Posts about History

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 August 1814, with British troops descending on Washington's federal core, local citizens burned the Eastern Branch Bridge (the Anacostia River was then known as the Eastern Branch of the Potomac) to imperil their advance.

On the night of Good Friday, April 14, 1865 John Wilkes Booth made his escape over the Navy Yard Bridge, through Uniontown (now Historic Anacostia), to southern Maryland after shooting President Lincoln at Ford's Theatre.

Today, as part of a massive public works project, a new 11th Street Bridge is on the cusp of reopening.

Additionally, the Kiplinger family, long-time HSW benefactors, donated more than 4,000 prints, photographs, paintings, documents, and DC historical ephemera last month.

With Kiplinger collection, HSW's holdings documenting local history are now comparable to those in the DC Public Library's Washingtoniana Division and Peabody Room, and in the Library of Congress. Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, George Washington University, recent recipient of the collection of Albert Small, National Archives, and DC Archives also contain material pertinent to city history.

"We have always sought to have our collection seen, enjoyed, and used by everyone from scholarly researchers to the general public," said Knight Kiplinger, editor in chief and chairman of the Kiplinger organization. "The Historical Society of Washington, with its large exhibition galleries in the grand Carnegie Library building on Mount Vernon Square, will be an ideal repository for our pieces."

Jerry A. McCoy, a special collections librarian for the DC Public Library's Washingtoniana Division and Peabody Room, is pleased to see the library reopening. "It is important for researchers to have access to the resources that the Historical Society holds, and as a long-time member I am elated to see them back in business," McCoy said.

"Historical Society leaders, members, and volunteer friends will celebrate Dr. King's memory by committing themselves to a Day of Service providing the Washington community with opportunities to learn more about the Society's collections and how to use them to explore their own personal stories," said Julie Koczela, chair of HSW's Bboard of Trustees.

According to Koczela, the Kiplinger collection is currently in crates in the east gallery. Once cataloged, the collection will join the more than 100,000 pieces already in HSW's collection.

President Lincoln's second inaugural party in March 1865 took place at the Old Patent Office Building at this intersection. Today, that structure is home to the National Portrait Gallery.

The corner is also home to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library and an entrance to the Gallery Place-Chinatown Metro station.

In the old image, streetcars prepare to head northbound on 9th Street NW, now a one-way southbound street. Clumps of snow are melting in the street. American flags hang between the columns of the Old Patent Office Building. Across the street a dentist and cigar shop are where today is a YWCA and a Segway tour company.

Too rural for street addresses, the German Orphan Asylum at 2300 Good Hope Road wasn't given an address until 1945. It first opened its doors in August 1880. Today, the Marbury Plaza apartment complex looms over Good Hope Road where the orphanage previously stood.

"In the second half of the nineteenth century, Washington's native-born and immigrant German population was significant in numbers," writes Mona E. Dingle in 1996's Urban Odyssey, A Multicultural History of Washington, DC. At their peak presence, Germans represented 10% of the city's population, significantly less than Chicago and Baltimore where nearly one-quarter of city residents were of German ancestry.

With an increase in the city's German population, a concern emerged to care "for orphans and the aged." In 1879 parishioners of Concordia German Evangelical Lutheran Church at 20th & G Street NW began to raise money for an asylum for needy German orphans. With financial support from leaders within the city's established and emerging German American community, the "German Protestant Orphan Asylum Association of the District of Columbia" was incorporated with a twenty year charter from Congress. The Protestant designation was later stricken from the title to allow admission of children of other religions and eventually non-German children were accepted.

"Admission requirements, based on race and age, stipulated that a child must be of the white race … at least three (3) years old but not over eleven (11) years,'" according to Louise Daniel Hutchinson's seminal 1977 work, The Anacostia Story: 1608-1930. These restrictions were relaxed in later years.

Before the turn of the century, the German Orphan Asylum was one of the first institutions built for the care and welfare of children in Anacostia, but other charitable efforts soon followed. The Stoddard Baptist Home for "colored elderly and indigent women" was founded in the Garfield community near Hamilton Road, present-day Alabama Avenue. In 1904 the Episcopal Diocese expanded its work to provide "for winter service to homeless children at Anacostia, D.C." according to Hutchinson.

