Posts about Historic Preservation

The Historic Preservation Review Board worried that allowing the raze would encourage other property owners to just let buildings deteriorate and then apply to tear them down rather than spend the money to fix the historic structures. HPRB allowed the process to continue once DHCD created a plan to preserve the other 3 adjacent properties on the "Big K site," 2234, 2238 and 2252 MLK.

DHCD's neighborhood holdings

DHCD currently owns more than a half dozen properties, not including the Big K site, within the Anacostia Historic District, incorporated in the 1970s. It is looking for developers for 4 properties (1201 and 1203 Good Hope Road SE, 1615 V Street SE, and 1326 Valley Place SE).

A 3-story red brick apartment complex at 1700 to 1720 W Street SE is in the process of being sold, and 1648 U Street SE is moving through the Residential Turnkey Initiative, where the District retains ownership of properties during development.

With pressure from residents and the Historic Preservation Review Board, DHCD has "develop[ed] a more strategic approach to acquiring properties in the historic district, which would include a pre-acquisition analysis to determine the scope of work to stabilize a building," according to materials the agency submitted to the HPRB.

In other words, DHCD agrees that it shouldn't buy a building if it can't care for it.

DHCD also announced plans to work with the Historic Preservation Office to create a "pattern book" that "would suggest basic architectural styles that are representative of Anacostia's Historic District." This pattern book would guide developers of vacant lots to "ensure that DHCD-owned property is compatible with the historic district, while still providing opportunities for affordable housing," said Denise Johnson, a former HPRB member hired by DHCD to work on historic preservation issues.

The Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, which owns vacant properties in Anacostia, Deanwood, Trinidad/Ivy City, and other neighborhoods should also be guided by a similar preservation plan, HPRB members agreed.

Absent from both the community meeting earlier last week and Thursday's hearing was DHCD's Director John Hall. Catherine Buell, Chair of HPRB and a resident of the Anacostia Historic District, asked about Hall's whereabouts. The answer: Hall has to prepare for February budget hearings.

With Councilmembers Jim Graham and Michael Brown calling for an investigation into DHCD, Hall should make a conscientious effort to be as accessible and transparent as possible. However, his recent absence hints at problems for an organization that looks to be coming under newfound and needed scrutiny.

Memories

When Rosalind Wheeler Styles was growing up at 2228 Nichols Avenue SE in the 1960s she often sat on the front porch watching the activity of the street below.

"You could watch people going into the Safeway, going to the drug store to get an ice cream float, or going to the Curtis Brothers furniture store," said Styles, who remembers an Anacostia long since changed.

Hawkins, whose community center at 2263 Mount View Place SE is across the alley behind the wood frame home, has more immediate memories of the home and its deterioration. The Kushner family, notorious owners of the Big K Liquor store, woefully neglected the property, which was last occupied in the 1970s.

"There was trash everywhere. Homeless men were sleeping on the back porch," said Hawkins, who recalls repeatedly chasing off squatters until a fence was erected around the lot some years ago.

Although not required to notify the lot's conterminous neighbors, the city government has failed to make a good faith effort to contact Hawkins or Dale Richardson, the owner of Astro Motors at 2226 MLK Avenue, about the city's pending plans to demolish 2228.

Until a recent visit from Ward 8 Councilmember Marion Barry's staff, Hawkins had not heard from city officials and subsequently decried the city's handling of the property as "criminal" at a meeting at DHCD's headquarters, a short walk from the community center.

Hawkins chastised city officials as "interlopers" who antagonize residents by imposing their plans on communities not before the fact, but after. "And I don't plan to try to play catch up. If you're not going to knock on my door or call me on the telly then so be it," finished Hawkins.

"That house means a lot to me because it was a refuge for me," said Bill Jackson, who first crept into 2228 MLK in November of 2010 to seek shelter from the streets. Jackson, now in an apartment off Southern Avenue, says the home's demolition "will be a sad day for a lot of people in the neighborhood."

