“We hadn’t sat down and gone through family pictures, ever,” she said. “And they had boxes and boxes of photographs — it took us all back.”
‘A busy, busy place’
Community meetings to determine what goes on the signs bring out new and old residents alike, Levey said, groups who are often at odds over neighborhood issues. Off H Street, for instance, new white residents are annoyed by the overflow of cars at African American churches on Sunday, while older African American residents worry about being priced out of their homes.
“We usually have community meetings over concerns or controversies,” said Lyons, whose family has lived on H Street for five generations. “So it was nice to have a harmony-building project where people who had just moved to the community become enraptured with the history and older residents feel like their stories are being collected and listened to.”
For newcomers such as restaurateur and nightclub promoter Joe Englert, who is often credited with resurrecting H Street, knowing the history of the Granville Moore building gives “the neighborhood a depth and it shows that these main streets didn’t just spring from the head of Zeus.” (Englert and chef Teddy Folkman decided to name the restaurant for the doctor after they learned about the building’s history.)
The meetings also bring back those who fled the city for the suburbs. Collins, a fourth-generation Washingtonian, moved to Chevy Chase years ago. He returned to the old neighborhood for the H Street history project and remembered how his grandfather worked as an engineer for the railroad that ran between Washington and Chicago.
“It was a busy, busy place right near the railroad when that was the center of transportation. But it was also rough. It was tough. We had two watchdogs, stolen three times,” he said, and laughed with Lyons, as they walked the neighborhood on a recent day. “We had to pay a ‘reward,’ to get them back. This was never Chevy Chase or Georgetown. People should know that. There’s not enough history about Washington so I think these trails are really recording two or three generations of a neighborhood’s metamorphosis.”
Indeed, every trail records the rise, fall and renewal of a neighborhood. Almost all describe how the riots of 1968 destroyed many of the city’s business districts, leaving economic and emotional scars. This is especially true of H Street NE, where much of the rioting took place.
Anwar Saleem, a former city bus mechanic who now heads H Street Main Street, a nonprofit group that promotes business in the neighborhood, said he appreciates the trail’s honest storytelling, even when those stories are painful. He was in the seventh grade when his best friend was killed during the rioting inside Morton’s Department Store.
“Folks have a tendency to see a vacant lot or see a new store and not look into the history,” he said. “But these trails are important because our society is changing and everyone wants their stories remembered.”
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