With its wooden sign in imperfect French advertising “frittes, ales, moules” seven days a week, Granville Moore’s on H Street NE looks like any other hip gastropub. But its exposed brick and chalkboard menu of craft beers belie the tavern’s rich history. In the 1950s, the Formstone row house housed the office of Granville Moore, one of the city’s most respected African American doctors.
“We didn’t want this history to vanish and become just a name of another fun place to go out,” said Marqui Lyons, a longtime resident who, on a recent frosty morning, was bundled in a thick winter coat to join a small group of amateur historians for a walk down H Street. These history hunters are digging for the kind of detail that isn’t found in guidebooks, but resides in the houses, storefronts, churches and vacant lots of this hardscrabble, working-class neighborhood a short walk east of Union Station.
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Greater H Street Heritage Trail
Lyons and her companions belong to a group of about 400 District residents who are working with Cultural Tourism DC — a nonprofit organization that promotes the city’s heritage — to uncover and restore Washington’s block-by-block history before stories such as Moore’s vanish as fast as a $13 pint of Belgian dark ale.
“It’s really the front lines of watching the change,” said Washington historian Jane Freundel Levey, who heads the Neighborhood Heritage Trails project. “Most historians want to deal with history that happened 50 years ago or longer because they feel pressure to know how it turns out. But this is the first cut of our most recent history.”
The H Street route, “Hub, Home, Heart: The Greater H Street NE Heritage Trail,” is scheduled to open this spring and will boast 3.2 miles of history. It’s the 13th historic walking trail installed by Cultural Tourism since 2001. Existing trails dotting neighborhoods from Tenleytown to Deanwood will be joined in coming years by routes winding through Historic Anacostia, LeDroit Park/Bloomingdale and along the Anacostia River.
The heritage trails project shows visitors neighborhoods largely unknown to the tourists who crowd Washington every year, said Kathryn S. Smith, the retired Cultural Tourism director who came up with the concept. Washington “had an image around the nation that was totally out of sync with what people who know and love the city understand,” said Smith, whose focus is on history at the community level. “We realized how important it was to Washingtonians who love their city’s history, but didn’t get to talk about it that much.”
A vanishing past
The H Street renaissance is among the most recent examples of gentrification in the District. The area was once home to a mix of residents, including the Italian immigrant stonemasons who helped construct the Library of Congress and Union Station, along with the Irish and African American laborers who worked on the White House and the Capitol. At the turn of the 20th century, the heart of H Street became a neighborhood of Greek, Lebanese and Jewish immigrants who ran mom-and-pop shops, living in cold-water flats above their stores.
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