Posts about East Of The River

"Yeah, a former associate of mine has been set up in there pretty tight for a number of years," said community activist William Alston-El, who through community work and life experiences is affiliated with Anacostia's underworld. "His wife died and that's when he started. He's on crack, he's pretty gone in the head, you know. Yeah, you could say it's a crack house abandominium, a lot of people have been up in there, you know what I mean?"

By 2011 the taxes grew to more than $3,000. At this time Redemptor Litium, LLC, with holdings throughout all city neighborhoods, purchased the lien.

"This is a typical law school exam question," says James M. Loots, the lawyer representing Redemptor Litium, LLC. "The tax sale is supposed to fix the problem of getting the property under control and back to contributing property taxes."

Loots says his client has filed a motion for judgment and followed every necessary step to receive an order of foreclosure from posting the mandatory orange notice on the front door, to searching for heirs in the probate docket, to advertising in the paper for all known and unknown heirs to come forth.

The case is on a judge's desk and awaits another status hearing scheduled for next month.

Unfriendly neighbor

Dewey Sampson lives next door to the crack house abandominium. A federal employee, Sampson bought his home a little less than two years ago. On move-in day, two men sitting out front of the house next door offered their help, as good neighbors. Sampson soon learned from a long-time resident two down over that the men didn't live there. Nobody does. They are known undesirables, squatters.

"Early last summer I saw the orange sticker posted on the door," Sampson said. "I was really excited. I thought something was going to happen, but I didn't think it would take this long."

After the posting, last fall Sampson called the police on two squatters, who after an evening of drinking and drugging were cursing at each other loud enough for Sampson to hear through his walls.

"The police came right away. When they took one of the guys away he kept yelling, 'This is my house! This is my house! I was like what is he talking about?" said Sampson.

After telling him what I'd heard from Alston-El, Sampson said it now made sense. What's still illogical to Sampson and his fiance is how the house could sit vacant for so many years.

"This is a paradigm example of what the tax sale process is designed to address—getting vacant or neglected properties back on the tax rolls and into productive use. Unfortunately, that process takes a very long time," said Loots.

The sooner the better for Sampson, who last week saw a face he'd never seen before leaving the back of the house. "I don't want to judge people, but she looked like she was on drugs." Adding insult to injury, Sampson just paid an exterminator as a result of termites coming over from the abandominium.

"Those guys coming and going primarily are a safety concern for my fiancé, me, and the entire neighborhood. What if they set the house on fire and it spreads?" Sampson said. "What do we do then?"

Inside the house

This past Sunday morning with iPhone in hand, I went around to back of the home. Although the city boarded up the front door and the adjacent window last fall, I saw no evidence that anyone has made an effort to secure the rear.

I opened the mesh-screened back porch easily. There were bars on the back porch window to stop intruders from climbing in, but the back door is wide open.

Stepping inside the kitchen, the rancid smell of urine welcomed me. The counter was covered in stubs of used candles and empty cans of Goya beans. The floor was littered with all sorts of debris, including chunks of fallen plaster from the ceiling. Slices of light from the second floor peeked through through small gaps in the floorboards above.

In the living room, more clothes covered the floor, along with discarded syringes and a bent spoon used to fire up dope. Two windows fronted 14th Street, one boarded up, one deflecting the morning sun behind a thick curtain. Peeling back the curtain, I saw Engine Company Fifteen; down the street is Saint Phillip the Evangelist Episcopal Church; in the median sits the restored Old Market House Square, which had a ribbon cutting last fall.

In the tight hallway junk mail fertilizes the floor. Three framed pictures rest atop the radiator: a baby girl not yet pre-school aged, a young man flashing a smile in cap and gown, and repentant hands coming together in a moment of prayer. Lord knows the rebirth of Historic Anacostia's crumbling homes need communion through any and all lines of invocation. Underneath the three photos is an unread Washington Post from this past November.

