In the News
Originally published by the Washington Post
The Past Is Present
By Michael Farquhar
What fools we are. We stand on the sidewalk and we think we are simply standing in front of an abandoned library with the words "Science . . . Poetry . . . History" carved in the marble above the columns. We notice the ratty construction fence, the trash rustling across the surface of the gouged earth, the homeless man crouched on the corner, the sign promising a spring opening for the City Museum of Washington, D.C. And of course we notice -- who could not notice? -- the leviathan looming across the street to the north, the almost incomprehensibly immense new convention center, Jonah's whale about to devour the once-grand marble building as if it were a tiny raft.
The convention center, which opens next week, 13 years after Marion Barry formally proposed it, is by far the biggest building in the city. Look at it -- glass and concrete rumbling along for blocks, a landlocked aircraft carrier on steroids. The word "building" doesn't even do it justice. It's more a force of nature than a building, an earthquake in reverse, whose aftershocks have sprouted towering cranes for blocks around. It is all still raw and unpopulated, but the stage is set for this dreary, blighted, listless slice of town to reinvent itself as a bustling city center.
Yet even on the pivot of this stunning transformation, we look out over these two buildings, one just being born, the other gaining new life after a century of use and misuse, and see something static: a mere moment in urban renewal. What we fail to notice is the truth. Time is fluid, each moment inseparable from all moments that preceded it, an endless chain of "right now" that only our puny life spans and monumental self-absorption block from view.
It was "right now" in this place when an angry mob faced off against U.S. Marines, a stolen brass cannon at their feet, a lit cigar ready at the fuse.
It was "right now" when greedy speculators eyed the neat rows of tobacco growing here and imagined a future great city and huge profits.
It was "right now" when a noisy, smelly firetrap of a market building was laid waste by a man charged with creating that great city, crushing two lives in the rubble.
It was "right now" when a marble palace of culture built by one of the nation's wealthiest men decayed into a filth-strewn hovel for the destitute.
This patch of land downtown between Seventh and Ninth streets, at the confluence of New York and Massachusetts avenues and K Street, set aside by Pierre L'Enfant and designated Mount Vernon Square, has long been overshadowed by some of Washington's more obvious attractions. But it is a place that pulses with history -- a place where dinosaurs roamed and troops marched, where great aspirations were born and power was boldly asserted. This is the story of that square.
Science, poetry, history.
Capitalsaurus
The earth heaved and mountains rose. Stupendous mountains, razor-edged, that would have dwarfed the
Rockies. Millions of years passed, time wearing the Appalachian rock into sediment, layer upon layer, until it became a coastal plain. A steaming jungle grew, filled with exotic life -- armored nodosaurs, one-ton tenontosaurs and ostrich-like ornithomimids. Thirty-foot tall herbivores called astrodons feasted on the ubiquitous bald cypress trees, and were feasted on in turn by one particularly fearsome carnivore, a relative of T-Rex, named for what this place would become 100 million years or so in the future: capitalsaurus.
What is now Mount Vernon Square would have been close to beachfront property during the dinosaur era, when the Atlantic Ocean still crashed against what is now Capitol Hill. The climate would have been perpetually muggy, too, like the hottest summer day in Washington every day. It was an ideal environment for the sequoias, horsetail rushes and tree ferns that grew here in abundance beside the bald cypresses.
The reign of capitalsaurus and Washington's other dinosaurs abruptly ended 66.4 million years ago after a cataclysmic event -- perhaps a meteorite -- wiped them out. In their place slowly emerged new Washingtonians like camels, rhinos, tapirs and sloths. The terrain they walked on would seem as alien today as the animals themselves, but gradually the city's most distinguishable natural features began to emerge.
The Potomac River, for example, started making its way south from its source about eight million years ago, eventually flooding the plain in a vast riverbed. When the river receded to an approximation of its present course, about two million years ago, the ancient plain reemerged. The climate cooled, and about 12,000 years ago, the oaks, maples and other deciduous flora that populate this "city of trees" took root. Five Hundred Paces
By the time the first Native Americans migrated here about 10,000 years ago, the city was a pristine forest filled with deer, bear and buffalo. Fresh water gurgled in many creeks and streams, including a major one where 13th and I streets would eventually run, not far from Mount Vernon Square. And, in 1608, the Potomac was so teeming with life that Capt. John Smith made astonished note of it after traveling up the river for the first time:
The fish were "lying so thicke with their heads out of the water . . . neither better fish, more plenty, nor more variety . . . had any of us ever seen in any place so swiming in the water."
