Category Archives: Washington, D.C.

Since I live and work just across the state/city line separating the District of Columbia from Maryland, I do a lot of work out of state. Posts here document some of that interstate travel.

Performative security on Capitol Hill

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Back in 2015 I wrote an article about security at the Library of Congress. I am reposting the article here because it is relevant to the January 6, 2021, insurrection that took place at the U.S. Capitol.

Capitol Hill, 2018.

The Library of Congress is America’s national library. It also may be the only library in the United States where getting into one of its Capitol Hill buildings is a lot like trying to board an airplane. Security protocols that once emphasized preventing loss by theft now appear more focused on keeping weapons and bombs out.

Since Timothy McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995 and the 9/11 attacks, security at the Library and elsewhere in the federal ecosystem has been dialed up to high. Between 1995 and the aftermath of 9/11, streets in the federal core were closed and new gates, bollards, and industrial-sized planters protect building exteriors. Many Washingtonians believe that the city has been turned into an armed camp. Continue reading →

The kernel of truth in Trayon White’s conspiracy theories

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Washingtonians lay claim to an urban legend called “The Plan.” It’s a conspiracy theory-rumor-urban legend that has circulated among the District’s African American residents for decades. Basically, it’s a belief that whites are conspiring to push blacks out of power and out of Washington. Mostly it’s a group of faceless, nameless generic whites. The conspiracy theories repeated earlier this spring by Ward 8 DC Councilmember Trayon White, however, combine elements of The Plan with even older and more widespread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jews dominating global markets, governments, and the media.

This narrative has lots of variants, all of them involving some secret cabal of white folks hellbent on whitening the Chocolate City. Like all urban legends and rumors, there are kernels of truth to be found embedded in The Plan. With Washington’s demographic shifts and gentrification over the past two decades, many Washington blacks see The Plan coming to fruition.

My first article for the new folklore blog published by New Directions in Folklore tackles Councilmember White’s comments and the context out of which they emerged. The kernel of truth in White’s conspiracy theory narratives lies in the decades during which Washington area Jewish businessmen wielded an invisible hand in discriminatory housing practices that resulted in generations of concentrated poverty, barriers to accumulating wealth, poor healthcare, and unequal educational opportunities.

The Rothschild family around which the conspiracy theories White recounted may not have been involved in Washington-area businesses but we had our own Rothschilds. Their names were Caffritz, Eig, Freenman, Kay, and Gudelsky.

Read THE PLAN, THE ROTHSCHILDS, AND CONSPIRACY THEORIES IN WASHINGTON, D.C.

© 2018 D.S. Rotenstein

The Gold Dust Twins repurposed

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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.

Continue reading →

Fake art and the right to stay put

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How many layers of resistance are embedded in this poster?

This poster is one of three affixed to a boarded-up storefront in Washington, D.C.’s Anacostia neighborhood. The storefront, like many other properties in this community East of the Anacostia River, is an active worksite in the Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. corridor. Anacostia once was a predominantly African American neighborhood stigmatized for its poverty and its perceived high crime. Now, Anacostia is prime real estate ripe for reinvestment, redevelopment, and gentrification.

Public space like the boarded-up storefront is a communications free-for-all where graffiti tags compete with concert flyers, community event announcements, and protest statements. With advocacy organizations and artists appropriating the language and imagery of resistance and commodifying it, discerning who is doing the resisting and why becomes fraught. Continue reading →

Washington’s Bloomingdale neighborhood tackles gentrification using history

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One of the greatest injustices in South of Market redevelopment has been the callous obliteration of its past. — Chester Hartman, Yerba Buena: Land Grab and Community Resistance in San Francisco (San Francisco: Glide Publications, 1974).

Urban planner Chester Hartman’s observation about San Francisco’s Yerba Buena neighborhood looms large as one Washington, D.C., neighborhood is trying to prevent its past from being displaced and rewritten as the forces of gentrification sweep through. Residents of Bloomingdale, an early District of Columbia suburb that was absorbed in the late 19th century by Washington, have mobilized to undertake an innovative interdisciplinary effort to seize control of the neighborhood’s future by gaining a better understanding of its past.

My latest article for the National Council on Public History’s History@Work examines Bloomingdale’s project. In the H@W piece I touched on how Bloomingdale residents and the volunteer researchers and community planners struggle to define gentrification. It’s not an easy task.

Older businesses share street fronts with newer ones like this yoga studio in Washington's Bloomingdale neighborhood.

Older businesses like the DC Mini Market share street fronts with newer ones like yoga studios and restaurants with patio seating  in Washington’s Bloomingdale neighborhood.

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The curious history of Bladensburg’s Spa Spring

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Open spaces are important parts of the cultural landscape. The Washington region is chock full of parks with histories as magnificent as the settings with which they are associated. The National Mall and Rock Creek Park are two notable examples. Other metro area parks have lesser-known histories or have been overtaken by development and erased from the landscape. Bladensburg, Maryland’s, Spa Spring is one example with close ties to Washington’s history.