I ascended the staircase, keeping my ears open for any sounds of rustling. At the head of the stairs is a small room, the door ajar. A bare mattress sat snug in the far corner, amid fallen sheetrock and plaster. Behind the door I saw dress shirts and suits. I walk back into the hall and past the bathroom with the upturned bathtub and toilet laying on its side.

In the far room, Clothes strewn everywhere, a king size bed headboard sans bed, a plastic lawn chair, a DirecTV remote with no television to control. Running up in the home alone, without the better company of a friend, I feel I should get going.

Passing a closed green door, I heard the static of a raspy cough. Time to get ghost. I slipped down the stairs, knowing the man behind the green door will not pursue what he likely thinks is a fellow squatter just looking for a small poor man's piece of the rock, an abandominium.

Over debris, clothes, beer cans, and drug paraphernalia I passed through the living room, crouched under a long board that's presumably been set up as a barrier between the kitchen and further entryway into the abandominium for a less able-bodied person. My first and last self-guided tour of an Anacostia abandominium.

I give Alston-El a call, telling him what I saw.

"What's the waiting list for housing in this city, 45,000? Me and you could find that many units and more in all these abandominiums," Alston-El says. A painter-by-trade, Alston-El repeats his lament, "They fix these places up and then there'd be jobs for everyone from the community who can work with their hands. It could create some small businesses. Yeah, but they don't want to do that, you see, because it would save the neighborhood. But, nope, too much like right."

In the Barry Farm community there are two historic homes on the 2700 block of Wade Road, SE that are not included in the city's thus-far unrealized redevelopment plans. Dews' home at 2717 Wade Road, built in the early 1920s, is one of the two.

"When they do that redevelopment, it doesn't matter to me. I plan on having my senior citizen's apartment," said Dews. "See, this is not part of the dwellings," he says, referring to the neighboring public housing project of Barry Farm Dwellings.

Yet, Dews has noticed recent changes that have affected his family's two-story home, one of the last remaining houses in the neighborhood with a basement. In recent years, a sidewalk was installed out front of the house. During his childhood and adolescence, Dews said it was a dirt road.

"I've watched them change the houses down there twice since I was coming up," he remembers, citing an influx of refugees from the urban renewal efforts in Southwest Washington. "At first it wasn't those big houses. It was little what we called shotgun houses. Open the front door and see through the back door. Back in the 40s & 50s."

Born in 1949, Dews says, "Most of the neighbors I know died."

Even with turnover in the area's housing, there was always a tight community. "It really didn't change the neighborhood that bad. See Barry Farm was always like a tribe," he said. Then, referring to the nearby Garfield Heights neighborhood, he added "they had the Garfields on the other side of the bridge. They didn't come over here and we didn't go over there. It was no guns, it was sticks and baseball bats back then, and fists."

During our conversation, along with local filmmaker and artist Tendani Mpulubusi, Dews shared some insights into his background. "I'm one of the original Teenorama dancers," Dews says reticently of the popular local teenage dance show of the 1960s. "I got on the cameras a couple times."

Dews and his extended family are well-known in southeast Washington. They were members of the Seafayers Yacht Club, founded in 1945 as the nation's oldest black yacht club. At one time, Dews owned a 55 foot boat.

He credits his life's success to his father. "My father had a third grade education. I thought he was the dumbest mother-(expletive) in the world, back then. But after I grew up I realized he was the smartest man in the world with a third grade education," Dews recalls fondly. "He always lectured us and whooped our ass."

Saint Teresa of Avilla Avila, at the northwest corner of 13th and V streets SE, is the oldest Roman Catholic Church in DC east of the Anacostia River. It was originally part of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, because the Vatican did not make the City of Washington a separate archdiocese until 1939. St. Teresa, in fact, is older than the Archdiocese of Washington by more than a half century.

