater Washington's own
debt totaled about 2 million dollars. Funds from the United Way, which Greater
Washington had counted on for the majority of its operating budget began to decline and
the non-profit was left without a steady stream of financing and without a marketing plan
to make up the shortfall. Mr. Schaff told us that they had explored all options with
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regards to how best alleviate the budget deficit and the only viable conclusion would be
to sell the property the club sits on. Beyond that their only choices were to sell the club
outright or sell it and get a piece of the action. They worked with the developer to get a
deal where they sold the rights to the land with conditions. The first condition is that the
developer would build a new Clubhouse to suit the needs of the Boys and Girls Club and
that Greater Washington would own that space “from today until forever". The second
condition was that the developer would fund an endowment that they would use for
programming. If either of these conditions were not met then the sale would not be
finalized. He said that the one thing they had not done well was work with the
community and that was because they were so busy trying to get money to keep the
doors open.
Linda asked him why they did not come to the community three years ago when
they were having financial problems as Metropolitan Boys and Girls Clubs, she told
them that they had underestimated the ability of the community to come together and get
things done whether it be raising money or anything else. Linda once again is asserting
that the boards of both Greater Washington and Metropolitan Boys and Girls Clubs had
taken for granted the political and civic agency and strength of the community
This exchange is indicative of the assumptions about the community that
emanated from the boardrooms of both Metropolitan and Greater Washington. They see
residents of these neighborhoods as passive and not active political agents. It never
occurred to them that the community could mobilize itself and raise money for the club's
survival. To highlight this point, when Linda asked why they had not come to the
community with their money problems Francine Levinson responded by saying that the
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community had not put it out there that they could help. The immediate response from
several members of the community was why did they need to put it out there that they
would be willing to help. Calvin, from Councilman Graham’s office then added that the
onus is not on the community to offer help; the onus was on Metropolitan and Greater
Washington to ask for the help of the community.
Mr. Schaff admitted that nothing about the deal was complete and when we
pressed him for more information he told us that the meeting at Cardozo had caused the
developer to realize that the community may not be 100% behind the plan and that they
were concerned about the bad publicity. 1 responded that, it should be taken as a sign by
Greater Washington that, the developer is more concerned about how happy the
community is with the proposed development than is the non-profit organization that is
supposed to be committed to serving that community. I said that the people in the
community would not benefit from what the developers were proposing and that the
people in Columbia Heights needed a place for kids to play. People on the board really
needed to consider what they were doing and the effects the condos would have on the
community.
Once this meeting had concluded and Greater Washington's agents had left the
room we decided that it was time for us to get serious with our efforts. By telling us that
the developer was concerned with the negative attention community displeasure could
bring Mr.Schaff had actually encouraged us. Linda, Iris, Denise, Rita, Ted, Zein and I
decided that it was now time for us to come together, meet separately from Greater
Washington and public officials and develop a strategy. The meeting that we had with
Mr. Schaff and Mrs. Levinson was to become indicative of the types of communications
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we had with the non-profit over the course of the next year and a half. Before long it
was the mothers that devoted a great deal of time to the kids and to the club came that
came to the forefront of our efforts and we began to refer to ourselves as the #10 Parent’s
Association and support team (P.A.). We submitted a letter to Pat Shannon, president of
Greater Washington, and we stated that the parents intended to fight the sale of the club.
The P.A. decided that we would take a three-prong approach to protesting the
plans of Greater Washington. First we wanted to put a stop to the sale of the club due to
the fact that Greater Washington had put out RFP’s without consulting the community
and without really exploring debt relief alternatives to selling the club. It was clear after
our first meeting with representatives from Greater Washington that they had not devised
a workable plan for what would be done with the kids in the interim period when a new
club was being constructed. Second we would work with Greater Washington to
improve the programming at #10 as a way to show the parents were active and
committed to seeing their children succeed and to make the club so successful as to make
it more difficult for Greater Washington to justify selling it. Lastly, we planned to work
with the non-profit in order to help raise funds that would allow them to operate all their
clubs until alternatives to selling off assets could be devised.
In order to pursue our goal of getting programming into the club that would
engage the kids and to discuss plans for fundraising we held a meeting with Pat Gunnin.
He reported that Greater Washington had plans to do a Walk-a-thon fundraiser that
would raise money for the individual clubs and the entire organization as well. In this
plan individual clubs would raise money by recruiting walkers and those walkers getting
donations for the number of miles that they walked. The money raised by the individual
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clubs would be split between the club and the non-profit. The money that went to
Greater Washington was to go into a pool that would fund travel for the various sports
teams at different clubhouses. Both Denise and Linda felt that this was not a satisfactory
plan and wanted the money raised for #10 to stay at #10. While it may not have been a
request that was out of the question, Greater Washington had done such a poor job of
communicating with the Parent’s Association at #10 they had fostered a distrust of their
motives in the parents.
