14th Street was first established in the mid-nineteenth century as a sleepy suburban residential area, with a generally white population. Initially farmland, the area was developed after the Civil War following the expansion of the Federal government during Reconstruction.
By 1900, with the segregation laws of the Jim Crow era in place, 14th and Greater U Street became known as a “city within the city,” for DC’s African-American residents (wealthy and middle-class whites in DC centered west of Rock Creek Park in neighborhoods that included Tenleytown, home to the Fischer family of If I Forget). Anchored by Howard University, which was established by Congress in 1867, the area became a gathering place for black excellence, attracting black scholars, bankers, financers, and artists. Jesse H. Mitchell, founder of the Industrial Bank of Washington, lived in the area. Robert Heberton Terrell (the first black municipal court judge in DC) taught at Howard University, and his wife, Mary Church Terrell (civil rights activist, suffragette, and one of the first African American women to earn a college degree), lived with him and taught Latin at the M Street School. As for students at Howard, Madame Lillian Evanti, the first international black opera star, received her bachelor’s degree in music in 1917. Additionally, author/poet Zora Neale Hurston earned her associate degree, going on to be the first black graduate of the esteemed women’s institution Barnard College at Columbia University. Intellectualism on 14th Street did not stop at Howard. Georgia Douglas Johnson, a black female playwright and poet, organized the “Saturday Nighters” meetings, where a group of her friends, including Langston Hughes and Angelina Ward Grimke, would gather on Saturday nights to write and swap ideas.
After serving as a national center for black culture and thought for decades, the character of the neighborhood began to change in the 1960s as racially restrictive real estate covenants were declared unconstitutional, allowing African-American families to move into other areas of the city and suburbs, although segregation lingered in DC into the late ’60s. 14th Street became an epicenter of DC’s civil unrest in the aftermath of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968. The year before, African-Americans in Detroit and Newark protested living conditions, unemployment, and discrimination in uprisings during the “long, hot summer.” As the news of King’s assassination spread, people from the DC offices of Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and others congregated at 14th and U Streets NW, demanding businesses shut down as they had five years before in the wake of President Kennedy’s death. At some point, a brick was thrown, igniting four days of unrest across largely black neighborhoods of DC.
“People were out of control with anger and sadness and frustration,” remembers Virginia Ali, co-founder of Ben’s Chili Bowl, which stayed open on 13th and U Streets during the four days of rioting and was one of the few businesses to survive them. Fires and property damage ravaged 14th Street and other black neighborhoods in DC, leaving 12 dead (nine from smoke inhalation) and 900 businesses throughout the District devastated. Far fewer people died in the DC unrest than in other cities over the same period, owing in part to Mayor Walter Washington’s orders—in defiance of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s requests—that District police not fire on the protesters.
The DC government did not rush to repair the damage from the DC uprising. Many people with the economic means, both black and white, left DC for surrounding suburbs. Property values around 14th Street decreased as crime rates rose. The area became a locus for crack cocaine, drug-related violence, and prostitution; in 1989, DC was declared the nation’s “murder capital.” At the same time, 14th Street incubated a younger and more politically assertive Black population. In the plunging property values, several theatremakers started arts organizations in the neighborhood, including Joy Zinoman, who founded Studio Theatre in 1978. Whitman-Walker opened on 14th Street in 1978 as well, providing much-needed health services to the LGBTQ community, many of whom clustered in the area, whether to fix up the neighborhood’s original Victorian houses or as part of the underground commercial sex industry.
In 1986, then-mayor Marion Berry opened the Reeves Center, a government building, with the hope that it would bring government resources closer to the area—which it did, along with ushering in wealthier government officials into the area. Several years later, George Stephanopoulos, a senior adviser to the Clinton administration, spearheaded a campaign aiming to reintroduce the middle and upper-class population that had fled from the area after the riots. One strategy was to build infrastructure, including routing the green line metro through the area. The stop, at 13th and U, had opened in 1991 after nearly a decade of construction and delays that disrupted the area’s commerce. Stephanopoulos also encouraged developers to take advantage of the area’s undervalued property. Soon, new shops began to open, bringing more business to the area and thereby drawing a wealthier population. The Black Cat club opened in 1993, hoping to revive the underground music scene that crashed down during the riots. In 1998, a vacant row house on 15th and P Streets was purchased and turned into condos that sold for approximately $450,000 each. By December of 2000, between the two acts of If I Forget, a Fresh Fields Market (a division of Whole Foods) opened on 14th and P, was seen by many as a symbol of the complete gentrification of the neighborhood.
–Genevieve Henderson