Local beer manufacturer Christian Heurich, known for his popular "Senate" beer, was one of the earliest benefactors of the German orphanage. Later contributors included local department store owner Julius Garfinckel.

Simon Wolf, a German Jewish immigrant and successful lawyer, assisted the orphanage, with funding from Congress, in purchasing the 32-acre Good Hope Hill Farm from Captain Samuel G. and Flora Cabell in what is today the Fairlawn neighborhood. With the help of Wolf and friends of the asylum, a new brick building was constructed and dedicated in October 1890. The asylum had formerly occupied space in downtown Washington.

"The new two-story home, perched on top of Good Hope Hill measured 52 feet x 100 feet, and was designed to accommodate up to 80 children," according to, "To Help A Child: The History of the German Orphan Home," an article in the 2006 edition of Washington History by local historian Anna Watkins.

According to Census records from 1900, the orphanage had 52 "inmates" and was run by the Henry and Elizabeth Harrold along with their four daughters and one son.

The board of directors controlled the admission and release of the children, and selected their schools until they reached the age of about 14. The youngsters were then placed in carefully surveyed homes where they worked as household help or nannies, or were assigned as an apprentice to a trade or profession. The board retained responsibility for the children until they reached legal adulthood. The older adolescents attended public school in Anacostia, while the younger ones prepared for school at the asylum.

The orphanage taught, studied, and used both German and English. Due to the national mood during World War I, the board decreed in 1918 that use of the English language would take precedent "because we must show ourselves thoroughly patriotic and loyal; we are American in every sense of the word and proud of it." During this time the American flag was raised daily on the main building. However, in 1929, when an illustrated 50th anniversary history book was published, it was done so in both languages.

The Orphanage's relocation

With the growth and development of Washington following World War II the neighborhood dynamics around the orphanage began to change.

"Increasingly developed with housing and institutions, the area was no longer conducive to having children do farm chores as heavy traffic sped down the hill bordering the property," according to Watkins. Long-time Superintendent George Christman "noticed that more people were walking across the home's grounds. Some ran dogs on the property, teenagers had parties and played games there displaying loud and annoying behavior, and drunks used the front steps to take a rest."

With the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 and other factors, such as the construction of the Barry Farm housing development and urban renewal of the SW waterfront, the demographics of the surrounding neighborhoods began to shift. Herein the orphans began to face difficulties in the neighborhood schools.

The board began to consider relocating and selling their property on Good Hope Road. In early 1964, developer Charles Smith offered to rent the property for 99 years at a price that allowed the orphanage to relocate. The Smith Company would later demolish the facilities and build the present-day apartment complex Marbury Plaza.

Soon thereafter the directors of the orphanage purchased a large parcel of land in Prince George's County, opening a new home on Melwood Road in Upper Marlboro, Maryland in 1965. In December 1978, at the end of the semester, the orphanage closed to its last student.

According to land records, the two-story red brick building at 2021 Martin Luther King, Jr. Avenue SE was constructed in 1906. With more than 3,000 square feet, the building has held temporary office space for non-profits in recent years but is currently without a tenant.

Launched in Ohio with 100 unemployed men, the protest moved through Pennsylvania, gathering strength. In the spring of 1894, Coxey's Army arrived 500 strong in Washington. Public interest and attention quickly fizzled, however, after Coxey and his followers were arrested for trespassing on the Capitol grass while trying to storm Congress.

Two decades later, in 1914, Coxey regenerated his army of "tramps" and marched on DC again. This time, Coxey was able to address a crowd from the steps of the US Capitol without being arrested; but his march made little lasting impact on the city or on national policy.

Resurrection City

After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968, leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference continued plans already in motion to descend upon Washington. Members of the Poor People's Campaign, focusing on inequity in employment and housing, arrived in DC in mid-May. In the shadows of the Lincoln Memorial, the epicenter of 1963's March on Washington, "Resurrection City" quickly but haphazardly formed with a collection of self-constructed shacks. Deluged by rain and poor planning, the group quickly became a burden to the Johnson administration. By that summer, the protest had disintegrated.

