One of DC's more interesting off-the-beaten path sections is that subwayed by Gallery Place Metro Station. Chinatown, joined lately by the MCI Center, has long been the principal draw here.
A Chinese carryout on H St. is the former Mary Surratt's boarding house where Booth and associates plotted Lincoln's send-off. The neighborhood still retains some of DC's oldest middle-class rowhouses, the narrow 2-up,2-down jobs with dormers in the garretts as built from 1800-50. On 7th Street is a huge stone pile of a Baptist church with a Star-of-David stained-glass window betraying its origin as a synagogue. Here a Jewish kid named Asa Joleson broke his father's heart by singing popular music instead of Hebrew hymns and so lived out the plot that he would later play in a landmark movie called "The Jazz Singer." [Abe Pollin is restoring this building.]
As one who dealt on a daily basis with the DC and Federal governments, I always found the Tariff Commission building fascinating. This was originally the Patent Office built in the 1840s and in the mid 1980s it still hosted a lot of its mid-19th-century appointments: office numbers on brass-plates, doors with louvres and foot-or-so gaps at top and bottom. This is how a world that dressed in wool dealt with Washington summers. Just think: in this building they examined Edison's light bulb and Kellogg's steam-driven enema pump.
My first trek through this neighborhood occurred in 1979 when I volunteered briefly at the long-gone CCNV's Zaccheus House soup kitchen at 6th & L. Back then, the area ranged from ghost-town to scary with Hodge's Sandwich Shop being the one oasis of civilization. Now, I suppose at the instigation of the MCI Center, the old buildings with cast-iron cornices have been spruced up and let out to restaurants including the one place I will not eat at, Fuddrucker's. This is because it is unlikely that I can say "Fuddrucker's" more than a couple times without running into the same difficulty I have with "Buckmaster."
We also, of course, just passed the 25th Anniversary of Metro. They started building it in 1969 and the planked-over streets and other disruptions around Woodies and Hecht's downtown were one reason my Mom transferred her Saturday shopping flag to Baltimore.
I remember taking my first ride with Mom and Dad, probably a few weeks after the first stretch opened. We boarded at Farragut North and rode out to Rhode Island Ave. and back. That was the extent of the line. Do you know that the whole 100-mile system was supposed to have been completed by 1979?
All the while it was being built, we shook our heads at Metro's not including extra express tracks as in New York. Now they're saying that the system won't be able to handle the ridership in 20 years.
My most memorable Metro experience occurred while I was in college: Riding home from my part-time Capitol Hill job at 10:30 PM, I was in the first car facing the driver's cabin. Between Bethesda and Medical Center Stations, the cabin door slammed shut on the control panel while the driver was not sitting at it. He was standing in the middle. I'll never forget his expression as he turned slowly around to face the passengers, having realized that he was locked out of the controls.
I knew that the train would stop when the "dead man's grip" was not being gripped and that's exactly what happened. Still, I didn't care for being stuck 200 feet underground late at night.
"Anybody got a bobby pin?" the driver asked sheepishly. Somebody did and we were soon on our way.
[Addendum. Thanks to Karen MacKavanaugh Jones for the following interesting thing about Gallery Place:
"My addition is that a few years ago, D.C. workers preparing to demolish a row house on Seventh Street found Clara Barton's old apartment on the top floor, which hadn't been used since about 1900. She had lived there during the Civil War and run her office for missing soldiers there. The National Park Service is still trying to decide what to do with the site, but they have information about it on their website, and there's also information at the Clara Barton House in Glen Echo. The first floor of the 3-story building had been a shoe store in business until the 1980s, so I expect you would remember it. The city workers found that the top floor still had 19th-century wallpaper, newspapers, and some documents. The second floor had been used as offices until a fire in the 1930s."
Makes you wonder what else is lying hidden in those old buildings. Thetrend isto gut a whole block of buildings and use their street walls as facades for new office buildings ]
Copyright © 2003 by Neal J. Conway. All rights reserved.