A modernist Four Corners home

Posted on by
1

10016 Renfrew Road, Silver Spring. February 2016.

Last year a longtime South Four Corners resident took me on a brief walking tour of his Silver Spring, Md., neighborhood. I had reached out to him because I was researching the history of a temporary defense housing development that had been located there. One of his favorite houses in the neighborhood is a small one-story International Style home.

As we were standing outside the home, the woman who was renting it at the time arrived home. She told us the affectionate name she had for it: the art deco bunker.

I took a few pictures and filed the memory away for later use. Recently, the home’s owner posted a picture of the house in a Facebook group. I struck up a conversation with him that began online and ended in the basement of his home in rural Brinklow where he showed me family pictures taken in front of the house and he told me what he remembered growing up there. This post captures some of the home’s history and the atypical suburban environment where it was built. Continue reading →

The hidden costs of relocating Confederate statues

Posted on by
Reply

Montgomery County’s Confederate statue, July 2015.

Earlier this year The Washington Post published my op-ed on Montgomery County’s decision to transfer a Confederate statue that had stood in Rockville since 1913 to a new owner in the private sector. The day after the Post article ran I began writing the follow-up article on the missed opportunities in that decision and the questionable logic of giving an artifact with strong neo-Confederate symbolism to an organization that celebrates the Confederacy.

I did additional background research on the statue and on the politics and semiotics of artifacts that celebrate white supremacy. For the follow-up article I interviewed Montgomery County Councilmember Tom Hucker and County Executive Isiah “Ike” Leggett in anticipation of the statue’s eventual move, which occurred July 22, 2017).

And then Charlottesville happened August 11-12, 2017. All of a sudden the entire nation was awash in analytical and opinion articles about Confederate iconography, race, erasure, and the production of history.

By last weekend I had revised most of my initial ideas for how that follow-up article would look and I made the trip out to the Montgomery County statue’s new home at White’s Ferry on the Potomac River. I crossed the river to Virginia and took in the statue’s new setting and I took more than 100 photos.

From the moment I first conceived of the follow-up article I knew that it would focus on two things: the tensions inherent in deciding how to deal with neo-Confederate artifacts that Montgomery County leaders and their counterparts around the nation grapple with and the consequences of re-contextualizing the statue in a space that celebrates the Confederacy.

Relocated Confederate statue in its new home at White’s Ferry, August 2017.

By giving the statue to White’s Ferry, Montgomery County officials relinquished control over the artifact and any messages it conveys. The statue now occupies a prominent position overlooking the ferry ramp and it is one of the first things passengers see as they leave the ferry and enter Maryland from Virginia.

View from the Gen. Jubal A. Early at the ramp to White’s Ferry, August 2017.

It’s private property yet public space. And, instead of being hidden among trees next to the county’s old courthouse, the statue now occupies a more visible space at a historic Montgomery County gateway.

The Activist History Review has published my analysis of the statue’s move and its implications in the wake of Charleston 2015 and Charlottesville 2017: No Country for Johnny Reb or Bobby Lee.

Welcome to Montgomery County, Maryland. River Road and White’s Ferry Road near the entrance to White’s Ferry, August 2017.

© 2017 D.S. Rotenstein

An early history of Lyttonsville, Maryland

Posted on by
8

[2019 UPDATE: This post was published in 2017 and the material represents an early stage in my research into Lyttonsville’s history. A more complete history appears in the Talbot Avenue Bridge Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) report completed in July 2019. That document will be available to the public in 2020 via the Library of Congress website.]

INTRODUCTION

Just about the only thing Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission’s Montgomery County Planning Department (M-NCPPC) architectural historians got right in the agency’s history of Silver Spring, Maryland’s, Lyttonsville community was that Samuel Lytton bought some property in 1853. Were it not for a sharp rebuke from longtime residents of the historic African American hamlet, the official history memorialized in a new sector plan would have read that Lytton was a “freed slave.”[1] That early draft historic context contained many factual errors, some of which were corrected before the Montgomery County Planning Board in late 2016 recommended approving the Greater Lyttonsville Sector Plan, which the Montgomery County Council approved in early 2017.

The final Lyttonsville historic context that is now part of Montgomery County’s background materials for formulating everything from development plans in the community to public art for proposed light rail line stations to place making efforts to historic preservation planning is an incomplete and error-filled narrative. Whether it’s the false assertion that Lyttonsville was a “pre-Civil War free black settlement” or the lazy conclusion that agency staff couldn’t find out what happened to Lytton’s property after his death, “It is unclear who owned the property when it was platted as twelve lots,”[2] there are significant issues with the M-NCPPC’s research.