According to the July 5th edition of Time Magazine,

Churning through the trash-strewn gumbo that had once been a manicured meadow, a federal bulldozer last week interred the last traces of Resurrection City. Its few remaining inhabitants scattered or imprisoned, the shantytown capital and symbol of the Poor People's Campaign had long since become an ugly, anarchic embarrassment to their cause.

Bonus Army

The Great Depression's Bonus Army is arguably the most well-known occupation-style protest that Washington has seen. According to The Bonus Army: An American Epic

In the summer of 1932, at the height of the Depression, some 45,000 World War 1 veterans - whites and blacks together - descended on Washington, DC from all over the country to demand the bonus promised them eight years earlier for their wartime service. earing violence after the Senate defeated the "bonus bill" Herbert Hoover's Army Chief of Staff, Douglass MacArthur led tanks through the streets on July 28 to evict the bonus marchers.

Set up on on the site of the old Anacostia flats, men, women, and children alike camped in structures built from materials scavenged from a nearby dump, but in a tightly-controlled environment in which veterans laid out streets, built sanitation facilities, and created an internal civil structure.

With martial law invoked, the Army set the shacks ablaze, and the veterans and their families left the city. Whether a result of the Bonus Army or not, that fall, President Hoover lost in a landslide to Franklin Roosevelt. Eventually, in 1936, Congress passed the "Bonus Act" that would pay out nearly $2 billion to WWI veterans.

If past is prologue and we can glean lessons from these past protests, Occupy DC and Stop the Machine might have ignominious conclusions. Time—and perhaps the onset of winter—will be the judge.

The Star began inauspiciously enough in December 1852, one of dozens of newspapers that sprang up for limited runs in 19th century Washington City. In fact, two other DC newspapers had already used the Star name, the Columbian Star from 1822 to 1827, and the first Washington Star in 1841.

The third Star, the one that would matter, began as a four-page broadsheet with a run of 250 copies, printed on a hand press in a small office at 8th and D Streets, NW. The paper's first owner, Captain Joseph Borrows Tate, sought to distinguish the Star from all the other rags published throughout the city by striking a tone of impartiality: "The Star is to be free from party trammels or sectarian influences...devoted in an especial manner to the local interests of the beautiful city which bears the honored name of Washington."

The paper's neutral stance and focus on local news became its trademark and, in time, gave it broad appeal and commercial success. It also led at times to overly innocuous reportage, as in this oft-quoted remark by reporter William Tucker that appeared in the paper's first edition: "Our courts are sitting, but the business with which they are engaged is not of a very interesting character."

Tate sold the paper within a year to William Wallach (1812-1871), an aggressive Texan who worked hard to build up the business, moving its office to the southwest corner of 11th and Pennsylvania in 1854.

Wallach hired a promising young reporter, Crosby S. Noyes (1825-1908), in 1853, and Noyes quickly became the Star's star. One of his many assignments was to report on the hanging of John Brown at Harper's Ferry, WV, in 1859, which he did in flowery, dramatic prose. The Star maintained an anti-slavery stance in those days and, once the Civil War began, was decidedly pro-Union, despite the strong Southern sentiments then common in Washington.

The paper grew in prestige during the war years, aided by its exclusive connections with an early incarnation of the Associated Press. Through the AP, the Star's vivid coverage of the war's impact on Washington was relayed across the country. The New York Times often reprinted war reports from the pages of the Star, and the paper's prestige increased. Supposedly, as soon as Abraham Lincoln finished delivering his second inaugural address, he handed the text to Crosby Noyes so that it could be printed in the Star.

In 1867, Wallach retired and the paper was bought by Noyes and four other investors: Samuel H. Kauffmann (1829-1906), Alexander "Boss" Shepherd (1835-1902), Clarence D. Baker, and George W. Adams. Shepherd, who would become governor of DC in 1873, sold his share of the enterprise within a few years, as did Baker, and Adams remained a behind-the-scenes investor. That left Noyes and Kauffmann to establish a family dynasty that would preside over the Star for another 100 years. Noyes exercised editorial control, while Kauffmann served as publisher and handled the business side.

