A Washington D.C. Neighborhood Transformed
When I moved to Washington, D.C. over thirty years ago, I first lived in a large apartment complex called Capitol Park in the Southwest quadrant of the city. Southwest Washington D.C. is the smallest of the city's quadrants. It borders the waterfront and also includes a number of modern government buildings along Independence Avenue.
Upon moving to Southwest D.C. I found a range of new apartment buildings and homes together with a small little-used shopping center called Waterside Mall. At the time, I was ignorant of the history of this portion of my adopted city. I eventually learned that Southwest D.C. had been the site of terrible slums not long before I arrived. In the 1950s, Southwest D.C was bulldozed. The residents were relocated and the old houses and stores were gutted and removed. The new community I saw took its place.
The renovation of Southwest D.C. was an early experiment in urban renewal. It was and remains highly controversial. Many inadequate, unhealthy and unsafe homes and neighborhoods were removed or transformed. But the city lost a great deal of diversity and sense of place as the residents of the community were scattered, most never to return. While the new renovated Southwest had its charms, it also suffers from a certain sterility and conformity unlike the neighborhoods it replaced.
In his recent contribution to the Images of America series, "Southwest Washington D.C." (2006), the local architectural historian Paul Williams offers a photographic tour of Washington D.C.'s Southwest, old and new, together with brief running commentaries. Although the book covers this area of the city from its beginnings in the Eighteenth Century, the most extensive collection of photographs, and the most fascinating, covers Southwest Washington D.C. in the years leading up to the controversial urban renewal of the area in the 1950s.
Thus, in a lengthy chapter titled "The Southwest Neighborhood, 1870-1950", Williams shows the reader a part of the city that is no more. Unlike most urban areas which exhibit a certain continuity over time, Southwest D.C. was utterly gutted and transformed. Williams offers a collection of photographs of old homes, churches and business, most of which are lost forever. He shows what, up to the 1950s was a vibrant commercial strip of small stores along 4th Street, (the site of what became my first apartment home), that catered to residents of all races and religions. There are photos of schools, landmarks, and businesses, such as the original site of the Rock Creek Beverage Company, a local soda manufacturer. But most of all, there are photos of the notorious alleyways, crowded streets, and dismal living conditions that made the D.C. Southwest the prime target it became for urban renewal. (The Soviet Union used pictures of urban blight in the area for propaganda purposes.) A series of photographs by the famous African-American photographer Gordon Parks taken in 1942 captures the tenements, yards, alleyways and residents of what was by any account a depressed urban area. Yet there is a sense of life in these photographs and even of neighborhood.
The photos of the old Southwest are followed by a section of the book showing the modern, planned community with its large apartments, condominiums and townhouses. The new community has been a mixed success as the poverty and deterioration of the earlier Southwest was greatly ameliorated at the cost of substantial residential displacement and loss of neighborhood character. Williams generally avoids editorializing but offers his photographs and commentaries and allows the reader his or her own reflections upon them.
Earlier chapters of the book focus upon the early D.C. Southwest, before it entered its long decline. There are fascinating pictures here of early government buildings, of Civil War Washington D.C., of the waterfront with its early steamers and fish markets, and of places of amusement. But the heart of any treatment of Southwest D.C lies in the comparison between the neighborhood that was destroyed and the neighborhood that took its place. Williams documents this radical change well. He offers material for thought on the nature, potentialities, and pitfalls of modern urban life.