The new church was greeted with great enthusiasm even before it was finished being built. An April 1879 Washington Post article describing the laying of its cornerstone also reports of a celebratory parade, saying:

The route was determined on as follows: from City hall, down Four-and-a-half street to Pennsylvania avenue, thence to St. Peter's church, where the visiting clergy and others will join the procession, thence across the navy yard bridge to Uniontown. With regard to the formation of the line, it is thought that it will be the same on St. Patrick's day, except that there will be five divisions instead of four, the colored societies making the fifth.

When Saint Teresa opened its doors in the fall of 1879 Uniontown had a hotel, post office, police substation with mounted patrols while Henry A. Griswold's single-horse streetcar ran every 20 minutes. Frederick Douglass, the United States Marshal for the city lived just down the street.

According to The Anacostia Story. by the turn of the 20th century black parishioners were dissatisfied with the limited role they were permitted; African Americans were relegated to celebrate Mass in the church basement.

In response a group under the name "Mission of St. Teresa" organized to establish a separate church and parish for African American Catholics. Others changed their affiliation and went crosstown to Saint Augustine, the city's mother church for black Catholics since 1858, four years before the city's emancipation.

By 1920 ground was dug, dirt was moved, cement was turned and cornerstone laid for Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church on Morris Road SE, on the grounds of Fort Stanton.

According to Cultural Tourism DC, this was the second formal division of St. Teresa's. The first occurred when white parishioners left to establish Assumption Catholic Church in what had been the village hall for Congress Heights at 611 Alabama Avenue SE on April 2, 1916.

As the neighborhood's demographics began to change in the 1960s and the neighborhood became increasingly African American, the congregation of Saint Teresa changed as well. In 1976 Saint Teresa received its first African-American pastor. On a recent visit, with the exception of some college students, the overwhelming majority of worshipers are African American.

Today, Saint Teresa is one of more than a dozen historic churches in greater Anacostia still going strong, an important and familiar neighbor for parts of three centuries.

Excerpts from this post originally appeared in a 2010 article for East of the River.

This photo by Theodor Horydczak (1890-1971), one of more than 14,000 photos of his available through the Library of Congress's American Memory series, captures Anacostia's iconic neon signage in January 1947.

Commercial neon lighting signage first appeared at a Paris barbershop a couple of years before the outbreak of World War I. The new signs, sometimes referred to as "liquid fire," arrived in the United States in 1923. From conversations with Anacostia residents and initial research, Anacostia's sign appears to date back to the early 1940s.

"This is one of the best abandominiums around," Alston-El said, peering through an opening into one of the building's basements, spotting scattered drug paraphernalia. "This is where they come to shoot the dope at. They jump in and jump out."

Walking the streets of Anacostia, at the turn of every corner, Alston-El is greeted with shout-outs and recognition. Speaking authoritatively about his community and its problems, Alston-El says, "When people talk about the good things happening in Anacostia, I wonder who they are talking about. They're not talking for me or people I know."

The people he speaks for are those who occupy Anacostia's vacant homes and apartment buildings and convert them to their own safe houses.

"On a scale of 1 to 10, Anacostia's abandominiums are a 2," says Bill Jackson, the last occupant of 2228 Martin Luther King, Jr. Avenue SE. "But the reason folks run up in abandominiums is because they get tired of the shelters with their rules and regulations. If you find an abandominium uptown people notice, but in Anacostia nobody seems to notice or care."

Sadly, "they're safer than shelters," Alston-El says. "You don't have to worry about fighting with somebody. You don't have to worry about rats, because there's no food."

The misfortune is not in the people who squat in abandominiums, but those who own them and let them scar the neighborhood, say Alston-El.

1401 Bangor Street SE

Behind the three vacant High Street properties, across the alley, is another vacant building on Bangor Street SE.

While looking in the open rear basement door a neighbor calls out at me, "Hey, what are you doing? I'm calling the police! Get on!" I quickly identify and introduce myself.

The neighbor, speaking on the condition of anonymity, opens up about the ongoing problems with the property, a nearly 4500 square foot red brick building built in 1945.

