History – Page 17 – Truxton Is In Shaw

This McMillan not THAT McMillan Save McMillan – In Shaw – Mari in the Citi

Happy Easter. I’m doing my annual staying home on Easter ritual.

I thought of creating a post called “McMillan was an A-hole, Save McMillan Park!” Something that would address the problem of “Presentism” and McMillan Parkand throw in a little history. Thing was I confused my McMillans.

McMillan #2

By US Government Printing Office – Congressional Pictorial Directory, 89th US Congress, p. 131, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29009100

I was thinking of John L. McMillian, Democrat Representative from South Carolina who ruled the House Committee for the District of Columbia from 1945 until DC got Home Rule and he was defeated. I could go into detail, but for the District of Columbia, African-American citizens and Home Rule, he was an asshole. Google “John L McMillian” and racist, or segregationist.

McMillian #1

By Unknown – http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=M000567, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1486060

Republican Senator James McMillan is the McMillan the McMillan Park, or the McMillan Sand Filtration Site is named for and he’s an okay guy, so far. He had a positive impact on the District of Columbia (he’s the McMillan of the McMillan Plan) focusing on the Monumental Core, that area around the Mall and the Tidal Basin. His focus was more on beauty and parks.

So Save McMillan Park
I vaguely remember then ANC and BACA President Jim Berry convincing me to attend as a representative of BACA meetings about developing the McMillan area between 1st and North Cap. It must have been in the early 00s as I can’t find the emails and I really didn’t want to go to those meetings, so I probably deleted those emails. I favor less development in that area than more and it is a shame that what is proposed seems a little over developed, not leaving enough of the the unique qualities of the site. It doesn’t seem to matter that the reservoir and the sand filtration site are on the National Register of Historic Places. Well with enough lawyers and money….. Anyway if you want to fight the proposed development see Friends of McMillan Park.

UPDATE- Earlier I misspelled McMillan. I found that email from Jim Berry asking me to replace him on the McMillan Advisory Group. It was from 2009, not that long ago. My memory isn’t as great as it used to be.

This page contains a single entry by Mari published on March 27, 2016 10:57 AM.

ANCs- A really short history

The following is a very simplified history, which hopefully will give some understanding of the present. During the Big Bear ABC license kerfuffle there were a few emailers questioning the rationale for ANCs or Advisory Neighborhood Commissions.
ANCs are a product of Home Rule. Prior to Home Rule (via the Home Rule Act of 1973) Congress (the Federal government) ran the city. It wasn’t until 1974 that DC residents were able to vote and have some real say in how the city ran. Before Home Rule the mayor and the city council were federally appointed. Neighborhood wise there were citizens (white) and civic (black) associations that appealed to Congress and city government officials for things like neighborhood improvements, traffic, crime and so forth. As far as I can tell civic and citizen association leaders were elected by the association’s membership. These groups could only beg or appeal to bodies and officials whom they could neither vote for or vote out of office.
With Home Rule, neighborhoods got something new:

… the Advisory Neighborhood Commissions (ANCs), brought the city administration closer to ordinary voters than any other elective units. The city council created 36 ANCs and 376 smaller single member districts, each representing about two thousand residents. The ANCs were intended to serve as neighborhood mini councils that advised the council on local problems.
—City of Magnificent Intentions: A history of Washington, District of Columbia 2nd edition P.584

Fact of life- people move

and not just during earthquakes.

People move. If you do genealogy you’ll find that people move around, which is a pain in the butt locating people. The Help comes from a line of lumberjacks, who ran around the northern US border following trees, and they had a common last name. So it is a guess which state they were in for any given census. My people in NC, though staying in the same two counties, moved around those counties, a lot. So that comes in mind when people say gentrification moves people out of their homes. Life moves people out of their homes. Americans are movers with fantasies that they are stable.

Most people move. A few stay, but in time they move too. In the arguments over gentrification the one family that has been in the same house for 30 years, but easily forgotten are all the other people on the street who stayed for 1 -5 years and moved. Some a few blocks over, some completely out of the neighborhood. Moving people are a bit of a problem for me with the census project as I look at the city directories, which you can find on-line in Google Books: Boyd’s directory of the District of Columbia, 1892 and Boyd’s directory of the District of Columbia, 1903. I can’t speak to the accuracy of these sources as I don’t know how the data was collected, but it’s the best source out there, short of hopping in a time machine. In my own house there were one set of people in 1892, then in the 1900 Census 11 people, then in the 1903 directory one person, all with different names. Considering that many people were renters, there really wasn’t anything tying them to one house, thus freeing them to move.