The arrival of British colonists meant the eventual loss of a home for the Nacostins and other tribes that had lived here for thousands of years. They were pushed west into the mountains and their land was carved into plantations, including an estate called Port Royal, one of about 15 that covered the future capital in what was then Maryland.
So rural was Port Royal that in a 1685 survey boundaries were marked by trees rather than streets or other landmarks: "Land called port Royall lying in Charles County in the freshes of the potomoke River near the head of a Creek called Broad Creek [Tiber Creek] beginning at a marked white oak within half a mile of the head of said Creek and running east by north for the length of 500 p. to a bounded hiccory then north for the length of 160 p. to marked red oak then west by south for the length of 500 p. to a marked white oak then with a straight line to the first bounded tree."
The estates were gifts of the Calverts -- lords of Maryland since 1632, courtesy of England's King Charles I -- or purchased from them. Some, like Port Royal, were farmed, others remained mostly wilderness. The plantations were at the far reaches of the colony, and given little notice as a result. But that all changed after independence from Britain, when in 1791 George Washington settled on the area as the site for the new nation's capital. Speculators suddenly sniffed opportunity.
The federal government offered a deal in which the land at the core of the city would be surveyed into lots. The landowners would convey all the lots to the government, receiving nothing for those portions of their property that would be turned into streets, but they would be paid for the lots that were to become public buildings and squares. The remaining lots, the bulk of the land, would be divided equally between the government and the original owners.
Although the owners were giving up some of their land, they stood to benefit, theoretically, from inflated property values the new capital would bring. The new city site is "surpassed by no spot on earth," one landowner wrote in a public notice, "of equal extent, for commercial advantage and elegance of situation." Or so he hoped. Potomac Fever Georgetown merchant Samuel Davidson purchased 150 acres of Port Royal in 1791 from Edward Pearce, who was apparently not willing to wait around for ownership in the new capital to pay off. Davidson paid Pearce $6,000 for the tract, plus a 500-acre farm near Baltimore. But that's not all! He threw in a chintz pattern for Mrs. Pearce.
"Yesterday I was violently seized with that diabolical, frenzical disorder, which have raged with such fury and pity for some time over the Federal City," Davidson joked in a letter to another speculator who had also purchased land. "You will sympathize, with others, over this my inevitable ruin, and believe me insane." In another missive, Davidson expressed his hopes more baldly. "We are all here in very high spirits in consequence of the Grand Federal City being fixed in the vicinity of [Georgetown]," he wrote to a friend in Virginia. "The commissioners and surveyors are now actively engaged in the business."
Davidson was so keen on the city's prospects that he snatched up an additional 500 acres of Port Royal, which he then sold to his brother. The rest of the former tobacco plantation was sold to New York speculators Dominic Lynch and Comfort Sands.
Mount Vernon Square emerged out of Port Royal, at least on paper, in 1791 as one of 15 reserves L'Enfant numbered and highlighted on his plan for the nation's capital. The squares were to be elegant spaces and integral parts of the city landscape. "The situation of these Squares is such that they are most advantageously and reciprocally seen from each other," L'Enfant wrote, "and as equally distributed over the whole City District, and connected by spacious Avenues round the grand Federal improvements . . . as circumstances would admit."
L'Enfant had grand aspirations for his squares, proposing that they "be divided among the several states in the Union for each of them to improve . . . The center of each Square will admit Statues, Columns, obelisks, or any other ornaments, such as the different States may choose to erect."
But this never happened at Mount Vernon Square, which remained barren for the first four decades of the capital's existence. Goat Alley The surrounding neighborhood, which became known as the Northern Liberties, was a bit of a wasteland as well, stuck in the far reaches of the city then bounded to the north by what is now Florida Avenue. Lynch and Sands nearly went bankrupt waiting to make a profit there, and Samuel Davidson bided his time by sowing oats and leasing part of his property for cattle grazing.