There were a number of instances where Linda and Denise called Mr. Gunnin a
liar in terms of the way he characterized the actions of his organization when it came to
clubhouse #10. It is my belief that as an agent of Greater Washington it is quite possible
that he had no real working knowledge of the decisions made by the President or the
board of directors. In terms of their educational programs Greater Washington as an
organization performed very little oversight with regards to what programming his
organization was implementing. When we asked Mr. Gunnin about who was
responsible for decisions made regarding the education program at Clubhouse #10 it was
quite obvious that he had no idea and he was making assumptions about what the staff at
individual clubs were doing and that they were doing things the right way. At this
meeting Mr. Gunnin did indicate that an agreement between Greater Washington and
Trammel/Crow would sign a legally binding agreement for the sale of the club on
August 27lh At that time Greater Washington would receive one million dollars which
would go into an escrow account. They would only receive 10.2 million dollars rather
than the 3 million dollars originally agreed to because of community opposition. It was
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mid July so that gave us six weeks to stir up enough opposition to make the developer
balk at signing that agreement
David Harvey (1989) argues that low-income people, who lack the ability to
command space and do not own even the basic means of reproduction, dominate space
through “continuous appropriation”. In this way Linda, Iris, Denise, Rita and other
members of the Parent’s Association feel a sense of ownership in the club. They do not
own the club per se, but their years as members and parents o f Clubhouse #10, the
countless number of volunteer hours that they put in and their consistent presence at the
club should afford them a certain amount of respect. In our meeting with Mr. Gunnin,
Denise made a tremendous statement to illustrate Harvey’s point stating that the
proposed sale of the club was bringing down the spirit of the people and they were being
stripped of power, that feeling of having a say in an important neighborhood institution.
Maintaining the message
One of the struggles with organizing an effective movement was staying on
target with our message. This was a struggle because the issue of the Boys and Girls
Club brought together individuals from disparate backgrounds, with different political
agendas and with differing opinions about how to proceed against Greater Washington.
At this point there were six individuals who were at all the meetings and really served as
the backbone of the P. A. Linda, Iris, Rita and Denise were the mainstays from the
Parent’s Association while Zein and I represented the mainstays of the support team.
While our group made most decisions by consensus I considered Linda to be the
leader o f the group. She was the president of the Parents Association and from the first
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meeting that I attended regarding the Boys and Girls Club Linda was the most adamant
that we could not allow the sale to go through. Denise was the person most responsible
for keeping us on message. The work that we were doing was for the many adults in the
neighborhood could count the club as a referential space in their life stories. Denise
continued to remind us however that what we were doing was ultimately for the children
who used the club and found the same refuge there that Linda, Iris and Denise had found
when they were young. Rita grew up in Columbia Heights and raised her children in the
neighborhood as well. She began a Laundromat along with neighbors in the Nehemiah
Cooperative as well as beginning programs like the Cinderfella Ball that nurtured young
people in the neighborhood. Zein had the most experience organizing because of his
time with the International Socialist Organization and as a neighborhood activist.
Having been a socialist for so long he brought a level of class analysis to our group that
complemented my knowledge of the way gentrification was driving neighborhood
change. Zein also has done significant work around other issues throughout the city and
worked hard to make sure that activists working on other issues were aware of our
struggle while also motivating us to get involved in other issues in the city. As an
anthropologist having studied gentrification over the past three years I tried to bring a
level of awareness and analysis to our work that would provide an even greater challenge
to the assumptions Greater Washington made about how politically and civically active
the community would be.
We also benefited from a revolving door of characters who assisted and offered
critical advice at various times. Although I will speak in greater depth about the
importance of Jim Graham's involvement in our activities, 1 will say now that he and his
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staff, especially Calvin, provided invaluable support and advice and gave our efforts
political clout with Greater Washington. Malik Farrakhan, a neighborhood activist and
Black Panther who grew up in Washington for a while brought in a more radical element
to our efforts.
It was a critical aspect of the work we were trying to do that individuals like Zein
and groups like the Black Panthers were supportive of our efforts. The more radical
nature inherent in Socialist and Black Panther rhetoric created an atmosphere where
Greater Washington and the city were more receptive to our requests. In one meeting he
told Mr. Gunnin as well as Robert Bobb, the city administrator under the mayor that,
“we are prepared for acts of civil disobedience at the construction site if this deal goes
through! The mayor is such a genius in thinking up playgrounds for the rich but when it
comes to playgrounds for kids he has nothing.” Fie then asked the representatives from
the city (Mr. Bobb, Ronald Austin from Adrian Fenty's office) to take a side right there
in that meeting and decide whether they were going to side with the residents of
Columbia Heights or the forces of gentrification. Mr. Bobb responded by saying that
although Zein said some good things we should not follow his lead. He implied that
Zein's threats of civil disobedience were not helping our cause and this was not a
comment that was lost on certain members of our group. Despite Mr. Bobb's warnings I
believe that Zein's warnings of civil disobedience created a situation where the city
administrator, representing the mayor was forced to show that the city would not and
perhaps could not take the side of poor and working class residents against
gentrification.
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While Zein and I believed it would be effective to have a “flash action”, or an
unannounced sit in at the mayor's office demanding to speak to him regarding issues of
public safety and recreation for youth, it was decided that it may be more effective to
hold a rally at the club where we could bring out a large number of community residents
to further show Greater Washington that the community was supportive of the club
remaining where it is how it is. We planned to introduce a series of speakers, such as
Councilman Adrian Fenty or Jim Graham, who would speak in support of the club and
our efforts to save it.