Former owner Roger Fons bought the then-closed Old Town Theater in 2003 with the intention of opening a live music venue but it quickly became a movie theater once again.

The Old Town Theater was in a thriving and popular part of town, a "date night" area. It was a unique building surrounded by a supportive community. With the right approach, it could have become a destination in its own right.

Instead, it was a mess. The theater was not cleaned well. Posters and lighting units were stored in plain sight. Movies never started on time, leaving patrons crowded in the small lobby or spilling out onto the sidewalk.

One reason the movies never started on time is that Fons couldn't resist a captive audience. When there was a full house, instead of showing coming attractions, Fons would stand in front of the theater and opine about anything that happened to be on his mind. The topics were generally related to the movie industry, but he would sometimes meander into stranger topics such as military conspiracy theories and tips on safe driving.

For years, the theater did not work with online services such as Fandango. The theater's Facebook presence was not consistently maintained, even though it once generated significant activity.

Fons did not recognize the neighborhood demographic and staged movies inappropriate for the old, small theater. Old Town residents are more likely to want to see smaller, arty, independent movies than big Hollywood blockbusters. Non-residents tend to come to Old Town for "date night" trips. Neither of these audiences wanted to see "Twilight" or "The Hangover." Those who do want to see blockbuster movies such as "Transformers" want to see them on the biggest screen possible with the full surround sound experience. The Old Town Theater could never compete on those technical fronts.

But it could have competed on another front. There are very few theaters in Northern Virginia which show independent films. Fons could have carved out a niche into that market. He was told this by many people many times over the years. He said that he tried but that no one came.

New owner Rob Kaufman said he has tried to find and is looking for a tenant who will keep the space a theater. But Kaufman said consultants have told him the space is not financially viable as a theater. Kaufman has also received permission from the Board of Architectural Review to proceed with a plan to demolish the 1940s-era marquee and box office, making the chances of the space reaching 100 years as a movie theater seem very slim. Rumor has it that J. Crew is interested in the space.

Despite the sale of the property and the planned destruction of the marquee, with proper management, marketing and demographic understanding, the Old Town Theater could be a charming gem instead of an ersatz dump.

In its earliest days, the theatre hosted vaudeville, musicals, road shows, stock company productions, and even a circus or two. For a short time during the Great Depression the building hosted a church, but by 1931 the theatre was restored to a lively performance space. Over the decades the theatre hosted stars of jazz, rock-n-roll, rhythm and blues, and some early front-runners of go-go.

Unable to survive the economic troubles of the era, the Howard Theatre closed shortly after the 1968 riots that decimated so much of central Washington. It re-opened in the mid-1970s, but closed again by the early 1980s. It has been shuttered for the past 3 decades.

Immortalized in song and verse by Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer and others, the theatre's pending reopening, along with the adjacent development of Progression Place on 7th Street, is already triggering memories of Washington's "Black Broadway."

"The Howard was the first major theatre built for and by black folks," said Timothy A. Jones, ANC 4C08, as he gripped a binder filled with photocopies of old photos, show programs, and newspaper clippings.

"The Howard seems to have been a place where local kids who thought they might be able to be musicians could come hang out back stage. Several discovered that they did want to be musicians," says Blair A. Rube, author of Washington's U Street.

The ground breaking for the renovations was held in early September, 2010, just weeks after the theatre's centennial anniversary.

Unfortunately, not much from the building's interior could be saved. According to construction project manager Ryan Colombo, water damage caused by leaks in the roof had destroyed most of the interior.

The renovated interior will have a standing room capacity of around 1,000, and seating capacity of between 400 and 500. There will be fewer than 100 permanent seats, all of which will be located on the 2nd floor balcony. The first floor will be flexible for either standing or banquet seating. The renovated stage will include DJ booths set to either side.

A new basement has been built which will have bathrooms, dressing rooms, a green room, and a large kitchen.