This page contains a single entry by Mari published on July 16, 2010 8:28 AM.

Razin’ Hell

I’ve pulled two Washington Post articles from the pile.
The first is from May 10, 1955 “5000 Homes To Be Razed In RLA Plan” by Robert C. Albrook. The RLA is the Redevelopment Land Agency, a government agency that dealt with blight. And the blight in this case were some 5000 houses in the general Shaw area. I say general because the agency was working on the 2nd Precinct (think 14th St NW to Union Station, Florida to Mass Ave) and hadn’t paired it down to the Shaw School borders. They were considering what needed repair and what needed to be bulldozed. The neighborhood had yet to organize against those plans and the impact of the SW Urban Renewal hadn’t really sunk in yet.
Fast forward a couple of decades to “RLA Sets Razing in Riot Areas” February 20, 1971 by William L. Claiborne. 1971, a little more than 2 years after the 1968 riots that ruined many parts of Shaw. Instead of several thousand structures to be razed, the effort was to tear down several hundred damaged properties. Fun quote from this article is:

Marion Barry, executive-director of Pride, Inc., who also attended the session, said, “You never get anything done unless the citizens go out and raise hell…. This (demolition schedule) came because of our protest.”

Making Ice Cream

This has nothing to do with anything, but last night I felt like I just discovered fire or that cold vodka is useful in making pie crust.

I like to make my own ice cream. I have a hand cranked thing that uses a cylinder that I set in the freezer a day or so before. Some of my neighbors have had my creations. I tend to make chocolate and BAM!Vanilla! (as my cousin calls it) and I tend to like it more than anything I’ve had elsewhere. However, the new gelato place on 7th St in Penn Quarter is pretty darned good too. Anyway, the only problem, if you consider it a problem, is my ice cream is typically too dense. The chocolate is like eating a frozen brownie sometimes. Or it bends spoons. I figure I’m just not churning it enough.

But last night, I made a Strawberry Sage ice cream using a recipe from an Irish Ice Cream store and it called for whipping the cream. I’ve never whipped the cream when making ice cream and this whipped concoction is lighter in texture. The whipping I see makes it less dense and easier to scoop.

Now the whole fruit herb combo makes me wonder if I can make a Twizzler’s sorbet with strawberry and tarragon.

As I said, this has nothing to do with anything.

Housing census 1950- Bad bones

This PDF you can find wandering around www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/index.html
the census website and look at the data and come to your own conclusions. Because
I have a bias, you have a bias, and we filter information differently.

This is for housing, looking at the condition of
houses in the TC part of Shaw, enumeration district 46. ED 46 goes from New
Jersey Ave NW to Florida Ave NW to New York Ave NW. Other parts of Shaw are in
EDs 44, 48, 45, 49, and 50. But I live in ED 46 so that’s what I’m looking at.

In 1950 there were 1766 housing units in Truxton
Circle total. Only 385 of those units were owner occupied, 1,297 rentals, the
rest vacant. What does this mean? If you’re living in the TC the house you’re
in was probably a rental for years because of what I’ve seen in other Census housing
reports. And that means the landlord more than likely didn’t live near the
house and didn’t give the house the same level of attention that a owner
occupied house would get. Of 1720 units, 439 had no bathroom and or was dilapidated,
268 no running water at all and or was considered dilapidated.

Let’s look at a couple of blocks. Census block 2,
Square 507 and Census block 20, Square #617. Block #2 is bordered by NJ, RI, FL
and 4^th St. Of 106 units on that block, 26 were owner occupied, 78
rentals, 2 vacant/for sale. Of the occupied units, 47 had no private bath/ dilapidated,
and 7 had no running water/ dilapidated. 100% of the block was non-white, read
African American more than likely. Average rent $37.56 a month. Block #20
bounded by N St, North Cap, O and 1^st Streets. Of 189 units, 31 were
owner occupied, 155 rentals, 2 vacant/for sale, and 1 other type of vacant. Of
186 reported occupied units, 90 had no private bath/ dilapidated, 86 had no running
water/dilapidated . 153 were non-white and the average rent was $36.80. To get
a sense, city wide there were 223,675 units, 27,727 with no private bath and 10,965
with no running water, average monthly rent $57.42.