Things were beginning to really heat up around our issue and it seemed as if this
would be an ideal time to hold such an event. Denise was asked to go on WPFW a
progressive radio station in Washington DC which is part of the Pacifica radio network.
I drafted a letter, which I sent to the Washington Post as an op-ed piece, which detailed
the issue and the work that we were doing to make sure the club remained for the
community. A reporter from the Post contacted Zein about the possibility of getting an
interview with one of the parents with regards to what was happening in the
neighborhood. We printed flyers, and distributed them throughout the neighborhood.
The P.A. decided that an outdoor rally might draw passersby and get the word out. We
wanted to give the appearance of as large a crowd as possible even if not all those in
attendance were necessarily choosing a side. It was important to get a good turnout in
terms of numbers to send a message to Greater Washington. I proposed that we
formulate a counter-proposal that states the community's desire to run a program out of
the building that houses the club currently. Since the club is running at a deficit the
organization should cut its losses and donate the building to the community. If the
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primary reason necessitating the sale of the club was the deficit and the goal was to keep
the club open and get out of debt all parties would be best served if the non-profit
donated the club to the community. Rita, agreed adding “this is about community
empowerment and if we do this right it could set a standard for clubs around the country
to follow”.
Saturday, September 18th was the day of the rally and I awoke to cloudy skies
and rain. The rain eliminated the possibility of outdoor rally, which did not bode well
for our chances of drawing a strong crowd. I arrived at the club at 10:30 and Linda was
the only one of our group at the to arrive. Zein arrived shortly after and the three of us
decided that we would move the rally inside and hope that the rain did not deter many
people from coming. Trying to stay upbeat I told them both that I felt it would be a good
day for us and we would turn a lot of people to our cause. Having energized myself at
least 1 took flyers and went to the sidewalk talking to people passing but I failed to get
anyone to come in. By the time I arrived the rally had started and there were some
mothers standing on the basketball court holding signs facing the sparse crowd of about
15- 20 people. Our primary speaker was Malik Shabaz, a Black Panther and attorney
who made a name for himself with his flamboyant personal and speaking style.
Although we did want to use Mr. Shabaz as our main speaker we were concerned
that Black Panther rhetoric would convolute our message and the support of the Boys
and Girls Club. The parents wanted Mr. Shabaz to speak in part because he is a black
man and his affiliation with the Black Panthers lent an authority to the event that we may
not have been able to achieve on our own. Because our message was to remain the
central theme of the day Denise made it quite clear to Mr. Shabaz that he was to stick to
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the script. Mr. Shabaz spoke eloquently and his primary theme was pan-city unity. He
urged the crowd not to allow themselves to be divided by arbitrary things like ward
boundaries stating that, “if you were bom here you are from the whole Washington DC".
1 disappointed by the lack of turnout at the rally considering that just the week
before Denise was interviewed on WPFW-we seemed to be building momentum . Since
we were not able to hold the event outside we did not draw the number of people that I
believe we all hoped we would. In retrospect we also could have done a much better job
of making other parents aware of the event in advance. I was concerned with the morale
of Linda, Iris, Denise and Rita who were giving so freely of their time and energy to
organize the rally. It was Zein and 1 who were most deflated by the low attendance, the
parents were excited and it was my hope that their energy would be long lived.
All of our hopes were buoyed the following Wednesday as Greater Washington
held their own community meeting at Clubhouse #10. The events of this event changed
the course of our efforts significantly. Judging from the lineup of speakers on the
program it was clear that Greater Washington was nearing a Public Relations crisis
regarding their handling of the sale of #10. In attendance on behalf of Greater
Washington were Pat Shannon, representatives from Trammell Crow, Steven Schaff,
Walter Woods (recently hired as Greater Washington's director of marketing), Ken
Slaughter (board of directors), Jim Graham and the 3ld District Commander for the
Metropolitan Police Department. While the gym was not full the attendance at this event
was better than at the rally we organized the week before. This meeting had drawn not
only longer-term residents of the community but also newer residents.
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Ken Slaughter spoke on behalf of Greater Washington and told the crowd that
they were holding the meeting in order to clear up misinformation that may have gotten
out as to their plans to sell the club. It was clear by this comment that Greater
Washington was going to use this bully pulpit in order to discredit the P.A. and our
efforts to rally the community to stop the sale of #10. In my field notes I simply wrote
misinformation with a question mark beside it as it seemed fairly obvious they meant
that the P.A. and support team had initiated some sort of smear campaign based on
misinformation. Greater Washington made this claim about misinformation despite the
fact that at no point since the intention to sell the club was made public had Greater
Washington presented the community or even Councilman Graham's office with a
design or blueprints for what the proposed new club would look like.