In 1881, the Star was forced to move from its quarters on the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue to make way for construction of the grand Post Office Department building, so well-known now for its iconic clock tower. Kauffmann and Noyes decided to move directly across the street to a narrow, four-story building on the northwest corner of 11th and Pennsylvania.

The paper was steadily growing during these years, and the new building was almost immediately too small. The company gradually acquired adjacent properties on Pennsylvania and 11th until it had a large enough plot to build a monumental skyscraper of a building.

The project began in 1897 with many of the leading architects of the day participating in a competition to design the Star's new home. James G. Hill, architect of such prominent buildings as the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and the Stoneleigh Court Apartments, submitted a proposal, as did the firm of Hornblower & Marshall, designers of the Smithsonian's Natural History Building, and Glenn Brown (1854-1932), an influential secretary of the American Institute of Architects and author of the landmark History of the United States Capitol.

The winner, however, was William J. Marsh (1864-1926). Marsh had just started an independent practice with Walter G. Peter (1868-1945), whom he had met while they were both working at Hornblower & Marshall. Marsh may have had the inside track on this competition since he had previously designed homes for Crosby Noyes and two of his sons.

Marsh designed an ostentatious, marble-faced office tower in the then-fashionable Beaux-Arts style. The shining white structure was a powerful statement of the Star's position of power and pre-eminence. In comparison, the Washington Post's smaller grey-granite building up the street, done in the Romanesque-Revival style, looked out-of-date. A postcard of the new building unabashedly proclaims, "The Evening Star Building of white marble is the most beautiful newspaper building in the world."

The building was completed and opened for business in June 1900. As described in great detail in the rival Washington Times, its interior held many wonders. Inside the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance, one passed through a marble-clad lobby to the richly-decorated business office.

The walls were clad in exquisite white Paonazzo marble from the famous Carrara quarries of Italy and carved into elegant Renaissance Revival arches and pilasters. Frederick Dielman (1847-1935), a celebrated painter who had recently produced murals for the new Library of Congress building, was commissioned to prepare seven great allegorical paintings of the newspaper industry for the lunettes in the upper portions of the walls. The effect was of being in a Renaissance church or grand library rather than the business office of a newspaper.

Editorial offices were on the seventh floor, with a commanding view of the city from the windows to the west and south. Editors (the news editor, city editor, telegraph editor) had their desks along the windows, all equipped with telephones, electric bells, and pneumatic tubes for sending messages around the building.

The open space in the middle of the room was filled with roll-top reporters' desks, a typewriter on each. On the other side, a row of telephones stood at the ready, providing instant communications with the Senate, House of Representatives, City Hall, and District Building. It was the height of modern journalistic efficiency.

On the eighth floor was the composing room, in a double space that extended through the ninth floor to provide a cavernous, skylit working space. It was outfitted with 18 of the latest Morgenthaler linotype machines, sophisticated devices that set lines of type in cast bars of lead for use on the two enormous printing presses down in the basement. The equally large basement printing plant included not just the presses but also electric generating equipment capable of independently supporting all of the building's needs.

Management of the paper passed to a new generation with the deaths of Samuel Kauffmann in 1906 and Crosby Noyes in 1908. Two of Noyes' sons took over, Frank taking Kauffmann's place as president in 1906 and his brother Theodore becoming editor in 1908. Under the Noyes brothers, the Star's greatest period of expansion took place, and it became one of the most profitable newspapers in the business. It continued to focus on local news and printed only the safest of opinions on its editorial pages, thus ensuring that none of its many advertisers were offended.

Meanwhile, its competitors languished. The Post had sullied its reputation by seeming to incite the race riots of 1919. According to Constance McLaughlin Green, "Newspapermen despised the Washington Post, a 'poison sheet' without moral integrity." Of the other two major papers, the Times had "swung far to the right," according to Green, thus marginalizing itself, while the Herald "offered a bland diet only occasionally spiced with biting, politically loaded comments." With such anemic competition, the Star could afford to be arrogant.