This post explores some of Lyttonsville’s early history up to the turn of the twentieth century and fills in some of the many gaps left by the M-NCPPC staff research that is now Montgomery County’s official historic context for the community.

Samuel Lytton

There are no known images depicting Samuel Lytton.

Samuel Lytton is a historical mystery. He spent about four decades in Montgomery County and left only ephemeral evidence about who he was, how he made a living, and what motivated him to establish a basis for the development of the community that now bears his name.

Government documents give us a glimpse into Lytton’s basic biography. He was a Maryland native who was born c. 1830. In 1849 he married Phyllis Cosbery in Washington, D.C. Phyllis, born in Kentucky, was 20 years Samuel’s senior. It is possible that she was an enslaved member of Francis Preston Blair’s household who came to Washington from Kentucky with the Blair family. The following year a census enumerator documented him as a “laborer” living in Blair’s household in what is now Silver Spring. By the 1860 census, Lytton had established his own household in the four acre tract he had paid white farmer Leonard Johnson $96 to buy in January 1853.[3] Three years later, during the Civil War, Lytton registered for the newly enacted federal draft. The entry identified Lytton as a “colored” farmer who was married. Continue reading →

A lifeline for the Talbot Avenue Bridge

Posted on by
1

Now that Silver Spring, Maryland’s, Talbot Avenue Bridge has a new history can it also have a new future?

Last year Montgomery County officials and many county residents learned that the Talbot Avenue Bridge was more than just some old metal and wood assembled in 1918 by the B&O Railroad spanning the CSX Railroad tracks. They discovered its important ties to the county’s civil rights history. Once slated for demolition and replacement to make way for the proposed Purple Line light rail project and closed since April for safety reasons, the bridge’s fate is now undecided.

My research into Silver Spring’s history as a sundown suburb, a place where people of color were unable to live unless they were domestic servants for most of the 20th century, exposed the bridge’s history beyond the Lyttonsville residents I was interviewing for my work. Longtime Lyttonsville residents have deep attachments to the bridge. Residents in the adjacent North Woodside and Rosemary Hills neighborhoods have mixed feelings about the bridge but acknowledge that before last year they knew little about its history. Even County Executive Ike Leggett told me in a recent interview that my research had changed his understanding of Lyttonsville’s history and the bridge.

The bridge is contested space where competing interests now collide. There is the newfound interest in the bridge’s history that is shared by people well beyond the railroad tracks and the neighborhoods the bridge connects. And, there are the compelling arguments originating in those neighborhoods: some folks in North Woodside want the connection closed to reduce cut-through traffic and people on both sides of the tracks make a strong case for keeping the crossing open to vehicular traffic, including emergency vehicles.

Talbot Avenue Bridge, closed approach from the North Woodside neighborhood, June 2017.

Continue reading →

An erasure primer

Posted on by
3

Two maps of Silver Spring, Maryland, published 80 years apart provide a palpable and accessible example of erasure.

Top: 1933 North Washington Realty Company map of “North Washington”; Bottom: Historic Neighborhoods of Downtown Silver Spring. The dotted line shows the approximate location of the historic African American hamlet, Lyttonsville.

The first map was published in 1933 by the North Washington Realty Company. It shows all of the area the company and community boosters were branding as “Maryland North of Washington.” The promotional map showed the existing street network, community institutions (schools, churches, commercial buildings), and neighborhood names, including areas shaded where the company had investments and plans for new residential subdivisions. Continue reading →

Is Montgomery County Planning tainted by racism?

Posted on by
Reply

Montgomery County, Maryland, goes to great lengths to promote its communities as diverse and progressive. Yet, actions by such institutions as the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission undermine those assertions with racialized land use policies and historic preservation plans that omit, marginalize, and alienate the county’s communities of color. Patterns apparent over the past 20 years suggest that the agency, which was founded by a white supremacist real estate developer and Democratic Party boss, structurally hasn’t moved very far from its 1920s origins as a machine for building suburbs where power and authority remain concentrated among the white middle and upper classes.

Framing Structural and Institutional Racism

In September 2016, a historic preservation planner with the Montgomery County Planning Department’s Historic Preservation Office approached a group of residents from the  Lyttonsville community in the lobby of the Montgomery County Council Building in Rockville. The planner and the residents of the historically African American community were there to attend a hearing for the Greater Lyttonsville Sector Plan.