From the perspective of the P.A. Greater Washington's inability to produce any
plans in the three months since the sale had become public indicated to us that the
developer agreed to no such stipulation based on the original Request for Proposals. We
believed that Greater Washington negotiated this aspect of the agreement after
significant community protest. They argued that their intention was to redevelop the site
in order to give the kids the best facilities and to generate revenue for the struggling
organization. When the project was to be completed they would own a 27,000 square
foot facility that they believed solidified their position in the community for years to
come.
What happened next was truly a shock for my group and a shot at the heart of
Greater Washington. Councilman Jim Graham stood to speak and made the following
pronouncement:
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J.G.: It seems that Greater Washington needs to get things in the right order, people and children are #lnot generating revenue. This property is a public trust...the neighborhood owns the club although Greater Washington is the technical owner. Condos cannot be built on this location! We cannot support this project as it has been presented to us and we will oppose the zoning application. We will call on the mayor to support this club. I call on Trammell Crow to stop all action, take no further steps in their plans!
This was a tremendous victory for us as not having the support of the
Councilperson whose ward the development was to take place in would greatly hinder
the efforts of Greater Washington to sell the club. Following the meeting I introduced
myself to Pat Shannon and Ken Slaughter, and perhaps a bit presumptuously suggested
that Councilman Graham's words meant that they should give some consideration to
giving the club to the community to run. Pat Shannon told me that all the clubs were in
trouble and not just #10 and that they were going to pursue the sale in spite of what
occurred in the meeting. Ken, who as a member of the board has greater authority to
speak for the organization, admitted that they messed up by trying to pull an end around
the community and asked us to help them fix the damage they had done. Echoing
feelings that I had heard Rita and Denise express previously I told him that it seemed to
me that when Greater Washington merged with Metropolitan and took over the club the
community felt a loss of power. Apparently their predecessors had been more
responsive to the community and treated them with respect. 1 suggested that if they
came to the table to partner with the parents and involved the community in decision
making they might have a chance to get it right.
A few weeks later 1 got a call from Denise who told me she had just spent a
couple of hours with a Reverend Cole who had been on the board for the Metropolitan
Boys and Girls Clubs since its inception and served as the Chaplain and volunteer
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coordinator. Rev. Cole gave Denise two binders full of information on the organization
including minutes from meetings from several years back. He told her that he believed
the merger of the two organizations to be illegal because he does not know if they got the
two-thirds vote of the entire 118-member Metropolitan board that was required to
approve the merger. It appears that Steve Schaff was a recent addition to the
Metropolitan board when the merger was proposed, Rev. Cole, who was Steve’s sponsor
to get on the board, speculated that because Steve owned a mortgage company he stands
to profit from the sale of the club in some way. Although the information in the binders
did not support or dispute Reverend Cole's claims his views did support our suspicions
Greater Washington planned the sale of the Clubhouse #10 from the outset.
Denise had been burning up the phone and email lines spoke several times with
both Ken Slaughter and Bill Eacho, who at that time was the Chairman of Greater
Washington’s board. They reiterated that they had done things “110 % wrong” and were
interested in having a dinner meeting with the P.A. and support team in hopes of finding
some mutual ground. During my first interview with Cookie Wilson she told me that
developers had taken her out to lunch and even offered her money to give some ground
in their negotiations with the Fairmont Tenant's Association. 1 suggested to Denise that
this might be the same type of situation and that we would really have to be aware of
how the meeting was going.
I met Denise, Rita, Linda, Iris and Zein in the lobby of the Gallery Place office
building where Venable LLP, with which Ken Slaughter is a partner, is located. He
came down and escorted us up to the offices and into the boardroom. Bill Eacho met us
there and they had set up a laptop, projector and screen. On the side was a selection of
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chicken and meat dishes, sides, salad, cookies and cakes. In order to make sure that our
true concerns were heard before our judgment may have been impaired by the kindness
of our hosts we had drafted and agreed to a meeting agenda and I typed a detailed list of
our concerns and demands each to be discussed in their entirety prior to moving on to the
next topic.
We were the first to speak and first made sure that they understood the issues we
had with the sale of the club. First, was the issue of public safety and the safety of the
kids that use the club. Columbia Heights has one of the lowest incidences of youth
crime in the District and we believed the club had a tremendous amount to do with that.
We felt that if the club was removed for even as little as two years from the
neighborhood that kids who would use it for after school recreation would be more likely
to be in the streets. Second, Greater Washington still had not given us any plan for
where they would relocate the children if they sold the club. Some of the alternatives
they had mentioned previously were unacceptable to the Parent's Association because
they meant that children would have to walk or take a bus to various locations outside
the neighborhood. One of the reasons why the club is such a vital neighborhood
resource is because it is in Columbia Heights and parents feel comfortable that their sons
and daughters are going across the street or around the comer and not across town.
Lastly, they had at that point not given us sufficient blue prints or plans to even show us
what they were trying to bring us that would be an improvement over the existing
clubhouse.
We also reiterated that our issue was bigger than just clubhouse #10 and is
symbolic of the gentrification pressures that are at work in Columbia Heights and the
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rest of the city as well. Greater Washington was looking to profit from the real estate
boom in Columbia Heights and it seemed as if their original plan when they took on the
debt of Metropolitan on top of their own was to use assets secured in the merger to
rescue themselves from financial crisis. We added that they had shown no real
commitment to the community and their own President Pat Shannon had said as much in
a radio interview when she said that if the demographics changed in a few years they
would sell out the club space they were to own to the condominium owners completely.