On the exterior, the façade's original 17 windows have been restored. Additionally, a new free standing statue will be added to the building's front. The statue will consist of stainless steel rods in the shape of a trumpet player, and will be called "Jazz Man".

In 2002, the DC Preservation League named the Howard one of its Most Endangered Places. According to Executive Director Rebecca Mller, "The Howard is a cultural as well as an architectural landmark." It is gratifying to see it restored and put to good use.

With the re-opening of the Howard Theatre, the revitalization of the U Street district continues to creep eastward, bringing neighborhoods back to life and returning a piece of the city's past glory.

A version of this story appeared in The Washington Informer.

DDOT sent the Congo and the State Department a letter a month ago, finding that the paving violated DC regulations. That was the basis for the State Department's follow-up letter telling the Congo to take the paving out.

Another successful fix comes from Mount Pleasant, where ANC commissioner Jack McKay alerted us recently to a change that had destroyed the pedestrian walkway along Irving Street. This section, where Irving climbs from Adams Mill Road along the edge of Rock Creek up into the neighborhood, has high-speed traffic and no sidewalk.

McKay wrote,

...that bit of road is also a vital pedestrian link between a bus stop and the Harvard Towers, a 193-unit DCHA structure housing mostly the aged and the disabled. Being aged and/or disabled, the residents mostly take the bus, and for years walked in the street, into oncoming traffic, to reach this bus stop.

But in 2006 the Mount Pleasant ANC persuaded DDOT to build a temporary barrier of jersey wall, creating a safe pedestrian passageway to that bus stop. (The ANC also purchased a bench for that bus stop, which DDOT installed so that those folks would no longer have to sit on an uncomfortable guard rail while awaiting the bus.)

Initially there was a series of posts in the street to guide drivers away from that jersey barrier and into the traffic lane. The posts gradually vanished, ampu­tated by careless drivers. That left the jersey wall barrier exposed in the street, with only the post mounting hump remaining to direct cars away from it.

Recently, the jersey barrier was moved over, creating a less crash-prone arrangement for the speeding cars but blocking the path for pedestrians.

Was this a misguided DDOT crew thinking they were making the road "safer"? We don't know, but after being alerted to the situation, DDOT restored the jersey barriers to their correct spots and added one of the sand-filled crash barrels.

This stretch of road still feels like a highway, and crash barrels are more usually seen on high-speed highways than local streets, but making the roadways in and around Rock Creek Park more hospitable to all modes is a longer-term issue that will involve additional significant changes from both DDOT and the National Park Service. Meanwhile, it's great that residents can at least walk safely to their bus stop.

The land beginning just in front of the porch all the way to the street is actually public space, not part of the lot. DC laws prohibit parking cars in public space, even when there is a driveway. However, many embassies nevertheless park cars there, and there's little or nothing DC can do about it.

On the question of the trees, representatives from the embassy assured community members they could build the driveway without killing the trees, but many with experience from other projects were doubtful. In the end, the embassy withdrew its request for the driveway, but received approval to convert a walled-in rear yard into a parking lot as well as to add a flagpole.

Then, in September, the embassy paved the entire yard and removed all of the trees. Members of the Dupont Conservancy asked the State Department to intervene, and the Dupont Circle Citizens Association protested outside the building.

The ambassador told the Examiner that they never promised not to pave over the yard. Plus, though they had promised not to build the driveway, he said that nobody can stop them from building the driveway if they wanted to.

Apparently DDOT and the State Department don't see it that way. In the letter, Cliff Seagroves of the State Department says,

The District of Columbia's Department of Transportation (DDOT) has investigated this matter and informed the Embassy in a letter dated November 17, 2011, that the referenced action constitutes a violation of the Board of Zoning Adjustment's Notice of Final Rulemaking and Determination and Order (No. 18162), issued on March 8, 2011. DDOT has further informed the Embassy that it is required to remove the unauthorized paving from public space and replace it with DDOT-approved landscaping within thirty days of the date of DDOT's letter.