"This building used to be for seniors, but they moved everybody out and tried to flip it," the neighbor said. "But that didn't work and it's been vacant since."

According to tax records the multi-family property was sold in November 2002 for $75,000 and was last sold in April 2005 for $288,000. The building and the 1/8 acre lot it sits on are assessed at $385,700 according to city records.

"It's a problem with the drug boys, the homeless, the prostitutes, you name it," said the neighbor. "I called DCRA after calls to 311 went nowhere. They did come out and board up all the openings. But you can see that didn't last long."

In the small room leading from the open door beer cans are strewn on the floor alongside cigarette butts and empty packages of Backwoods cigars, used for rolling up weed. A hot water heater remains intact adjacent to the door.

Back outside on Bangor Street, two neighborhood men pass by. I ask them about the building and its impact on the community.

"If you're living in the streets, a vacant house is a roof over your head," said Jerry. His friend Maurice added, "Gray and all them, they could fix these places up. But see the thing of it is, is that you got money they sending across the water instead of taking care of your folks at home."

Walking past the Bangor Street building on a recent evening, I notice a light on on the second floor. On its east side three separate power lines run into the domicile. With a second floor rear window open, a bucket propped upside down on the ground below providing a step to ease entry to and fro, this abandominium is apparently occupied.

"When you find one with power and water you stay put," Alston-El says, "because you're living like a king. You turn that place into the 'hood version of a five star hotel. The only thing missing is room service."

1700 - 1720 W Street SE

While taking pictures of a boarded-up apartment complex on the 1700 block of W Street SE, two blocks from the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, someone calls out, "You guys finally going to get started?"

After explaining ourselves, Kirk Clark, a contractor who lives across the street, shared his memories of the collection of derelict three story buildings. Ivy is slowly encroaching on the banner pledging "Spacious 2BR/2 Bath Homes Coming Soon" at the Buxton Condos.

"When I got locked up in '87 it was open," says Clark. "I came home in '91 and it was closed. It's been closed ever since." The only other activity he's seen in and around the property, other than neighborhood children, has been the coming and going of Anacostia's displaced souls.

"They got a lot of homeless people out here who don't have nowhere to go. And when you leave a lot of abandoned buildings around that's where people are going to go so they can go sleep," Clark said.

Walking around to the back of the property, Alston-El and I ascend the stairs to the second level of one of the units and enter a former one bedroom apartment, stepping over a door that's been kicked in. A few wayward t-shirts and Gatorade bottles show someone has recently been here.

"Look," Alston-El says reaching up, "you can see they've cut all the copper out. I know how it's done because I used to do the same thing."

The properties, owned by the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, have an assessed value at just over $2.2 million.

"The most important matter," says Alston-El, "is that these places don't do anyone or the city any good. They don't generate any taxes and they don't generate any jobs."

"We got all these people, working people who need some place to live and can't find anything, yet this stuff is allowed by the city. They want to build something new, why not fix what's been here?"

All the while, across the river, a new tower crane pops up every few weeks. Is it any surprise some people in Anacostia feel resentment?

The best solution would be to make the sidewalks one each side of the bridge actually safe for pedestrians and cyclists. Unfortunately, that's almost impossible without actually reconfiguring the interchange to make it less like a cloverleaf.

The current curb ramps are very narrow and line up with sharp turns on the adjoining sidewalks, which is not ADA compliant. Cyclists can't easily navigate them. Fixing these would also help.

Meanwhile, there's a viable, and only slightly longer, third option: a bike and pedestrian work-around through Anacostia Park.

While this option seems like the safest route on a map, it is not without its share of challenges. DDOT and NPS could make this safer and more inviting, and perhaps make it a more popular option.

1. Improve wayfinding at the entrance to the path

There is a bike route sign at the start of the path. The sign is not visible if you are traveling eastbound on the bridge, as depicted in the photo above.