We then gave them the conditions under which we would come to the table and
begin a dialogue through which we could find a solution to this issue. First we were
only willing to meet with them in hopes of finding alternatives to the sale of #10 and we
would meet with them until we found those alternative resources. We insisted on Parent
Association empowerment in all programming decisions pertaining to #10 and veto
power in the future hiring of club directors. It was also important for us to maintain a
voice in future decision making of Greater Washington and to that end we asked to have
a board representative from each club with equal voting status and for those members we
asked that the mandatory donation of 2,500 dollars be either waived or reduced.
Victory?
It was several months of relative quiet before word got to us through Calvin from
Councilman Graham’s office that Greater Washington terminated the deal between
themselves and Trammell Crow. It was January 11th but our breakthrough had come just
before Christmas in a meeting between the P. A. Councilman Graham and his staff. Mr.
Graham bluntly asked us what Greater Washington claimed it cost them to operate
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Clubhouse #10 for a year. We told him that Greater Washington had always claimed it
took approximately 300,000 dollars to operate the club so somewhere in the
neighborhood of 350,000 dollars would be more than adequate. Even Zein was
speechless when Mr. Graham told us that amount was “a drop in the bucket” indicating
that he could probably get that amount of money added as a line item in the 2005 District
budget which still had to be approved by the council. Needless to say we were ecstatic
at the news and hurried to call a meeting with Greater Washington to update them on our
lead for possible money for the organization.
In the interim we continued to meet, only this time our meetings centered around
plotting the future of Clubhouse #10 rather than of struggling to keep Greater
Washington from selling it. We all agreed that it was our desire to see the club remain as
it is or improved but not developed. Linda spoke about how important the club is to the
community and I added that the club should be shining star of the community with
enhanced programs added but in a way that meshes with what has traditionally been
important there like the athletic teams.
We met in late January with Bill Eacho, Ken and Walter Woods, Greater
Washington's director of marketing. Jim Graham and Calvin were also in attendance
along with Sara Akbar, a new resident in the community who recently joined the PA and
support team. Bill informed us that they indeed had called off the deal with Trammell
and Crow, but what he did not say was that they had sent out a new Request for
Proposals (RFP) to three more developers. Bill admitted that they did send out
additional RFP's only after Jim Graham brought one out of his briefcase and said that
developers had contacted his office asking what to do because they were aware of the
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community opposition to the sale of the club. Bill Eacho openly admitted that they still
envision some sort of development happening at the club and told us that something has
to happen because Greater Washington was running budget deficits of about 2 million
dollars a year. A number of times they referred to the clubhouse as an asset that they
needed to maximize and I was struck by the vast difference between our vision for
Clubhouse #10 and Greater Washington’s vision.
No matter how often or how much they speak to the contrary clubhouse #10 will
continue to be a commodity to them, an asset needing to be maximized. Working class
people tend to operate in a world where exchange value is scarce. They pursue use value
because of the centrality of those values to daily survival. The women in the PA
depended on the club, not for their total survival, but it was a key of their lives because it
was and is a place where their kids can participate in stimulating activities while they are
at work trying to assure the material survival of their families. People grow attached to
places because the interactions that occur in those places are key elements of their
survival. I contend that #10 is a key locus in the creation of a smaller network that
contributed to quality of life of the mostly single mothers that were in it.
With the help of the Parent’s Association and support team, Jim Graham was
able to secure a meeting between Greater Washington and the Deputy Mayor to make
their case for support from the city to help ease their fiscal troubles. As an act of good
faith Greater Washington agreed not to send out any additional RFP's and to take those
they had already distributed out of consideration until they were able to meet with city
representatives and determine how much, if any, the city would agree to assist them.
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The meeting between Greater Washington and the Mayor’s budget office marked
a significant victory for our small group of mothers and activists. Critical in this victory
was the relationship that we were able to establish and nurture with Councilman
Graham. His role in our success is a testament to the positive effect that democratic
home rule can have when local politicians respond to the concerns of residents rather
than pandering to business elites. This type of local intervention was the type that was
missing in post WWII Washington D.C. when old Southwest was raised and its residents
scattered throughout the city. Municipal governments should behave like dams
restricting access to neighborhoods only to those developers and business interests who
have an interest in becoming partners in improving communities rather than running
roughshod over poor people in search of higher returns on their investments. In order for
grassroots organizing to be successful, whether it be for better schools, healthcare or to
save a Boys and Girls club from demolition, requires that local politicians become agents
for active debate and change on the side of the poor and the working class. It is standing
with these people, people like Linda, Iris, Denise and Rita that their political resources
and influence can make a significant difference.
