Did you know that just over 50 years ago, Georgetown was a melting pot, a place that large numbers of both African-American and white families called home? And that the U Street Corridor was once a thriving middle-class African-American community? When you walk through Columbia Heights, do its superstores and high-rise apartments mask the fact that until less than a decade ago, it was in ruins?

From restaurants and retail to demographics and development, neighborhoods in Northwest Washington, D.C., comprise a thriving study in contrasts. One thing they have in common: a history of gentrification.

These neighborhoods are also contrasts within themselves; merely decades ago, many Northwest D.C. neighborhoods were not as they are today.

Georgetown: The Cradle of Gentrification

M Street and Wisconsin Avenue, townhouses with flowerboxes and homogeneity — these were not always the defining features of this neighborhood. Ron Johnson, professor emeritus in the history department, sees Georgetown as a critical location: the birthplace of gentrification in the District.

“The Georgetown neighborhood represents the starting point, in most ways, for gentrification in D.C. The renovating of the houses in Georgetown began in the 1930s during the influx of federal workers during the Roosevelt administration and continued on in the post-war era,” Johnson said.

The pace of housing renovation and large-scale development in the neighborhood sped up after 1951, the year the Old Georgetown Act granted the neighborhood historic district status, making it one of just two in the nation with such a distinction (the other is Charleston, S.C.).

By the 1960s, the neighborhood was on the fast track to “full gentrification,” Johnson said, noting that Georgetown has “remained the model for such a development ever since and this now extends to almost every square inch of property in the neighborhood.”

What changes, exactly, resulted from Georgetown’s gentrifying? First, there was the renovation of residences, transforming homes in Georgetown into essentially a series of cookie-cutter townhouses. Next came the development on Wisconsin Avenue and the Waterfront (think everything from Safeway and Starbucks to K Street’s Washington Harbour and Georgetown Loews theater). Residents gained greater access to goods and services in the form of new grocery stores, restaurants, retail destinations, etc. It was a classic model of gentrification.

Despite Georgetown’s makeover, Johnson and history professor Maurice Jackson agree that not all was well in the neighborhood. Median home prices and property values rose as a result of renovations and development, and soon the neighborhood’s residents began to reflect those changes too.

“Not since the 1950s has Georgetown been a melting pot in any way,” Jackson said. “It was during the ’50s and ’60s that Georgetown started becoming more homogeneous. A lot of blacks started moving out, because it just became too expensive. White people started moving in then, and black people just haven’t been moving back in.”
Following the racial transformation of the neighborhood, racial tensions began to develop.

“Usually, when black people leave neighborhoods, they come back to go to churches,” Jackson explained. Georgetown’s original black community stayed loyal to churches such as the First Baptist Church of Georgetown on Dumbarton Street, Jerusalem Baptist Church at 26th and P Streets and Mount Zion United Methodist Church on 29th Street. Today, Jackson said, “When they come back to go to their churches, the churches they founded as a community, the white residents complain about overcrowding in the streets. It’s sad.”
Soon, the economics changes of gentrification caught up with themselves.

“The commercial buildup along M and Wisconsin, and more recently along the river front, is probably seen by most home owners as not desirable — too much traffic, too many outsiders, trash on the streets, loud and irritating noises,” Johnson said. “This pattern of gentrified areas succeeding at first and then bringing a commercial component which is counter to the quality of life that is most desired is one that comes with [the] process.”

U Street Corridor: Phoenix Rising

Until the growth of Harlem, N.Y., in the 1920s, the U Street Corridor was one of the largest African-American communities in the country. The middle-class neighborhood (Duke Ellington’s childhood home is located on 13th Street between S and T Streets) claimed a high concentration of African-American businesses and entertainment facilities, including silent movie houses and family-owned restaurants such as the beloved and perseverant Ben’s Chili Bowl on U Street, which was founded in 1958.

The U Street Corridor remained a vibrant cultural center for the African-American community through the end of the 1960s. Then suddenly, the neighborhood faced an unthinkable series of challenges when it was torn apart by violent riots following the death of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

A resident of northeast Dupont Circle and northwest Shaw for a collective 61 years, Kathryn Eckles doesn’t just know about the riots. She saw them herself.

“The riots did a lot of damage. It was a terrific loss to the black community. They burned and damaged a lot of their own businesses, and a number of places have never returned,” Eckles said. Her 16th Street home narrowly missed being damaged by the riots, which caused the most destruction at 14th Street and U Street and eastward on 7th, 8th and 9th Streets.

Following the riots and even into the 1970s and ’80s, racism and discrimination threatened the ability of African-American residents to continue living in the neighborhood. Many of those who attempted to rebuild their lives after the riots found that “they did not have the same opportunity to get loans and mortgages, and this area was called ‘red-lined.’ It was a slum,” Eckles said.