The planner began speaking enthusiastically about her research in a neighboring community that had been developed by Jewish developer Sam Eig: Rock Creek Forest. She told the Lyttonsville residents that in her research on Eig and the subdivision she found that Eig did not attach racial restrictive covenants to the properties.

The following morning I emailed the planner and asked her about what she had told the Lyttonsville residents. She replied:

What I was telling [Lyttonsville resident] was that Sam Eig developed Rock Creek Forest, without restrictive covenants. He also donated land there for two churches and the Jewish Community Center (?and maybe for the Red Cross). MCHS has  information on Sam Eig.

Continue reading →

Confronting racism

Posted on by
Reply

I was honored to participate in IMPACT Silver Spring’s program last night, Courage Lives Here: Confronting Racism that Divides Us.

IMPACT Now 2017 panel. FB photo.

Dr. Yanique Redwood (with microphone) gave the keynote address and then moderated a panel that included Rev. Ronnie Galvin, MD Delegate Maricé Morales, and myself. This is the start of a very important community dialogue in Silver Spring and my work in documenting Silver Spring’s history as a sundown suburb plays a key role in addressing structural racism here.

 

Montgomery Modern madness

Posted on by
3

Montgomery County historic preservation planners have begun exploring, analyzing and recording local mid-century modern buildings and communities, part of an effort we call Montgomery Modern. — Montgomery County Planning Department website

A few years ago the Montgomery County Planning Department’s historic preservation staff began an initiative it calls “Montgomery Modern.” The initiative has included a massive public relations campaign to raise public awareness for, and appreciation of, Montgomery County’s mid-twentieth century architecture. Montgomery Modern has included bus tours and bike tours of residential subdivisions and architecturally significant office buildings, churches, and public buildings. And it’s yielded a book written by one of the agency’s historic preservation planners.

In its zeal to highlight other’s peoples’ buildings, the agency appears to have overlooked its own headquarters: the Maryland-National Capital Planning Commission’s Montgomery Regional Office (MRO) at 8787 Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring.

Continue reading →

Producing art in spaces of change

Posted on by
Reply

For this year’s Delta Symposium at Arkansas State University I collaborated with two University of Arkansas professors on a panel titled “Producing Art in Spaces of Change.” The panel drew from my work in Washington, D.C., and Decatur, Ga. Dr. Robin Roberts (University of Arkansas Dept. of English) and Les Wade (University of Arkansas Dept. of Theatre) spoke about their work in gentrifying New Orleans neighborhoods post-Katrina. Dr. Richard Burns (Arkansas State Dept. of English and Philosophy) moderated the panel.

Delta Symposium panel (left to right): Dr. David Rotenstein, Dr. Robin Roberts, Dr. Les Wade, and Dr. Richard Burns. Photo courtesy of Richard Burns.

Our panel was about displacement and the creative responses to it that emerge in neighborhoods where it occurs. Here is our panel’s abstract:

Displacement is a violent process that involuntarily separates people from their homes, neighbors, families, and essential social networks. This panel examines artistic production in two Southern cities with histories of displacement and substantial communities of color, New Orleans and Washington, D.C.

Both cities in the twentieth century became majority African American and by the turn of the twenty-first century both had begun inverting demographically. In New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and subsequent rebuilding efforts were key displacement catalysts. Washington’s historically black neighborhoods are rapidly changing through gentrification.

Two scholars explore artistic production in New Orleans. Robin Roberts drills down into the economic and social changes affecting communities with long histories of Mardi Gras participation and how residents respond to and resist change. Les Wade examines cultural changes in the Treme neighborhood, hard-hit by Katrina and memorialized in popular culture by the HBO series.

David Rotenstein unpacks an urban legend found in African American neighborhoods throughout North America and long associated with the District of Columbia, “The Plan,” and its jump from black homes, churches, and barbershops into the African American press, mainstream white media, and academic literature.

I’m already looking forward to next year’s Delta Symposium. I plan to pitch a paper on heritage tourism in Helena, Arkansas, where contemporary residents are struggling to find the right mix of history and tourism to reboot the local economy.

Cherry Street Historic District, downtown Helena, Arkansas.

Abandoned motel, downtown Helena, Arkansas.

Cherry Street Historic District, downtown Helena, Arkansas.

Fake art and the right to stay put

Posted on by
Reply

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 →