The funny thing is whether a house is considered
dilapidated based on if there was decent plumbing. The actual phrasing is “No
private bath or dilap.”/ “No running water or dilap.” According to the report, “a
dwelling unit is ‘dilapidated’ when it is run down or neglected or is of
inadequate original construction, so that it does not provide adequate shelter
or protection against the elements or it endangers the safety of the occupants.”

In 1960 Block 2 had
77 units, 69 sound, 7 deteriorating, 1 dilapidated. Block 20, 180 units, 45
sound, 86 deteriorating, 49 dilapidated, and a majority of occupied housing
rented. Both majority non-white but not 100% non-white. For both, the number of
units went down, block 2 the most. Renters were the majority still.

College not just for the upper and middle classes

The difficult, I’ll do right now

The impossible, will take a little while

-Billie Holiday

There was a comment on another blog that just
annoyed the crap out of me and continued to bug me. It insinuated that lower
income kids can’t go to college and that college only has middle and upper
middle class kids running around it. My own and the experiences of friends
proves that so wrong and I am so sick of that mindset. Also since this is
Inshaw, the quick tie in to this is a) it’s my blog and b) Shaw and other
gentrifying neighborhoods have lower income kids, who may wind up going to
college.

Let me start with my aunts and mom. They were girls,
in the late 60s. The family was black and sharecroppers in rural North Carolina.
My oldest aunt only had two dresses, everyone else got hand-me-downs. Not
exactly rolling in dough. My aunts went to small black colleges and became
teachers. They helped fund their education by working at colored resorts, one
in NY state. Mom didn’t go to college because grandpa, on his deathbed, asked
her to take care of grandma. Mom did however, many years later went to
community college and became a CNA.

Scraps of DC History- RLA

If I ever, ever, which looks like not at all on my current path, write a history of urban renewal from the neighborhood perspective in Washington, DC I will have to include the District of Columbia Redevelopment Agency (RLA). According to the US Government Organization Manual the RLA was:

Created by act of Aug 2, 1946 (60 Stat. 790), to provide for replanning, rebuilding, and rehabilitation of slum and blighted areas in the District of Columbia. The District of Columbia Self-Government and Governmental Reorganization Act of Dec 24, 1973 (87 Stat. 774), established the agency as an instrumentality of the District of Columbia government, effective July 1, 1974

A post war agency to deal with slums turned into something that helped with the destruction of SW. Which who knows, may have needed destroying in parts, but not to the extent it did with the SW Urban renewal in the 50s and 60s.

1883 Bicycle mishap

While looking for something I came across the following in the “personal” section of the classified page of a newspaper:

“The party who drove a buggy into a bicycle on the 14th-st road yesterday will please send his address to this office. By doing so he will learn of what is thought of one who is not man enough to stop to see the extent of the injuries inflicted by his unmanly conduct.”

— “Display Ad 3 — No Title. ” The Washington Post (1877-1922) 2 May 1883 ProQuest Historical Newspapers The Washington Post (1877 – 1993), ProQuest. Web. 14 Jan. 2010.

Don’t need a car to be a jerk.

Women, the past and home ownership

As I’ve stated before I’m not too keen on architectural history, in that I just don’t have an interest in it. However, I do have an interest in property transfers and its history, as that tends to relate to personal wealth.
Today, I’ll be covering myself in red rot from old volumes regarding, some DC properties in the 19th and early 20th centuries. There are published books (Lusk real estate assessment directories, published by Rufus Lusk & Sons) listing the owner of the property. I noticed, running my eyes down the list of owners, I saw several repeats for a series of houses right next to or nearby each other. So you’d have say a Ruppert or a Richardson owning 4 or 5 houses on a block. And not all owners were male. Most were male, but not all.
Now going back to the 1900 census project, so far (I’m still cleaning up data) of the 1101 households, 892 rent. That is a huge chunk. 78 are owners with a mortgage, and 104 own their homes free and clear. Of the homeowners, 45 are women. Now, it would be correct to say that in 1900, not many women owned their own home. It would be also correct to say not many men owned their own homes either, since most rental heads were male.
Though not as popular as the career of laundress there were about 9 landladies and 1 female capitalist. Yes, ladies and gents, someone said their occupation was that of a capitalist. So in this turn of the century world there were women involved in the real estate game, as owners or property managers (landlady). Not many, but 1900 wasn’t 2000 where credit was extended to anyone who could breathe for a home loan.