You Better Sit Down. The Big Chair's Gone.

Anacostia Laments Loss of a Landmark

In Anacostia, people still talk about the pretty woman who lived for 42 days on the big chair, high above what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, eating and sleeping and waving to the crowds who came to see her.

Over time, the stories took on the feeling of folklore, except that they were all true, every word, including the fact that the woman had a telephone up there, and a television and a fridge. Now there's a new story, also true: After 46 years as a singular Southeast Washington landmark, the big chair is gone, dismantled, its 19 1/2 -foot-high mahogany frame weather-beaten and rotting.

"It's like going home and not finding your kids there," Ed Robinson, 53, said as he gazed at the empty pedestal where the chair had stood since 1959, when a furniture store put it up to lure customers.

Like many who work and live and regularly travel through Anacostia, Robinson said, he was stunned when he found workers taking the chair down piece by piece as he arrived for work Wednesday morning. In a city of countless monuments and statues, the big chair had evolved into Anacostia's very own homespun attraction, not to mention a well-placed geographic marker that helped define the world.

"That's a landmark," said Robinson, an HIV prevention counselor who works in an office near the chair. "You tell people, 'Meet me at the big chair.' Now what you going to say?"

A 191/2-foot-tall dining chair built as a promotional ploy for the Curtis Bros. furniture store was an attraction in Anacostia from 1959 until Wednesday, when it was taken down because its rotting wood had made it a liability.

The chair's fate is in the hands of a thin, gray-bearded contractor named John Kidwell, who has patched, painted and otherwise cared for it over three decades. Kidwell said he plans to rebuild the chair and put it back, though he acknowledged that he is not exactly sure how.

"We just don't know what to do," he said, smoking a cigarette as he stood in paint-splattered khakis among the remnants of the chair, two dozen pieces arrayed on the floor of a garage a couple of blocks from its berth.

Along a wall, turned over on its face, was the seat, 9 by 8 feet and tattered at the edges. There was a front leg, next to another that was rotting from the top. And there was the back, split into pieces. "It's certainly a challenge," Kidwell said with a shrug, estimating that the repair could take two months and cost $30,000. He compared himself to a doctor who is losing one of his patients to cancer. "I'm going to do what I can do to save the patient, but cancer is cancer," he said.

Still, Kidwell said, he understands the importance of his mission to generations who have lived and worked in the neighborhood and beyond. "This is a serious test of my abilities," he said. "We're tearing down Anacostia."

The chair was built as a promotional ploy for Curtis Bros., once a well-known furniture retailer whose warehouse, showroom and offices were at what is now V Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE, and then on Nichols Avenue.

At the Curtises' request, a supplier, Bassett Furniture Industries of North Carolina, built a replica of a Duncan Phyfe dining room chair, though a bit heavier than the everyday model, at 4,600 pounds.

When it was completed, the chair was transported in one piece to the District on a flatbed truck, though it had to take a somewhat circuitous route. "It couldn't go under the underpasses," said Charles Curtis, 80, the former president of Curtis Bros., by phone.