History

Lost Washington, DC brings back great buildings of the past

by John Muller   •   October 26, 2011 1:35 pm

Where landmarks of commerce, residence, and society once stood, merely an incidental plaque often remains. Each marker conceals colorful memories and dynamic stories waiting to be resurrected and shared. A new work of timely and notable hometown scholarship does just that.

John DeFerrari's Lost Washington, DC (History Press, paperback, $19.95) reanimates lost icons of the city's past such as Providence Hospital, Griffith Stadium, the Knickerbocker Theater, Center Market, Key Mansion, and the Brentwood Estate, which inspired Paul Laurence Dunbar to verse.

DeFerrari is a government auditor with a master's in English literature from Harvard University. He has posted many historic tidbits on his blog and on Greater Greater Washington over the past few years. The compact 160 pages, his print debut, reads quickly and smoothly.

A foreword by historian James Goode notes, "With so few past landmarks preserved, it is easy to lose sight of the rich heritage of the city's architectural landscape, and thus it becomes ever more important to retell the stories of these lost places for new audiences."

Lost uses personal sketches, lithographs, period photos, and postcards to cover the city's earliest days as a sparsely populated "largely rolling farmland and rugged wilderness" to a city now with more than 600,000 residents.

Deftly moving from Capitol Hill to Upper Northeast in eight separate sections, DeFerrari draws from known and lesser-known sources. Excerpts from newspapers—that first draft of history—provide many quotes and period insights. Lost brings many of the city's departed newspapers back to life as well.

During those simpler times, before the development of the modern entertainment industry (including motion pictures), families could enjoy entertainment at B.F. Keith's High-Class Vaudeville Theater at 15th & G Streets NW. Among the guests opening night in 1912 was President Taft. Across downtown to the east, 513 9th Street NW featured a livelier form of entertainment, burlesque, at the Gayety Theatre.

While focused on the past physical identity of the city, Lost also introduces us to a cast of personalities whose entrepreneurial élan helped build a growing city, the seat of a power of an expanding nation. These characters helped forge the city's emotional and social identity.

Pennsylvania Avenue NW was where the action was all hours of the day. The powerful and influential local and national papers located on "Newspaper Row." reporters and editors rubbed elbows with drunkards and thieves in the same space once known as "Rum Row." Being cutthroat was not the battle cry, it was the battle.

One who played for keeps was Frank Munsey, a "robber baron" of the publishing business at the beginning of the twentieth century. Munsey is credited with perfecting a printing process that used extremely low-quality "pulp" paper to produce magazines that "were both dirt-cheap and filled with enough racy fare to be widely popular." Munsey brought about the era of pulp fiction.

Sacrificing quality to achieve high quantity, Munsey owned numerous papers nationally and eventually established a local bank. He hired a prestigious New York architectural firm to design a grand twelve-story Italian Renaissance Revival that could house the headquarters of his banking and publishing concerns in Washington. The building stood until 1979 when, despite community and legal opposition, the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation (PADC) bought the then-vacant building and demolished it.

Image from History Press.

After the property was sold in 1985, a coalition of preservationists was able to persuade developers to use the terminal as a gateway to the planned office building. In 1991, the building opened with a "handsomely restored bus station" and a permanent exhibit on the history of the terminal "complete with life-sized plaster casts of historic buses standing where their bays would have been."

DeFerrari launched the blog Streets of Washington in 2009, using his extensive postcard collection as the foundation for featured posts. He also has cross-posted many of the entries here on Greater Greater Washington. This gave DeFerrari an abundance of substantive research ready to be tapped for the book. However, many of the entries in Lost were never published or posted before.

The only gap readers might notice is a lack of coverage of lost landmarks east of the Anacostia River. However, DeFerrari says he would like to write a second volume that would give him a chance to cover sites and neighborhoods left out of Lost.

John Muller is a former reporter for The Washington Times and current contributor to Capital Community News. He earned his degree in Public Policy from GWU and is currently working on a book, Frederick Douglass' Washington: The Lion of Anacostia to be published in October by The History Press. John is a late night Metro rider.