Among the few pioneering residents around the square in the early 1800s was a shoemaker named Thomas French, who owned a two-story frame house at the southeast corner of Ninth and K streets. The U.S. Post Office used a vacant space at the southeast corner of New York Avenue and Seventh Street to burn dead letters and refuse, while, on an empty lot around the corner, a man sold lamb stew.
As an Evening Star reporter later wrote, "there was not much sign of improvement to be found [around the square] other than the pretense of keeping the wagon road of Seventh street in such a condition as to be used; for that street was, of course, then as now, the route to Montgomery County, and during the days of the cholera epidemic it was much used by hearses and wagons bearing away the victims of the dread disease . . ."
A bustling new prosperity gradually came to the Northern Liberties as the population of the tiny capital city started to expand. Lots that once couldn't be given away finally had some value. Elegant houses were built around the square, and Seventh Street became a vibrant commercial corridor. But with progress came the first of many assaults on L'Enfant's original plan. A two-story fire station was built smack in the middle of Mount Vernon Square in 1840. So much for the dignified ornamentation and gracious open spaces that had been envisioned.
Intrusive as it was, the engine house did serve a number of community needs beyond just fighting fires. It was the only large meeting space in the neighborhood. The Northern Liberties division of the Sons of Temperance gathered there, spreading their message of total abstinence in space shared with the Walker Sharpshooter's armory. A Professor Weber held dance classes on the second floor, where the Rev. French S. Evans sometimes delivered Sunday sermons.
With the neighborhood's burgeoning population, all that was missing was a convenient market. Residents clamored for one, but when they got their wish, L'Enfant's plan was further subverted. President James Polk allowed the Northern Liberties Market to be built on the east side of the square in 1846. Now, instead of open vistas, there were rows of merchant stalls to compete for dominance with the imposing fire station.
With all this economic growth, came the hope of employment. German, Irish and Italian immigrants began to move to the neighborhood, which also became the center of a large black population. The rowhouses that went up reflected middle- and working-class incomes. There were also pockets of utter poverty. One of the most notorious was Goat
Alley, bounded by Sixth, Seventh, L and M. In the 1850s, hundreds of poor white immigrants huddled together there in modest houses and shanties. By 1900, 400 people were counted in Goat Alley, almost all black.
Gangs of D.C.
Anti-immigrant sentiment had reached a violent frenzy by the middle of the 19th century as wave after wave of foreigners poured into the United States. Opposition to the immigrants was organized under the American, or Know-Nothing, Party (a name derived from the standard non-response members gave when asked about the party). With a number of Know-Nothings elected to Congress and other high offices, they became a potent political force.
The party's candidate for mayor of Washington had lost by only a handful of votes in the election of 1856, and the Know-Nothings were determined to prevail in the city's municipal elections the following year. To help their cause, gang members from Baltimore known as the Plug-Uglies were imported on Election Day to intimidate voters.
Arriving by train on the morning of June 1, 1857, the Plug-Uglies, joined by a rabble of like-minded Washingtonians, rallied at the polling station on Mount Vernon Square. Violence erupted almost as soon as the polls opened. Immigrants and voters disinclined toward the Know-Nothing slate of candidates were beaten and driven away with rocks, knives and guns. City police were helpless against the rioters, numbering somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500. The polls were shut down and the mayor of Washington, William B. Magruder, called on President James Buchanan for help in controlling the mayhem.
Buchanan referred the matter to the secretary of the Navy, who promptly ordered two companies of Marines from the Navy Yard to be placed at the mayor's disposal. Before leaving the barracks, Marine Corps Commandant Archibald Henderson addressed the soldiers: "Men, you have always done your duty in the service of your country. I expect you now to do your duty bravely, if necessary, in the protection of the laws and rights of citizens." Hearing that the Marines were about to march on Mount Vernon Square, members of the mob commandeered a six-pound brass cannon from the old Anacostia engine house and hauled it to the market to greet them. One of the Marines wrote a detailed account of the events that followed: "Soon after we marched to the polls . . . we were surrounded by a furious crowd, who greeted the mayor's order to open the polls with yells, threats and the vilest language I ever heard, and that is saying something considerable."
The rioters stood about the cannon, protecting it from the rain with straw and poised to fire it with lit cigars. "Brave old Gen. Henderson, in citizen's dress and unarmed, quickly placed himself against and in front of the muzzle of the gun," the account continued, "and by pushing the men away with his umbrella, prevented them from firing it."