In 1918, the company built a large annex next to the original building along 11th Street, and it became the industrial heart of the expanded business. The new space was equipped with no less than 34 Morgenthaler linotype machines and four presses in the basement.

On an average day, 890 4-pound ingots of lead were melted down to make the day's press plates. (The metal was melted down and re-used each day.) A typical print run in 1927 was 100,000 copies of a 32-page paper, requiring 38 massive rolls of newsprint, or 596 miles of paper. The finished papers were loaded on to 17 trucks for distribution across the city each weekday afternoon and Sunday morning.

Everyone seems to agree that the real turning point for the newspaper—from rising star to falling star, as it were—came in 1954, when the Post absorbed the Times-Herald. (The Times and the Herald had merged in 1939.) The Times-Herald had had a slightly higher circulation than the Star, although the Star's advertising volume far outpaced any of its competitors. But the acquisition of the Times-Herald put the Post well ahead of the Star in circulation for the first time—over 380,000 by 1955 compared to the Star's 250,000.

By 1959, the Post pulled ahead in advertising volume as well, and the Star never caught up. While the Post had taken over the spot as the city's newspaper of record, having come a long way from its "poison sheet" days of the 1920s, top management of the Star seemed oblivious to the sea-changes. Insular and used to longstanding success, they thought their paper was invulnerable. Instead, it was doomed.

As if to symbolically punctuate the Star's decline, the company decided in the late 1950s to abandon its venerable home on Pennsylvania Avenue and construct a new building at 225 Virginia Avenue, SE. The move gained key logistical advantages for the paper's printing operations; the soon-to-be-constructed I-395 freeway would provide direct access for speedy afternoon distribution, and a railroad spur offered equally direct access to newsprint and other raw materials.

In addition, the new building boasted roughly three times the floor space of the old one. Nevertheless, the company had traded an elegant structure at a prestigious address for a hulking, utilitarian box in an out-of-the-way, run-down area.

The demise of the Star was a long and drawn-out affair. Circulation actually continued to increase throughout the 1960s, although advertising revenue steadily dropped off. The afternoon format became more and more of a liability, no longer fitting the daily routines of a changing culture and also posing distribution challenges.

"Realistically, it was probably hopeless by '65 or '66," a former executive was quoted as saying in the Star's final edition. As the paper relentlessly lost money, the Kauffmann and Noyes families began to look for an outside buyer. In 1974, a wealthy Texas banker, Joe L. Allbritton, took control of the paper, eventually buying out the shares owned by the Kauffmann and Noyes families.

Allbritton wanted to turn the paper around, but he faced insurmountable odds. A key part of his strategy was to leverage the income from the company's profitable WMAL broadcasting stations to cover the paper's losses while fixes were being planned. However, the Federal Communications Commission balked at Allbritton holding on to two different mass media outlets in the same market.

Tense times at the paper ensued, with staff accepting pay cuts and a reduced work week to keep the business alive. In 1978, four years after taking over, Allbritton sold the Star to Time Inc. The media giant made more changes, bringing in new editorial leadership, changing the physical design of the paper, and switching to morning delivery. It didn't help. After just three more years, Time closed the Star for good in 1981.

Meanwhile, the old Evening Star Building endured quietly on Pennsylvania Avenue. Initial plans, after its namesake had moved out, were to convert it to a 330-room hotel. Instead, it was converted to generic office space, and much of it was rented to the federal government. As various "modernizations" were undertaken, nothing of the original interior decoration was preserved—the Carrara marble, the mahogany trim, the Dielman murals—all vanished.

In 1981, the owners proposed a massive renovation and enlargement of the building, a project that was finally carried out 9 years later. The 1918 addition on 11th Street was torn down in 1987, as were smaller structures abutting the building on Pennsylvania Avenue, and a large new addition, designed in a style sympathetic with the original, was put up in their place. The Evening Star Building is now one of the most valuable properties in downtown Washington.

The 1959 building in Southeast was sold to the Post, which used it as a printing plant for many years. The DC government leased the building in 2007 with the intention of using it as a new police headquarters but subsequently determined that that option would be too expensive. The city bought the building outright in 2009, and it is currently being extensively renovated to house several other DC government agencies.