DDOT recently added wayfinding signs in Anacostia Park. However, if you aren't familiar with the area, it appears the path will only take you into the park. DDOT and NPS should consider adding a map at the entrance that shows how to access Pennsylvania Avenue SE via the park.

2. Repair the path

Having biked down this path, it is not a comfortable ride. The cracks and bumps on top of the steep slope can be intimidating for novice bicyclists. It's also dangerous for pedestrians with baby strollers.

In response, bicyclists have developed their own solution, and most going to the park prefer their carved path over the official one. This worn desire path has been here for years.

3. Make the area under the DC-295 bridges inviting

Once bicyclists and pedestrians enter the park, they must go under 3 bridge spans for 295. The sidewalks are in need of repair, and that could be a good first step. Another important element for cyclists would be replacing the in-line grates that can catch wheels and cause a cyclist to crash.

The bigger concern is the lack of adequate lighting along Nicholson Street SE and underneath the bridges. These photos were taken during the day. At night it is even darker. Brighter lighting and murals can enliven the area and make this route safer and more attractive.

The current interchange is really not designed to be safe for pedestrians and cyclists, and in the long run needs to be replaced with one that is more befitting its location in an urban area. Perhaps when the 11th Street Bridge is complete, some of the traffic from this area will relocate, but that alone won't solve the pedestrian and bicycle safety problem on the Sousa Bridge.

In the meantime, there are safety improvements that do not require expensive engineering solutions. DDOT and NPS can work together to make these low-cost aesthetic improvements throughout Anacostia Park to ultimately provide a safer route for pedestrians and bicyclists.

All photos are by Gerald Fittipaldi, P.E., a civil engineer from New Jersey, who met with me to discuss challenges to biking east of the Anacostia River. For additional photos, visit his DC - East of the Anacostia River album on Flickr.

The consolidated Planned Unit Development (PUD) map amendment that the developers are seeking would make some major changes to Sheridan Station. Originally, 53% of the 344 total units were to be renter occupied. Now the developers want to increase rentals to 75% of the total, while reducing the number of dwellings to 327.

Members of the community and ANC 8A commissioners, whose position is given "great weight" when the modification comes before the Zoning Commission, were outspoken in their opposition to these changes at last week's meeting.

"We can do that land bank strategy," said Matt Engle of William C. Smith. Although, this waiting game strategy could allow time for the market to come back around, there's a major caveat. If the $4 million does go back to the Treasury, the redevelopment's completion could be compromised.

"The housing authority struggled with this change," said Asmara Habte of the DC Housing Authority. "We did our own market research and we saw there just isn't a market to develop any more home ownership units."

Units priced at $328,000 and above are being appraised at just over $300,000. Complicating matters, said William C. Smith representatives, are the problems in nearby Henson Ridge, a HOPE VI project located on Alabama Avenue SE. Bank lenders have pointed to a recent short sale in Henson Ridge for $240,000 as a comparative sale that should guide Sheridan's price points.

"The banks are schizophrenic," Engle said.

As funding dries up nationwide for affordable housing programs and more than 40,000 people sit on the city's waiting lists for housing assistance, the demand for help greatly overwhelms the supply.

However, residents believe the dense concentration of public housing in Ward 8 is handcuffing economic development, by suppressing property values.

"We always accept, 'Well, we got to have a place to house people. We got to make the rents suitable for people,'" said Gregg Justice of ANC8A. "What about the people that are coming in the future?"

William C. Smith has been widely lauded by city officials as a responsible corporate citizen in Ward 8 for, among other projects, their development of THEARC on Mississippi Avenue. But some lifelong Anacostians said their initial skepticism is being confirmed.

Pointing to Sheridan Station's misleading website that heralds, "Steps away from Metro and trolley," Rev. Oliver Johnson, a former board member of the Anacostia Economic Development Corporation and Union Temple Community Development Corporation, says, "This dream has turned into a scheme that has turned into a nightmare."