At the same time, Mayor Magruder ordered the rioters to surrender the cannon and disperse. His demand was answered with a volley of bricks and curses. Then someone tried to fire the cannon. With that, the Marines were called to take it by force. "The order 'first platoon forward' was given, and the veterans rushed upon the gun," wrote the unidentified Marine. "Instantly a shower of stones, bricks,
clubs and bullets rained upon us from all sides. Private Byrnes of the first platoon was shot through the face, the large ball crashing through the bones into his mouth. He dropped his musket and staggered back to us. As he took his hands from his face the blood gushed over his white belt, and some of the Marines, with a yell, commenced firing."
The rioters scattered. The cannon was retaken. When the smoke cleared, a number of dead and wounded, some of them innocent bystanders, lay strewn across Mount Vernon Square. "I never heard of such curses and wishes for our everlasting ill-luck as were showered upon us by the relatives and friends who bore away the dead and wounded rioters," the Marine's account concluded. "Four men came rushing and shouting down 7th Street . . . evidently trying to rally the mob once more. A sergeant stepped out and sent a bullet whizzing over their heads and ricocheting up the street beyond, and they disappeared."
The polls were reopened as soon as the mob was dispersed, and voting resumed. The Know-Nothing candidates were defeated, and not long after that the party faded into history. One Man's Progress Meanwhile, the Northern Liberties Market, which had been at the center of all the violence, continued to grow and thrive -- much like bacteria.
Poorly constructed merchant stalls were haphazardly set up around the original market on the east side of the square, and an animal pen took up a portion of the west, shared with a tent under which small circus shows were performed. The firehouse that had stood since 1840 was razed in 1856 when the Northern Liberties Fire Company moved its headquarters, and by the 1860s, well-to-do residents were agitating for the removal of the sprawling market as well.
"On market days the most offensive matter accumulates in the adjoining streets," a local official reported, "greatly detrimental to the health of the neighborhood. The refuse vegetable matter thrown from the wagons of the hucksters, and the offal from the stall of the butcher, mingle with the filth created by the many animals which are brought and allowed to stand around the place, causing a most disagreeable stench, especially in the summer."
It would take the will of one man to clean up the unsightly mess.
Alexander "Boss" Shepherd, head of the Board of Public Works, was on a mission "to make the city worthy of the nation" through massive public improvement projects. With money no object, and legal niceties simply ignored, he was remarkably successful in this endeavor. Much of Washington was transformed from muddy morass to modern metropolis. Mile upon mile of sewers, sidewalks and roads were laid. Street lamps were erected, new water mains and gas lines installed. And, despite vigorous protests from the people who made their living there, the Northern Liberties Market on Mount Vernon Square was destroyed.
It was a unilateral decision made by the Boss, and no shopkeepers were going to stand in the way of his agenda. On the night of September 3, 1872, a demolition crew descended on the square armed with axes and sledgehammers. As the walls crumbled down, and a horde of displaced rodents scurried to find new shelter, Boss Shepherd was at his D.C. estate entertaining the judge who might have otherwise issued an injunction against the work at hand. The next morning the eyesore was gone. But in the rubble were the corpses of a young boy who had gone to the market with his terrier to chase the fleeing rats, and a butcher who had failed to clear out of his booth in time. It would take the city years to settle all of the damage claims.
City Beautiful
With the destruction of the market, Mount Vernon Square was open space once again. L'Enfant no doubt would have been delighted by the transformation. In place of stinking animal pens and tradesmen's stalls, a new city park emerged. Pebbled walkways crisscrossed newly sodded lawns. Carriage paths that had cut through the square were closed, and the part of Eighth Street that had been rammed through the center was reclaimed by a sparkling fountain. Park lanterns were installed. Six hundred flowering shrubs were planted, along with ornamental evergreens and a variety of other trees. The people living and working around the square now had a beautiful commons to call their own, but only briefly, because after three decades green space gave way again to construction.