We spent the better part of a year meeting, organizing and working with Greater
Washington to provide a solution to their financial woes that did not involve selling
Clubhouse #10 to make room for yet another condominium complex. Both decline and
gentrification in Columbia Heights have caused the loss of potential areas for recreation
over the past three decades. The loss of green and recreation spaces has adversely
affected the quality of community life. Geography is an important determinant of our
life chances as it often binds us together in communities of fate. Also important to those
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life chances is how successful we are in leveraging the collective power of those
communities to the benefit of each member. We reference places in the built
environment in telling our stories because of the attachment we have to them vis-a-vis
the relationships that are nurtured within those spaces. The victory that we achieved was
for the single mothers who grew up in the club and who today use it as a resource as they
raise their own children. It is also a victory for Ronnie and the countless others like him
who benefited from the club being there for them children but who suffered because
society failed them as adults.
Things moved quickly once Councilman Graham organized the meeting between
Greater Washington, the Parent's Association and the Deputy mayor to determine the
non-profit's worthiness to receive financial assistance from the District government. A
line item was added to the 2005 District budget which allocated a half million dollars to
Greater Washington with the stipulation that it be used solely to fund and upgrade the
programs and facilities at Clubhouse #10. After helping the non-profit find a short term
solution to it's financial problems, the P.A. turned our attention to physically enhancing
Clubhouse #10 so that it's aesthetic value would begin to match its value as a community
resource.
It was Sara's brainchild that we hold a Columbia Heights Unity Day where we
would bring together long-term neighborhood residents with newer residents to do
beautification work at the club. We believed that if we could begin to get newer
residents, who did not have the same emotional ties to the club, invested in it through
volunteering of their time, we could strengthen the case for the club as a vital
neighborhood resource. We also wanted to bring old and new residents together as a
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way of forging bonds between groups and individuals that are often times separated by
racial and class differences.
In the months leading up to unity day we managed to convince the Duron paint
store to paint the exterior of the club at a substantially reduced price. Developers who
either have or desire to do business in the neighborhood have donated funds to offset the
cost of the painting. We also worked with volunteers from Casey Trees, an endowed
organization whose mission is to restore tree cover in the District of Columbia, to
arrange for the planting of several trees the day of the event. Volunteers also had the
opportunity to work with Sara and I in planting flowers and herbs in areas in front of and
around the club as well as picking up the trash strewn about the grounds of the club.
The Saturday of Unity Day was particularly rainy and as 1 remembered back to the poor
turnout for our first rally nearly nine months ago I worried that all the volunteers would
be scared off by the weather. I arrived at the club and found that there were already
almost two dozen working on various activities. Volunteers from Casey Trees were
working with some volunteers putting in Dogwood and Cherry trees. Another group of
six or so people were working on placing flowers in the large planter in front of the club.
Linda and Iris were both there with their son's as was Zein and his son.
Although we promoted Unity Day as a way to bring the community together and
to cultivate an atmosphere of cooperation between neighbors, the day represented more
than that to each of us that had been involved in this work for nearly a year. While none
of us are naive enough to think that the fight is over and that Greater Washington will
just accept defeat, we could at least for this day acknowledge that the work we had done
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was worth it, and that this club would continue exist in the community for the
foreseeable future.
While we were successful in our efforts to prevent Greater Washington from
selling clubhouse #10, our victory will most likely never be complete. As long as
Greater Washington remains in financial trouble and as long as the Columbia Heights
land market continues to produce huge profits, the threat will exist that Greater
Washington will see the property that the club sits on as an asset in need of
maximization. It remains to be seen if the Greater Washington has come to fully
understand and embrace the activism and persistence of the parents who prove to
continually challenge the way that Greater Washington conducts its business both on a
day to day basis in the club and in terms of freeing itself from debt. Greater Washington
is beginning to the Parent's Association with the respect they have earned, and given the
input into daily activities that they sought for so long.
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CONCLUSION
I conducted this dissertation research in order to contribute to the understanding
of the relationships between the spatial and the social using an anthropological lens. My
goal was to better understand the phenomenon of gentrification in Columbia Heights and
its effects on the lives of everyday residents who, based on their geography, find
solidarity together in communities of fate. In order to understand the challenges these
communities face from gentrification it was necessary to outline the economic and social
processes that create the conditions in which gentrification can occur. My conclusions
rest on my understanding of space as a socially created phenomenon . which is the result
of human activity and agency. Through a careful analysis of the w ay that a crisis of
capital accumulation spawned a restructuring of the American economy. 1 have
attempted to explain the creation and restructuring of urban space in Washington D.C.
My ethnographic analysis of gentrification in Columbia Heights has shown that
communities of fate draw use values not only from their relationships to one another but
their proximity to other area resources. Boys and Girls Clubhouse #10 is such a resource
and because it has been such an important part of community life for more than twenty
years it now also serves as a referential space through which people identify with others
and locate themselves in neighborhood history.
200
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Societies organize space through a careful negotiation of ideologies political
choices. Space is in fact a physical manifestation of those ideologies and choices. For
instance, the existence of a black belt in Washington D.C. that was characterized by
overcrowding and substandard housing was a product of racist ideologies and the
political choices which reinforced them. Black belt neighborhoods-the embodiment of
racist ideology-also served as the premise upon which contestations to the segregationist
order were built. Once the black belt grew so overcrowded that it no longer served as an
effective mediator between blacks and whites, older racist ideologies began to be
overtaken and political choices made that created new urban forms. These new forms
were not necessarily anti-racist and in fact helped to enhance segregation in the Nation's
Capital. Because the built environment served as the medium through which social
relationships were that are made not only work to reorganize geography they also force a
reorganization of a variety of social relationships. It is in this instance that 1 have begun
to understand the nuanced functions of what Edward Soja (1989) called the socio- spatial
dialectic.
