The Washington Sanitary Improvement Company (WSIC) was a late 19th century charitable capitalism experiment that ended in the 1950s. This blog started looking at the homes that were supposed to be sold to African American home buyers, after decades of mainly renting to white tenants.
Looking at WSIC properties they tend to have a pattern where the properties were sold to a three business partners, Nathaniel J. Taube, Nathan Levin and James B. Evans as the Colonial Investment Co. for $3 million dollars. Those partners sold to African American buyers. There was usually a foreclosure. Then the property wound up in the hands of George Basiliko and or the DC Redevelopment Land Agency (RLA). Then there were the odd lucky ones who managed to avoid that fate.
Let’s see what happens with 123 Bates St NW:
- April 1951 Evans, Levin and Taube sold one-half of 123 Bates St NW to Clark E. and Mattie E. Otey.
- April 1951 the Oteys borrowed $1,900 from Colonial Investment Co. favorite trustees Abraham H. Levin and Robert G. Weightman.
- April 1951 Evans, Levin, and Taube sold the other half of 123 Bates St NW to Joseph B. and Lucille Robinson.
- April 1951 the Robinsons borrowed $1,900 from trustees Abraham H. Levin and Robert G. Weightman.
- October 1954 the Robinsons sold the property back to Colonial Investments’ owners.
- August 1958 the Oteys lost their half of the property to foreclosure. New Colonial Investment Co. new partner (Levin died) Harry A. Badt, Evans, and Taube regained ownership via an auction.
- March 1959 the Colonial Investment Co partners and the Levin survivors, in a larger property package, sold their interest in the property to Sophia and George Basiliko.
- 1971-1978? or sometime before, as I cannot locate a document, Basiliko sold 123 Bates to DC RLA.
- July 1978 DC RLA had a contract with the Bates Street Associates for many Truxton Circle properties.
The story of the Bates Street Associates is a whole other post on its own. So there is one foreclosure and then the usual story with Basiliko and the DC RLA.
Sometime I’ll put up some biographies of the owners if their name was unusual enough (no Smiths, or Jones or Johnsons). In this case I’m looking at Clark Ellis Otey who lost half of 123 Bates to foreclosure. He was born April 25, 1913 in Bedford, VA. In 1939 he married Mattie Ethel Penn and in 1940 lived in Bedford where he was a waiter and she worked as a cook. In 1948 they lived at 752 Euclid NW in DC and Clark was working as a clerk for the government. They managed to avoid the 1950 census. Looking at the DC Recorder of Deeds, they did not buy any other DC properties.
It appears they moved back to Bedford. Clark died in 1986 at the age of 72 in Bedford. Mattie also died in Bedford in May of 2005. It appears they did not have any children.