Subsequent to the delivery of DDOT's letter, the Department of State again formally raised this matter with the Congolese Embassy, advising that it expects the Embassy to comply with the DDOT's requirement that it take prompt, corrective action.

Seagroves adds that he recently toured the interior and feels the Republic of Congo has been taking great care to restore the property.

DDOT's 30-day deadline ends December 17. Will the embassy heed the requests of neighbors, DDOT, and the State Department and take out? Sadly, no corrective action can restore the mature trees, but landscaping will be far more appealing, and appropriate, than the completely paved-over yet empty yard.

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.

Not all has vanished. Lost describes how the Art Deco Greyhound Bus Terminal at 1100 New York Avenue NW, built in 1940, was saved from the wrecking ball. Following the 1968 riots and with construction of Metro, downtown in the 1970's was gritty and grimy, as was the bus station, which closed in 1976. The building was then enclosed with ugly "concrete asbestos panels and a squat-looking metal mansard roof."

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.

By the 1960s, the neighborhood was changing. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968 and the ensuing riots, the theater's old clientele were virtually gone. The following year, the theater switched to a Spanish-language format, the first theater in DC to cater to the burgeoning Latino community.

By the early 1970s, Sunday afternoons at the Ontario became the social center of the Latino community. Extended families would show up every week; for recent immigrants, spending Sunday at the Ontario represented a chance to attend an enjoyable, affordable social event on the one day of the week they had free.

This stability was threatened in 1977 when new owners took over and tried to convert the theater back to its former first-run format, on the theory that Adams Morgan had been taken over by yuppies. "There is no Spanish Community here any more," one of the new owners was quoted as saying. In response, Latinos picketed the theater, issuing a statement asking, "Who says we don't exist?" The Spanish-language films were soon restored to the all-important Sunday afternoon time slot.

Throughout the rest of the week, the Ontario took on a new life as the venue for some of the leading rock and punk bands of the era, including The Clash, Blondie, U2, and the Police. The promoter who booked these and other artists would go on to organize the celebrated 930 Club downtown in the mid 1980s. At that time, the Ontario was sold yet again, and the new owners tried to re-establish a first-run movie format.

The attempt didn't work this time either, and the theater closed in 1987. The building was then divided up for various retail businesses, including a drug store, discount store, and other shops. The theater has been vacant for the last several years.

The Historic Preservation Review Board is scheduled to consider a landmark nomination for the Ontario at its November meeting. The current owners are reportedly considering redeveloping the property as condominiums.

It would certainly be a shame if nothing can be saved of the Ontario. Besides its rich cultural history, the theater is also unique architecturally, representing a mid-century modern aesthetic as expressed by one the leading movie theater architects of the 20th century, John J. Zink, who also designed the Uptown Theatre.

The Ontario, of course, isn't nearly as beloved as the Uptown, and it has several potential strikes against it. Many people just don't care for the mid-century style, which has far fewer followers than does the art deco design of the Uptown. Additionally it's been decades since it was actually in use as a theater. An entire generation hasn't had the chance to see a movie there. Furthermore, it's run-down and simply looks ratty.

There have been other occasions when historic buildings were destroyed because they were decaying and dilapidated. Perhaps the most notable was Rhodes Tavern, one of the most historic buildings in the city at the time, which was torn down in 1984 despite a citywide referendum endorsing the need to preserve it.

Built around 1800, the little tavern at 15th and F Streets NW, had been one of the first meeting places of the young city's new government. Designated an historic landmark, it was the subject of an intense effort at preservation. But it was in bad shape. Part of it had been torn down in the 1930s, and the remainder looked out-of-place and even "ugly," in many critics' view. So in the end it came down and was replaced by a large, respectable-looking office building.

Will the Ontario share this same fate? Should it? Isn't there some way to develop this underused property without completely obliterating the old theater?