In Southwest Washington where homes, businesses and churches were razed,
residents did not have to worry just about finding new homes. It was necessary for these
displaced families to find new churches or wait old churches to find space elsewhere,
they had to find new stores to shop for day to day necessities and relationships had to be
established with owners so that credit accounts could be opened. Men had to find new
barbershops and women new places to get their hair done. Families needed to make new
connections with friendship groups who could look after children or make loans when
money was tight.
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In 1948 the Supreme Court ruled that restrictive covenants, which previously
excluded many blacks from moving into white neighborhoods, unconstitutional and in
1968 Congress passed the Fair Housing Act making the use of racial covenants illegal.
Real estate brokers used those landmark events to play into white expectations of living
in segregated neighborhoods and fears of diminishing property values. Brokers often
made large profits for these transactions because black families paid a premium for
relocating outside of the black belt. Simultaneously suburbanization created billions of
dollars for development, homebuilding and real estate industries. Once complete
suburbanization had created a less equal more segregated metropolitan area, while
political choices in Congress and Judicial decisions by the Supreme Court created slightly
more opportunities for blacks. The new urban geography though did not topple racist
ideology but masked it through liberal minded public policy and expanded housing
choices in a city receiving fewer and fewer private and federal dollars.
I have argued that the manipulation of spatial organization is a key facet of capital
accumulation. In the United States after WWII the primary goal of spatial reorganization
was to rescue the capitalist system from its own internal contradictions. When we
recognize that the political and ideological decisions that transform comer stores into
shopping malls and that real estate speculators, developers and to a host of other human
agents profit from those decisions we can understand the organization of space confounds
an effective analysis of societal power relations. Power relations are hidden because the
reorganization of space can create upheaval in our lives placing so much stress on
individuals and communities that it is often difficult to keep a light shone on the
economic rationality of the decisions that are being made.
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Time works in favor of the developers and other growth elites. With each
passing day it becomes more and more difficult to mobilize effective resistance against
them. With the collection of resources often at their disposal developers can simply
acquire a property, often secretly, and squat on that property until such a time as its
profitability can be realized. Time is on the side of the developer. Working people and
activists often find themselves reacting to the culmination of development plans which
appear to be conceived and realized at a stunning pace. The financial resources available
to developers allow them to maintain a long view of their activities where they can
accumulate property over many decades in relative anonymity and can then slowly begin
changing the face of entire neighborhoods, sometimes just a few buildings at a time. The
neighborhoods that gentrification is dismantling are the result of urban and economic
restructuring and as such have been largely working class and black for 30 years.
Delores Hayden (1995) argues that public space can help to nurture a more
inclusive sense of what it means to be an American. “Identity is intimately tied to
memory, both our personal memories (where we have come from and where we have
dwelt) and the collective or social memories interconnected with the histories of our
families, neighbors, fellow workers and ethnic communities. Urban landscapes are
storehouses for these social memories, because natural features such as hills or harbors,
as well as streets, buildings, and patterns of settlement, frame the lives of many people
and often outlasts many lifetimes" (Hayden 1995:9). For Hayden the built environment
can hide and reveal histories specifically as they relate to the lives of women and ethnic
minorities.
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The connections between the life stories of the women in the Parent’s Association
and the club itself are excellent examples of what types of knowledge can be unearthed
when focusing on the connections between space and social organization. The issue of
the Boys and Girls club also indicates how the power of memory and the intensity of the
feelings that arise from those memories can lead people to political action in order to
preserve referential spaces that help them to narrate their own stories. Ronnie lives on
not only because his mother and sisters keep his memory alive in their thoughts and
remembrances but also because his pictures don the walls of the #10. Would Ronnie's
story be lost if Greater Washington sold the club or if his family were to leave Columbia
Heights? Ronnie's family will always remember him and tell his story, but we do stand
to lose the physical referents that often spark remembrance.
Urban Renewal and redevelopment in neighborhoods like Foggy Bottom and
Southwest Washington prove that often despite our best efforts the restructuring of urban
space can wipe out collective memories as well as the neighborhoods that give rise to
them. Today these areas are once again being recognized for their centrality to the story
of African Americans in Washington DC., but often the referential spaces that we know
exist from photos and from the stories of people who live there have been destroyed.
A growth minded elite has mobilized both disinvestment and gentrification, as the
purposeful tools of capital accumulation, to the great disadvantage of minorities and the
poor. Both of these aspects of urban restructuring diminish the quality of life of those
who were forced to remain in disinvested and abandoned neighborhoods and who today
are being pushed out of gentrifying neighborhoods. Children in particular felt the adverse
affects of disinvestment as they saw their schools grow worse and worse every year,
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crime and the chances of being a victim of some sort of violence increased, green space
and space for recreation disappeared and the chances of growing up free of physical
illness became less and less likely. Gentrification has brought with it the promise to
disrupt already fragile families and communities of fate. Gentrification has further
exacerbated the loss of green space with development threatening every piece of empty
property.
