Little had been done to rehabilitate the old riot corridors from the unrest of April 1968, when after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., three days of rioting, arson and looting killed 11 people, burned out 600 businesses, ravaged major thoroughfares, some just blocks from the White House, and scarred the city's psyche. Half of the business owners said they would not reopen, and 5,000 jobs were lost permanently, according to congressional testimony.
Fourteenth Street NW had been cleared of debris, but no new housing units had been built, and many charred and boarded-up buildings remained. It was the same along H Street NE. There were plans for improvement, but only one house had been rehabbed by the summer of 1971.
John Folan, who brought his four children to the Senators' last game, shows off the foul ball he caught that night.
(Gerald Martineau -- The Washington Post)
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Businesses departed, too. Car dealerships and haberdashers left. Jewish-owned corner stores sold out to black businessmen who in turn gave way to Asian American entrepreneurs. Big downtown department stores like Kann's and Lansburgh's hung on but would be gone within a few years. Corporations decamped for modern office buildings in the suburbs.
Longtime Washington lawyer Frederick D. Cooke Jr. remembers feeling a mixture of futility and hope. "For those of us who happened to be black in the city," he recalled, "there was a moment, despite the bleakness of it, when we could see the fruition of majority control."
In the decade that was to follow, every jurisdiction outside the Capital Beltway -- a road that was completed in 1964 and took people everywhere except into the city -- grew substantially. While the population inside the Beltway declined by 11.6 percent, the population outside it rose by 31.4 percent. Few were immigrants, though in 1970 the District did have its first Latin American Festival, and a fledgling Latino affairs advisory committee was established in the city government.
The sense of being a southern town had not yet disappeared. This was a time when baseball cards were stuck in bicycle spokes with a clothespin to mimic the sound of a motor; and when a youngster like Dean Phillips, who went to the last game, could ride a bike safely from Arlington over the Key Bridge to Georgetown, with the only parental caution: "Be home for supper."
It was a place where baseball still captivated youth, and where a young fan might sleep in his Little League uniform with his mitt under his pillow, as Gasbarri, one of those at the last game, said he did.
"Baseball ruled, and the Senators ruled," Phillips recalled. "They were terrible, but they were our terrible, and we loved them."
It was a peaceful time in many city neighborhoods, too. In the 1970s, McCall, now 85, said elderly people would sit outside on their porches talking to each other in the Kingman Park neighborhood near RFK.
On game nights, they could hear the stadium announcer and listen for the roar that would signal a home run. "As close as I am, I hear everything," he said. "When the wind blows, [the sound] filters all through the neighborhood."
Washington still had an old-fashioned elegance and dignity, and it remained the population center of the region. One in four area residents lived in the District.
The 1970 Census said the Washington area was the most affluent metropolitan area in the country. "It was doing better than most other metros nationally but wasn't understood to be such," said longtime local demographer George Grier.
It had the best-educated population, both white and black, in the country.
It had a thriving, tight-knit black middle class, fostered by tradition, by institutions such as Howard University, and by good, white-collar jobs in federal and local government.