Just before the turn of the century, a group of prominent Washingtonians led by Theodore W. Noyes, associate editor of the Evening Star, had been lobbying Congress for a public library in the capital city. Money was eventually allocated, but not enough to actually build anything. Space had to be rented. Such was the rather bleak situation when a chance meeting at the White House in January 1899 dramatically altered the library's fortunes and, eventually, the look of Mount Vernon Square.
Brainard Warner, vice president of the library's board of trustees, had an appointment with President William McKinley. Also waiting for the president was the great industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who was setting aside a part of his enormous fortune for the construction of libraries across the country. Warner did not waste the opportunity to let Carnegie know just how stingy Congress had been with funds. With barely a blink, the benefactor pledged $250,000 -- more than he had given any project outside Pittsburgh. Now the library was guaranteed a home of its own, but where to build?
Two potential sites emerged: a vacant lot on Pennsylvania Avenue next to what is now the National Archives, or Mount Vernon Square. Debates raged in Congress and in local newspapers. The opposing forces tried to drag Carnegie into the fray, but he was having none of it. In a terse letter reprinted in the Star, he declared, "I have nothing whatever to do with the site. This is not my affair. I do not believe in trying to govern distant people. I give the money -- the people of Washington must do the rest."
Heated as it was, the issue was resolved in just one week. Sen. James McMillan of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia, made it clear where he wanted the library to be. "Situated in the center of Mt. Vernon Square," McMillan's committee report read, "the view of the building would be obtained from Massachusetts avenue, K street, and New York avenue, and would add dignity and beauty to a portion of the city where ornamentation is somewhat lacking."
The deal was signed by McKinley on March 3, 1899, a mere two months after Carnegie made his offer. And four months after that, a design by the New York firm of Ackerman and Ross was selected out of 25 submitted. The plan called for a Beaux-Arts building of white marble, heavily ornamented with sculpture, with a prominent central block and two wings, recessed and lower than the center.
Ackerman and Ross were part of a generation influenced by the "City Beautiful" movement that arose from the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. It was an aesthetic of classical order and beauty, with inspiring structures symmetrically arranged. The spirit of the movement would soon guide the McMillan Commission's transformation of the area around the Mall into a work of art, but, as historian Alison K. Hoagland has noted in Washington History magazine, Ackerman and Ross set the stage with their "City Beautiful" library design.
The monumental structure to be built in the middle of Mount Vernon Square heralded one force that would shape the city, but, once again, the vision of the original was violated. It was becoming a pattern. The park that had harmonized so well with L'Enfant's wishes was cleared away when construction began on the new library in June 1900. Those shrubs and other park accouterments that could be salvaged were moved to other locations. The rest were destroyed. Only peripheral shade trees were left on the square, towering reminders of what had been lost.
Still, the new order was compromised as well. To give the library gravity as a temple of knowledge, Ackerman and Ross intended as much ornamental sculpture inside the new building as there was to be on the exterior. But there wasn't enough money, and the unadorned interior was left in stark contrast to the ornate facade.
Washington's new library, informally called the Carnegie Library, was dedicated on January 7, 1903. President Theodore Roosevelt attended the ceremony, as did Andrew Carnegie -- reluctantly. "It seems the Washington people will have me at the library ceremony," he groaned to a friend. "I thought it would take place on the [prior December] 16th as arranged and had declined. Now they have postponed it and there is nothing for me to do but comply with their wishes."
The controversy that had flared over the selection of the site for the new library was briefly revived at its dedication. "Some of us wish Congress had permitted us to have a site for the building outside of a park square," District Commissioner Henry B.F. McFarland remarked at the ceremony, "but since Congress did not see fit to do this, we have consolation in the fact that in Mount Vernon Square the library will be central to all sections of the District."
Something to Crow About
The library was open to all of the city's residents, one of the few public places in Washington that remained unsegregated as Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913. The library was a treasured resource for Charles Drew, the famed African American surgeon who pioneered the separation of plasma for the long-term preservation of stored blood. "We used to go to the library every week to get books," Drew's younger brother Joseph recalled in a 1983 interview for the D.C. Public Library Oral History Project. "We all had library cards. When my mother wanted to punish us what she would do is take our library card."