As discrimination and economics forced African-Americans to leave the neighborhood in large numbers, white residents quickly bought the run-down residences and moved in, investing large amounts of money in renovating and rebuilding their new neighborhood.

Up sprang luxury apartments, condominiums and beautified homes with neatly trimmed lawns and gardens, but still, Eckles said, for 30 years the damage was not completely repaired. “U Street with the Metro … it was just a mess of construction and destruction all thrown together” until the U Street/African-American Civil War Memorial/Cardozo stop opened at 1240 U St. in 1991.

Johnson sees parallels between Georgetown and the U Street Corridor.

“The commercial dimensions … which we can now see along 14th Street, U Street, and all over the eastern part of Northwest Washington are growing tremendously,” Johnson said, adding, though, that like Georgetown, Columbia Heights will likely soon see crowding along commercial arteries, trash in the streets and excessive traffic.

Eckles, feeling the human repercussions of gentrification, admitted that the U Street Corridor is a nice place to live today because of its “talented young people with a good income, but … long lines of black pioneer families have moved out and died off.”

Columbia Heights: The Best of Both Worlds

The neighborhood that was once home to author Sinclair Lewis, Columbia Heights has undergone gentrification in ways that do not quite parallel Georgetown and the U Street Corridor: It has seen breakneck-speed development, yet it has not lost the majority of its pre-development residents.

Dr. Deanna Cooke, research director at the Center for Social Justice, said that the development that dominates the area today is a far cry from the Columbia Heights of just a few years ago.

At mid-20th century, the neighborhood was a thriving middle class African-American enclave with street car lines providing access to downtown Washington and the elegant Tivoli Theatre on 14th Street. The neighborhood saw few developmental changes over the next few decades, and as late as the 1990s, Cooke said, “all that was really there were many small business and two- to three-story row houses.”

Much like the U Street Corridor, the neighborhood remained a primarily African-American residential center until the mid-1960s. Similarly, it was devastated by the 1968 riots, though perhaps to an even greater degree. The neighborhood lay in shambles for decades and was further damaged by the introduction of illegal drugs in the neighborhood during the 1980s, Jackson said.

During the 1970s, Columbia Heights residents changed the rules of gentrification when they took up a battle unique to their neighborhood: They decided to fight the speculators who were poised to buy out the neighborhood’s low-income housing, renovate it and sell it to wealthier buyers.

“There wasn’t just this passive acceptance of development happening,” Cooke said. “People were talking about what would happen to the current residents who were there.” Columbia Heights activist groups like Trinity Towers Tenant Association and Stand Tall in Community Struggle helped bring about the 1974 Section Eight Certificate Program (now referred to as the Housing Choice Voucher Program), which helped low-income families by giving rent certificates to qualified individuals, thus guaranteeing that no more than 30 percent of one’s income be spent on rent.

These groups and others contributed to the rent control movement that started in D.C. in 1975 to prevent landlords from finding ways to force tenants out of rent-controlled residences so they could hike up the price and rent or sell units for more profit.

Section 8 and rent control, plus the major influx of immigrants who arrived in Columbia Heights after fleeing the civil wars in South America, assured the continuation of a diverse body of residents in Columbia Heights. The success of these measures also caused major delay in the developmental gentrification of the neighborhood; it was not until 1999 and the opening of the Columbia Heights Metro stop that the District announced an initiative to revive the neighborhood.

“Then came the tall buildings, the Giant, the big condos across from Target and that new big dance studio that was put in just two years ago, so it looks completely different from just a couple years ago,” Cooke said. In essence, she said, Columbia Heights is getting the best of both worlds: It retains its diverse residential body while benefiting from new development and increased access to goods and services.

“Development is a useful thing. No matter who you are, you want access to services,” Cooke said. “The real question is, are the people who lived in that community in the bad times — are they the ones who get to benefit when the neighborhood eventually develops?” In the case of Columbia Heights, the answer is, for the most part, yes.

It’s tough to justify living in a city as culturally, demographically, economically and socially diverse as D.C. if all we ever get to know is a four-year span of modern Georgetown. The good news is it’s never too late to start getting to know the city we call home.

Change — new development, demographic transformation, social ups and downs — is a normal part of any neighborhood’s history, whether in Northwest D.C. or anywhere else. As Johnson simply notes, “Neighborhoods rarely stay the same.”

But change doesn’t always have to mean a complete overhaul, and a lot of the time, it doesn’t. Eckles recalled a time on U Street before the unrest of the 1960s and the riots of 1968. “The only color that mattered when I lived on this block was green, because the landlord needed his money. And we all lived on streets mixed together, and that was just fine with us.”