The fight for #10 was a fight against gentrification and the effort to remove yet
another resource in a neighborhood where the poor are being left behind. We fought
against the sale of the club for the sake of the children who use it as a safe haven and
outlet for their energy and exuberance. The pursuit of profit has been responsible for the
restructuring of the urban landscape in Washington D.C. for a century. The restructuring
of land subsequently alters the manner in which people interact sometimes by limiting
their movement; while at other times making it possible for groups to interact in ways
they never had before. Whether or not we see these changes as positive they are products
of drastic changes to the landscape. These new social relationships in turn affect when,
where and how the next round of restructuring will take place.
One of the consequences of urban restructuring is the destruction of sites that
serve as a critical connection between life histories of individual residents and collective
histories as working people struggle to create meaningful lives out of what are essentially
the leftovers of those who are more materially wealthy. Nevertheless, they do make these
places, these neighborhoods theirs and in doing so place their own imprint on the space.
The destruction of neighborhoods and sites within neighborhoods in which residents
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invest meaning works to erase the geography and history of poor and working class
history.
Because of the efforts of a small group of activists, mostly single African-
American mothers, clubhouse #10 of the Boys and Girls club and the memories invested
in it were saved from being replaced with condominiums. Our victory may prove to be
brief; it may prove to be long lasting, but no matter what we were successful in
preserving a part of the geography and history of Columbia Heights. It is necessary that
we preserve these sites because of their value in contributing to our knowledge of the
histories of both minorities and women in the Nation's Capital
Our group's organizing efforts to save the Boys and Girls Club was reactionary in
terms of the reasons why it began. It quickly was transformed into a proactive political
organizing effort that moved the issue of gentrification from one that just seemed to touch
housing opportunities and made it about public space, the connections between place and
life history and what responsibilities non-profit organizations have to the communities
they serve. If Michael Reuben is correct, in discourses concerning the city, scholars and
policy makers portray the poor as passive and not active agents. The organizing that 1
have taken part in over the last year is a clear expression of how ordinary citizens can
change the nature of discourses about cities.
Public space and how it is used play a considerable role in the quality of life in the
urban landscape. In chapter 4 I noted David Harvey's argument that poor and working
class people dominate space not through material ownership of that space but through
“continuous appropriation" of that space. This is true of all public space in Columbia
Heights not just the Boys and Girls club.
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While the story that I set out to tell is by no means at an end, it was important for
me to stop and record the success that those of us who organized to save #10
experienced. As I have argued throughout this project, the way capital moves through the
landscape of the city is cyclical dictated by the decisions of individuals in public and
private positions of power. The cyclical nature of capital accumulation and the power of
the developers, banks and the insurance industry to restructure the land and deploy
symbols, make restructuring appear natural and inevitable. Although working class and
poor blacks in both Foggy Bottom and Southwest fought similar processes but were not
successful, we cannot allow ourselves to simply accept as inevitable and natural,
something man has made. By standing up and fighting for the importance of memory,
history and use values we were able to show that perhaps it is hard to mobilize entire
neighborhoods to stop gentrification that does not stand to benefit longer term residents
allowing them to stay, it is possible for people to organize themselves into a political
movement and save a site of working class geography and history. Today I can walk into
the club with Linda and Iris, they can tell me their brother's story and they can still point
to his pictures on the wall.
I began this dissertation with a poem titled ''a chance" and at every point in this
process I have tried to keep in mind what type of city would allow children like Edwin
and Ronnie the chances that they were not or have not been afforded. In order to learn
and grow children need to live in clean environments where their drinking water is not
contaminated with lead and the streets are not littered with trash. It is the responsibility
of municipal governments to make provide basic services in even the poorest of
neighborhoods. Municipal governments should not allow infrastructure allowed to
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deteriorate only to rehabilitate it when the demographic and socio-economic profile of the
neighborhood begins to change. All children should have equal access to the natural
environment. If the city and federal governments allow the Anacostia River to remain
silted and polluted and children east of Rock Creek Park live in a concrete jungle like
environment, the entire city suffers the consequences. To nurture the creative, social and
spiritual capacities of young people all neighborhoods should provide ample green and
recreation spaces. Economically neighborhoods include all the facilities children need to
be happy and well adjusted. Schools, entertainment and access to other children would
create environments where children would feel safe and nurtured. Neighborhoods should
be economically and culturally diverse so that we never again have areas of great poverty
lying in the shadow of great wealth. Decent health care facilities should exist in every
neighborhood so that when a child is sick they don't have to accept the bear minimum of
treatment just because they are poor.
Some of these goals are achievable now, some it will take a tremendous amount
of work and realignment of priorities to realize. What becomes of one of us becomes of
us all and in future researchI will use my knowledge of urban economic and social
processes to critique and help reform the mechanisms and political choices that currently
do not enhance the lives and life chances of inner city children.
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