The problems at Sheridan Station, within an area the city's branding as "CHASE" (Congress Heights, Anacostia, Saint Elizabeths), directly east of Sheridan Road, bound by Howard Road, Sayles Place, Bowen Place Road, Stanton Road, and Pomeroy Road will without a doubt have a reverberating impact on the nearby commercial corridor that has seen the recent closure of two eateries.

Last summer Carol Chatham, Vice President of Communications for William C. Smith, said, "Many eyes are watching the Sheridan project. Success at Sheridan will encourage further development along the MLK corridor."

What the potential failure of Sheridan Station means for the surrounding neighborhoods and greater Ward 8 is analogous to a modernized version of Charles Dickens' epoch "Tale of Two Cities."

The risk is that the city's population continues to swell, while Ward 8 shrinks. New restaurants, businesses, and opportunities for leisure enliven communities elsewhere in the city, but Anacostia and Ward 8 remain a commercial dead zone.

Unless something starts to change, East of the River, foreclosures and short sales will continue to be ubiquitous. And deserted 19th century homes will continue to decay as the elements slowly turn history to dust.

There is no new Ward 8. It's just more of the same old song; concentrated poverty, failing schools, and broken promises.

For a neighborhood that has been the recipient of two of the Obama Administration's most celebrated community development efforts, there's been little fanfare in the city outside this small patch of Ward 7. Fortunately, that's not holding the DC Promise Neighborhood Initiative (DCPNI) back.

DCPNI is a new 501(c)3 organization led by Irasema Salcido, founder and CEO of the Cesar Chavez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy, which has a Parkside campus. DCPNI organized a permanent Board of Directors in October 2011 and has been working since to pursue its goals for 2012. A January 2012 report by the Urban Institute outlines in great detail how DCPNI plans to transform the neighborhood.

Kenilworth-Parkside sits squeezed between the Anacostia River and DC-295 to the east and west, and a sprawling decommissioned Pepco plant and the District border to its north and south. The disadvantageous geography and years of disinvestment left Kenilworth-Parkside sinking further and further into disrepair.

Despite having Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens and its acres of green space in the neighborhood, Kenilworth-Parkside still shows all of the typical indicators of urban blight.

Statistics on the residents in the DCPNI footprint are dire. Median household incomes are barely half of the city's median. Rates of teenage births are some of the highest in the nation. Single females head 90% of families.

Yet, at least until now, it's lacked any kind of investment which many of DC's now "up-and-coming" neighborhoods have received.

Enter DCPNI. In 2008, Salcido launched the Initiative based on the principles of Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone. DCPNI launched their efforts after winning funding from the US Department of Education.

The 2012 plan is ambitious. DCPNI is proposing home visits to pregnant women and mothers of young children. They want to build a community library of children's books. For the neighborhood's school children, they will launching an experiential learning program to visits to local museums and monuments with directed classroom instruction.

DCPNI, which holds tours of the neighborhood on the fourth Thursday of every month, is perhaps the city's foremost example of a place-making initiative. They are taking all of the most current research on comprehensive, services-based community development and applying it to one unique geographic area.

DC should keep its eye on Kenilworth-Parkside. Stakeholders of the Choice planning grant will inevitably apply for implementation funding when it becomes available in an effort to revitalize more than 300 units of dilapidated public housing. In June, Educare, a brand-new early childhood education center serving 175 Headstart-eligible children, will open its doors.

Victory Square, a new senior affordable apartment building built by Victory Housing, began accepting applications this week and will open in the spring. And all the while, DCPNI continues to establish partnerships with local businesses and organizations and organize programs that aim to strike at the core of Kenilworth-Parkside's ills in just the way that Canada tackled a swath of Harlem.

Over the next few years, as the 21 Promise Neighborhoods get to work across the country, community development advocates will learn whether or not federal money can be applied to local community development initiatives successfully and efficiently to improve public health, housing and education outcomes.

Lucky for the DC region, there's a site right in our backyard to follow, support, and learn more about. You just have to know where to look.