Thanks to Kim Williams, DC Historic Preservation Office, for her assistance with this article. Sources included Fred A. Emery, "Washington Newspapers" in Records of the Columbia Historical Society (Vol. 37-38, 1937); Merrill E. Gates, Men of Mark in America (1906); Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington: A History of the Capital, 1800-1950 (1962); John Clagett Proctor, Washington Past and Present: A History (1930); Pamela Scott and Antoinette Lee, Buildings of the District of Columbia (1993); Washington Board of Trade, The Book of Washington (1927); a draft National Register of Historic Places nomination for the Evening Star building from 1990; and, of course, numerous newspaper articles from the Star as well as its chief rivals.

Cross-posted at Streets Of Washington.

An anchor of downtown since its opening in August 1972, the library was the city's first public memorial to the slain civil rights leader. Momentum to build a new central library began during the second mayoral administration of Anthony Williams. Released in November 2006, a report by the Mayor's Blue Ribbon Task Force recommended an overhaul of the neighborhood branches and the replacement of "the current functionally obsolete central library."

With a price tag of nearly $300 million, President Bush proposed $30 million in federal funds for a new downtown library. The current site of CenterCity DC was discussed as the most logic location. However, Williams' administration was unable to push a proposal through the DC Council.

Backed by a new administration, the building, designed by pioneering architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, became a historic landmark in late June 2007, preventing its demolition.

The DCPL Board of Trustees first mentioned the ULI panel at their meeting last month. When a smattering of questions arose about the intent of the panel, and whether the library's name honoring MLK was safe, it was clarified that no matter where the central library is located, it will retain Martin Luther King Jr.'s name, and continue to be a memorial to him.

Problems at the library

Since Cooper arrived in August 2006, MLK Library has undergone important functional and cosmetic upgrades making the building more inviting. The public bathrooms are no longer dungeons, the Black Studies and Children's Divisions have been refurbished, and a metal detector no longer greets visitors upon entry. The Adaptive Services Division, helping the deaf community, visually impaired, older adults, veterans and injured service people, received updated technology, the light plane of the ceiling of the Great Hall was revamped to better illuminate the cavernous lobby, and in 2009 a new room opened for teens.

However, MLK Library is still perceived as a homeless shelter and nicknamed "MLK Mission." The pervasiveness of the homeless and those with mental health issues obscure the library's vast collections and resources, according to members of the library staff.

The homeless are supported by a network of social service agencies such as the United Planning Organization. In the morning and evening, buses to and from homeless shelters use the front entrance of the library as a drop-off and pick-up point. G Place NW, behind the library, was the location point until the Secret Service objected.

Basic neglect continues unabated as evidenced in a recent list of safety violations issued to the library by the DC Office of Risk Management. According to library staff, a federal employee visiting the second floor's Literature Division saw numerous ceiling lights out. The outage left stacks in the rear of the division eerily dark, a safety concern for both staff and patrons. A DCPL officer said men are often found sleeping in between the stacks. If processed by police it is not unusual to find they have an arrest warrant. Though the staff has been raising the issue for many years, only recently were the lights fixed, under threat of fine.

Future of MLK Library

"The design of the building, while iconic as architecture, has failed to create the type of loved, dynamic and heavily used central library that would best serve the city," says Terry Lynch, a community activist who served on Mayor Williams' Blue Ribbon Task Force on libraries. "It is past time for a state of the art, new central library and conversion of this building to a more appropriate, adaptive reuse."

Over the next year MLK's first floor will be undergoing significant changes. A solicitation for proposals to "complete the interior improvements to the Business Science and Technology Reading Room and the Great Hall" closed two months ago. Construction is planned to be completed by August 2012.

Robin Diener with the Library Renaissance Project says citizens have advocated for a Citizens Task Force on the Future of MLK since the Williams Administration. Diener says, "In our view, the information gathered by a ULI panel could be a very useful contribution to the complete picture, but it should be presented to a task force of library users from around the city that Mayor Vincent Gray should appoint."

The ULI panel will present their finding and recommendations November 18th, 9 am to 11 am at MLK Library. The public is invited and encouraged to participate.