Joseph's Drew's wife, Grace Ridgeley Drew, discussed in the same interview an incident that showed just how rare the institution was in a deeply segregated town. "One time my sister and I had been to the library," she said. "It was summertime. It was a hot day. We were walking back home and we passed a little cart. A guy was selling soft drinks, cold drinks. We went up to him and handed our money and said we would like one. He shook his head. We didn't understand at first. We wanted a cold drink. He shook his head. He wasn't going to serve us."
Enlightened racial policies aside, the library was obsolete almost as soon as it opened. It had been designed for then-current standards, when book stacks were closed to the general public and patrons had to wait for librarians to retrieve the volumes they wanted. (Rudyard Kipling's Kim, incidentally, was the first book requested when the building opened.) As head librarian George F. Bowerman noted soon after he took over in 1904, there was little room left for the open display of books that was coming into vogue.
Twenty years later, Bowerman testified before the House on the library's inadequacies: "It is not a well-planned building . . . We have often wished that it might be possible to build a building in the light . . . of the best expert knowledge of library building today, one that could be more economically administered."
Despite its obvious failures, the cramped and overcrowded structure limped along as the city's central library until 1972. During that time it stood vigil over the slow death of a neighborhood.
Committing Nuisances
The urban blight that eventually strangled the area was evident at Mount Vernon Square as early as the 1930s. Even then, it was a gathering place for street people, and would remain so for many decades to come. The residents of Mount Vernon Place, on the north side of the square, complained in a petition sent to the U.S. Park Police in 1934 about "unnecessary gatherings of unemployed people, loafers, gangs and beggars, both colored and white, ringing our doorbells, parading up and down the streets, rattling our gates and committing nuisances on our premises, and generally disturbing the peace and quiet of this community."
The decline continued steadily over the years. Liquor stores and sex shops gradually replaced the retail stores that had catered to the once-vibrant neighborhood. Buildings were boarded up and abandoned. Vacant lots were littered with with broken bottles and discarded tires.
A Star columnist described the ongoing decay in 1953: "The library -- it is called a 'University for the People' on the curved, stone bench in front -- sits in the middle of a section of town that is slowly crumbling. It was once a high-class residential section of townhouses. Now the area around the square has been reduced to a collection of cheap hotels and lunch stands, neon signs and a movie house that runs an occasional nudist film. And the tired bums, in their loose fitting brown overcoats, stand in doorways and look outside blankly."
That same year, Rep. William Natcher (D-Ky.) decried the conditions around the square. "The Central Library must be relocated," he declared. "The present location at Eighth and K streets NW is deplorable . . . A location that makes it necessary for employees to go to their cars at night in groups of two or more for protection against assault and robbery should not be condoned."
A public restroom that had been installed under the southwest corner of the square around 1911 -- when well-heeled pedestrians still safely strolled the area sidewalks -- would come to serve as a popular place for furtive sex, as well as a haven for drunks and thieves. Several times over the decades it was closed by the city, only to be reopened after complaints by the library staff that the displaced "undesirables" who had inhabited the restrooms were crowding the library facilities instead.
The dispossessed eventually took over the entire building when it was abandoned in 1972, just three years after being added to the National Register of Historic Places, and the central library was moved to its present location at Ninth and G streets. "There were winos cooking inside," a city official told The Washington Post in 1978, "and somebody set up a cot to sleep there. Some people also tore up copper from the roof and sold it. They tore the doors off the walls and took the bronze hinges. They stole the leaded glass from the skylights and from elsewhere in the building . . . It was really looted."
Gateway to Nowhere
In 1980, extensive renovations were performed on the abused yet still elegant building, once described as "a little marble palace . . . fairly glistening in its purity and elegance." It was rededicated to serve as the gateway to new facilities the city wanted to build for the University of the District of Columbia on the four blocks immediately north of Mount Vernon Square.
But, alas, the restored building stood as a gateway to nothing more than a giant parking lot. The city had acquired land to create a campus it couldn't afford. And Congress balked at spending money on the university with its enrollment then declining.
In an ironic echo of the original deal offered to owners of the Port Royal plantation, the city offered developers rights to portions of the tract, rent free, if they would build campus facilities on the rest. There were no takers. "The deal didn't work out," one prominent developer said at the time. "It's in the middle of nowhere." Thanks to the city's insistence that the land be used only for UDC, it stayed that way.