Bladensburg is an 18th-century Prince George’s County town that hugs the east bank of the Anacostia River. Adjacent to the original town limits there was an undeveloped and frequently flooded tract with free-flowing springs. Today it includes property within the Maryland-National Capital Planning Commission’s Anacostia River Stream Valley Park and Bladensburg’s light industrial fringes. But 200 years ago it was part of Henri Joseph “H.J.” Stier’s 729-acre Riversdale plantation. Continue reading →

Two Dukes, one building, and a whole lot of speculation

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Curious coincidence? About 1913 young Edward “Duke” Ellington began hanging out in a pool hall operated by Frank Holliday in a building in the 600 block of T Street NW owned by Washington, D.C. physician Louis Kolipinski.

Howard Theatre vicinity, c. 1919. Arrow indicates former Frank Holliday pool hall location. Credit: Baist's Real Estate Atlas of Surveys of Washington, District of Columbia, Vol. i, Plate 32.

Howard Theatre vicinity, c. 1919. Arrow indicates former Frank Holliday pool hall location. Credit: Baist’s Real Estate Atlas of Surveys of Washington, District of Columbia, Vol. I, Plate 32.

Kolipinski was born into a Russian (Polish) immigrant family and he graduated from Georgetown medical school. He began practicing medicine in 1897 and by the first decade of the 20th century was investing in real estate throughout Washington. He owned several buildings in the 600 block of T Street NW including the two-story brick building where Holliday and later proprietors operated a pool hall. The Howard Theater, completed in 1910, is located across an alley to the east.

Continue reading →

DC’s first tiny house movement was in the 1880s

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Last fall, Washington, D.C., Councilmember Vincent Orange (At-Large) proposed building 1,000 “tiny houses” for low-income residents and millennials. His bill — “The Minimum Wage, Living Wage, and Millennial Tiny Housing Amendment Act of 2015” [PDF] — quickly drew criticism as being “gimmicky” and potentially discriminatory. What many don’t know is that Orange’s initiative wasn’t the first time District leaders sought to solve big housing problems with small houses.

Boneyard Studios Tiny House Village

Tiny houses. Photo by Inhabitat via Flickr.

In Washington’s earliest years, alleys housed horses and privies. As African Americans began streaming into the city during the Civil War, most alleys were converted to residential uses and many small wood shacks went up. These quickly became overcrowded and concerns about disease and crime followed. Continue reading →

Holding onto the Bible and the land

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Meeting attendees study handouts illustrating bike lane alternatives.

Meeting attendees study handouts illustrating bike lane alternatives.

Yesterday the District of Columbia Department of Transportation held a public meeting to share revised alternatives for proposed protected bicycle lanes in the city’s Shaw neighborhood. The meeting followed an earlier event in October 2015 where African American church congregations found themselves in an adversarial position against bicycle lane proponents.

It was the latest chapter in more than a century of gentrification in Washington.

More than 300 people packed the auditorium in a D.C. charter school. After presentations from D.C. transportation officials, nearly 50 D.C. residents shared their comments. According to the meeting moderator, District officials had already received more than 2,000 comments about the proposed bike lanes.

KIPP DC-Will Academy auditorium shortly before the meeting began.

KIPP DC-WILL Academy auditorium shortly before the meeting began.

Continue reading →

Can historians help defuse gentrification conflicts?

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My latest article on the conflicts that arise in gentrifying neighborhoods when bike lanes are proposed has been published in the National Council on Public History’s History@Work site.

A bike lane passes across the street from Metropolitan A.M.E. Church, M Street NW in Washington, D.C. Cyclists battled the church in 2013 over building a bike lane in M Street.

A bike lane passes across the street from Metropolitan A.M.E. Church, M Street NW, in Washington, D.C. Cyclists battled the church in 2013 over building a bike lane in M Street. The historic church is home to one of Washington’s oldest African American congregations.

Over the past several years, urbanists and cycling enthusiasts have clashed with churches and residents in gentrifying neighborhoods. Can a comprehensive understanding of a neighborhood’s and a city’s history avoid heated exchanges that end up being polemic battles about race, class, and privilege?

From the new History@Work article:

Gentrification: It’s not just for sociologists and anthropologists any more. Though historians have been making inroads documenting and interpreting gentrification and displacement, there are abundant opportunities for historians to make significant contributions in public policy and planning. One recent kerfuffle involving proposed bicycle lanes and African American churches in Washington, DC, provides a window into how a better understanding of the past could have defused a racially and class charged debate over painted lines in public spaces. – See more at: http://publichistorycommons.org/a-public-history-role-for-building-bike-lanes/

© 2016 D.S. Rotenstein