A few years back I wrote about a ghost sign exposed in Atlanta by a tornado. It was a “Gold Dust Twins” sign that had been painted on a building facade that had subsequently been concealed by the construction of an adjacent building. Atlanta historian Velma Maia Thomas dug deeper into the Gold Dust Twins advertising in a 2015 article published in the online journal, Atlanta Studies.

This post recounts another unexpected meeting with the Gold Dust Twins.

I was reviewing photos in the Library of Congress collections to use in slides for an upcoming program. The photos depict African Americans in Washington neighborhoods near or where Civil War contraband camps had been located. One of the photos I was considering using was one I had seen before. It was taken c. 1916 and it depicts an African American entrepreneur in front of a roadside restaurant — a stand, actually —that he whimsically called the “Fair View Hotel.”

FAIRVIEW HOTEL. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-hec-08027.

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Not a single length of track has yet been laid for Maryland’s new suburban light rail line, the Purple Line, yet there already are complaints of environmental racism coming from the historically African American Lyttonsville community. Though much of the environmental/social justice and equity concerns about the Purple Line have focused on displacement once the line opens, virtually no attention has been focused on the externalities communities like Lyttonsville are bearing during the construction phase.

Over the past few weeks, the entity selected to build the Purple Line (Purple Line Transit Partners), the Maryland Transit Administration, and the Montgomery County Department of Transportation have been trying to figure out how to mitigate the impacts of closing the Lyttonsville Place Bridge, a structure spanning the new Purple Line corridor (an abandoned former B&O industrial railroad line) connecting Brookville Road and the Lyttonsville community. Lyttonsville has been partially isolated since April 2017 when the Montgomery County DOT declared the historic Talbot Avenue Bridge unsafe and closed it. If the Lyttonsville Place Bridge is closed (for up to six months, according to transportation officials), that will leave Lyttonsville residents and emergency responders with limited options for entering and leaving the community.