The failure was just one of many in the effort to resurrect the area around Mount Vernon Square. In fact, the gateway concept had previously been put forth in a 1967 capital improvement plan that envisioned the square as a revitalized crossway between the downtown and residential portions of the city. The riots of 1968 had quickly killed that idea.
Similarly, there had been a plan to build a new convention center north of the square, as well as a sports arena to house the pro basketball and hockey teams Abe Pollin brought to Washington in the early 1970s. The buildings were to honor the late President Dwight D. Eisenhower and be built in time for the nation's bicentennial in 1976. Of course, it never happened. Pollin took his teams to now-demolished Capital Centre in Landover.
Through it all, Mount Vernon Square remained squalid. The murders of eight gay men around the area in 1977 and 1978 only seemed to spotlight this sorry fact. Most of the victims were professional men over 40 who frequented a nightspot on Ninth Street called the Eagle bar. It was painted black and a sign outside suggested the dress-code: "Leather-Levi-Western preferred."
At a time when gay liberation was more of a concept than a reality, the victims were mostly closeted and secretive, making their murders more difficult to solve. One was found slashed to death in his nearby apartment. Another was found strangled in his car parked near the Chesapeake House, a restaurant on Ninth Street that catered to a gay clientele. The remaining victims had been shot and beaten.
Mount Vernon Square seemed to have all but succumbed to the urban cancer that had invaded it, but soon a vibrating pulse beneath its eastern border signaled something else. Giant drills were plowing through the layers of earth below Seventh Street to create Metro's Green and Yellow lines. With Washington's subway system came a renaissance of sorts for the city's core. Huge chunks of downtown were reclaimed by office and retail developers. Long-shuttered theaters were reopened, historic buildings restored. People were flocking to the area.
One large concrete blunder compromised the downtown renaissance, however. The Washington Convention Center that was eventually built just below the southwest corner of Mount Vernon Square was a white elephant almost from the time it was completed in 1982. It was simply too small to accommodate large groups, and millions of dollars in potential revenue were lost to cities with bigger facilities.
Home Page to the Past
In May 1990, just eight years after the Washington Convention Center's completion, Mayor Marion Barry proposed a much larger one immediately north of the square. Still clinging to the dream of a downtown campus for UDC, Barry wanted to put the new center underground, reserving the six-block surface for the campus, as well as residential and commercial development. He was so enthusiastic that the city spent about $6 million to acquire property on the site. Only problem was, the proposal was never submitted to the D.C. Council, the zoning commissioner or any other regulatory body. And Mayor Barry was about to depart office ingloriously after a crack bust. His successor, Sharon Pratt Dixon, quickly put the kibosh on further expenditures.
The new convention center was in limbo but not quite dead. By the time Barry returned to office in 1995, new plans were underway. There were still hurdles, though. Some city leaders thought the center should be built elsewhere, such as behind Union Station; others found fault with the enormous size of the proposed building. One planning commissioner compared it to a "battleship being plowed into the community."
The community consisted in part of a number of businesses that clung to life in the 1990s, hoping for better days: hair salons, barbershops, clothing boutiques, law offices, restaurants, real estate offices, an art and theater space, printers, a deli, a dry cleaner, a used-car lot, a furniture store, a vending company, a community health center and a body-piercing studio -- plus seven trailers housing homeless women.
After several years of debate and design modification, ground was finally broken in October 1998 -- at which point the trailers for the homeless were moved away. Across the square, the enormous Techworld complex was completed along K Street in 1991. Around the corner, another big project by Boston Properties is under construction.
As for the stunning yet ultimately dysfunctional library now celebrating its centennial: Well, it's being described as a gateway again, updated with a modern metaphor by the City Museum folks who are giving it new life.
"We see the museum like a Web site," says Barbara Franco, executive director of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., which is developing the project, set to open in mid-May. Recognizing that the whole story of Washington can't be told in one building, Franco describes the museum as more of an introduction to the historical neighborhoods and other places of interest beyond the Mall. "We want to forge links with those places," she says. "We want to be the home page for the rest of the city."
With 12,000 feet of gallery space, multimedia displays and changing exhibits, the City Museum of Washington, D.C., will contain an impressive trove of historical information about a unique town. But the best history lesson for visitors might well be the very ground beneath their feet.
Michael Farquhar is an editor on leave from The Post.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company