Tag: neighborhood history

Okay, I have finally dug up my Wikipedia log in info and I’m now dangerous. I thought about making changes to the Shaw, DC wiki article but the changes would be so extensive, it frightens me. For example:

Shaw once included the areas of smaller neighborhoods, such as Logan Circle and Truxton Circle, but in recent years those neighborhoods have grown into their own and become separate from Shaw.

It was the RLA and the National Capital Planning Commission that created it, who else is to say what’s in and what’s out. The Post still occasionally refers to parts of Logan as Shaw. Besides I consider myself part of Shaw. I wouldn’t know where to start with that statement.

Shaw grew out of freed slave encampments in the rural outskirts of Washington City. It was named after Civil War Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the commander of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.

There were houses located in the Shaw area prior to Lincoln’s presidency and the Civil War. And then there are those pesky white people, who really don’t fit in this wonderful AfAm History narrative. I don’t doubt the Shaw in question is Col Robert G. Shaw. But the actual naming the neighborhood after him…. I’d have to wipe out the whole dang paragraph and replace with something that reads like. In 19?? (50 something 60 something) the Government agency (RLA? NCPC? Model Cities? I gotta look back and figure out who to blame) carved the Shaw School Urban Renewal Project out of the city’s 2nd District. The Shaw school, a junior high school named after Civil War commander Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, covered an ??? square acre area running from 15/14th Street on the west, Florida Avenue (and some other little streets above FL) on the north, North Capitol Street on the east and M Street to the south. The Shaw School Urban [whatever] became what is currently called Shaw.

Shaw thrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the pre-Harlem center of African-American intellectual and cultural life. Howard Theological Seminary received its first matriculates in 1866; by 1925, Professor Alain Locke was advancing the idea of “The New Negro,” and Langston Hughes was descending from Le Droit Park to hear the “sad songs” of 7th Street. The most famous Shaw native to emerge from this period—sometimes called the Black Renaissance of DC—was Duke Ellington.

The problem with establishing the neighborhood name in the mid 20th Century is referring to the cool stuff that happened before the establishment of the recognized name. Also where the heck was the Howard Theological Seminary? Yes, I could look it up, and I will, maybe around lunchtime. I’m worried about stealing another neighborhood’s history, which is a problem when certain things are close to or straddle the boarders. Also the notables need addresses that actually put them in the neighborhood, so as that we are not stealing another neighborhood’s historical figures.
Oh, and there is not a single solitary thing about the urban renewal. Can’t ignore the urban renewal. And more importantly, the why, the reason for the urban renewal in the first place.
Since as a habit, I tend to work with primary sources and not secondary sources, that makes writing a history of something probably more difficult for me than it really needs to be. Secondary sources, like books on the topic, and there is one out there, sum up what the primary sources (like newspaper articles from the day and eyewitness accounts) say.
PS- Blagden Alley people, the wiki for your area is ripe for the pickin’.
Update: As of 1/2 through my lunch dish I wandered around the net and found that Howard Divinity School was (according to the Divinity School website) in Douglass Hall, which is north of Florida Ave, was never in the Shaw School borders (and why would any part of Howard U be part of the urban renewal plan).

I am getting the feeling that few people have any idea of what the heck I’m talking about when I mention Old City. Much less Old City II. Some of you know it as the area mentioned on the real estate database with the tax office.
Because I don’t have a neat little book at my side saying so, nor am I sitting in the Washingtonia room at the MLK, please allow for some error. And if there is error, please correct and cite source.
I’m 89% sure the map shown in this post is of Old City. Basically, it is the L’Enfant drawn city, within the District of Columbia. So, there is Georgetown, which isn’t part of Old City, it is labeled #7 on the map. Then there is the Old City, which are Police and Fire Districts 1-6, and there is the rest of Washington, which isn’t shown anywhere on the map.
I don’t think of Old City as a neighborhood. It is a city, a very small city in the District of Columbia. Georgetown, a town, in the District of Columbia. Everything else, farmland. And like a lot of farmland in our nation’s history, got gobbled up by developers and turned into communities. Oh, sometime in the late 19th, early 20th century.
So are we clear?

I posted something on Shaw Rez’s blog that made me think I should just post here instead of ranting there.
What unites us? What makes Shaw, Shaw, and not Glover Park or Fort Lincoln or Avondale? What makes the stuff that falls outside of the borders (and for the sake of argument I’m sticking with every neighborhood that falls within the border, whether they like it or not) different and within the same? And does it hold true over time?
The easy answer, which I’ve been pointing to over and over and over again like a broken record is the Shaw School Urban Renewal Area hashed out by the Redevelopment Land Agency and the National Capital Planning Commission and any other government body that wanted to ‘fix’ the area in the 60s and 70s. But there is a past, preceding the creation of those borders, and possibly the creation of the school’s borders, with various notables ‘passing through’ and buildings of various sorts being built for various sorts for various reasons. And in the past and the present there is the hard answer of what makes Shaw, Shaw.
Just sticking with the present, what makes Shaw, Shaw? I’m going to say there is probably not one answer. And I’m saying that because I know I’m going to leave something out. First thing that comes to mind, right now, lunchtime on a Wednesday, is the amount of ‘affordable’ and public housing that exists with private and market rate housing in the same space. That is part of the character because it puts people of various income levels together in the same neighborhood. It puts services and service organizations that serve and advocate for the poor, in the neighborhood. If you want to talk history, you can find bits of or ghosts of“the Great Society” in Shaw. Anyway, those things play a part in the character.
There is more but my lunch hour is over with.

Not the Florida Market Plan. Another plan. A plan that I thought was born in the fifties and sixties and died possibly in the 90s. But like an aging celebrity you thought was dead because you haven’t heard about them doing anything recent, this thing is still alive too.
I write of the Shaw School Urban Renewal Plan. Poking around the National Capital Planning Commission website I found the plan, buried down the list:

Shaw School Urban Renewal Plan, Washington, D.C.
7/7/05, Modifications to the plan

So, it was adjusted in 2005, for what I don’t know, but that hints that The Plan is still alive. Admittedly, I’m too lazy to walk over and ask for a copy of The Plan from their offices, and they might charge me for it. The District Government may also have a copy of The Plan, but I fear it is in the hands of the Department of More Important Things, where they never return your phone calls and really that’s handled by someone else.
*****
Another thing I noticed poking around on the Internet, was the Wikipedia entry for the neighborhood formerly or currently known as the Shaw School Urban Renewal area. “Shaw, Washington, DC” has in it’s history that

Shaw grew out of freed slave encampments in the rural outskirts of Washington City. It was named after Civil War Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the commander of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.

Can anyone provide a dead tree reference for the slave encampment part? I’m aware of encampments around the city, and the big Freedmen’s camp was out in Alexandria, not so much one notable here.
And this is one of those moments I wish the African American papers were in an accessible database. ProQuest allows me to search the Post back to the late 19th century, but it was the white paper, and up until the Shaw School Urban Renewal Plan, the Post called this area the 2nd District. I’m curious about what Black residents called the area prior to The Plan, well besides Northwest.