A Bittersweet Renaissance

Wood was born across the street from where he now lives, a block populated at the time by blacks and Irish, many of them plumbers, electricians and carpenters. His father bought the family's first house on the street from a West Indian family. As a child, Wood said, he went to the grocery and swept the sidewalk for the O'Donnells, an Irish family that lived two doors away. Wood went off to the Army, and when he returned in the mid-'40s, he learned that Mrs. O'Donnell had died. Her son had left the neighborhood but still owned the house, which Wood rented.

By then, the area had long since attracted teachers and Howard University professors, doctors and lawyers and ministers. But after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned restrictive covenants in 1948, the stage was set for blacks to begin moving to newer and less crowded neighborhoods north of U Street.

As the middle class departed, it was replaced by poorer blacks who moved into rowhouses that landlords broke up into apartments. The neighborhood deteriorated, then erupted with the 1968 riots, when looters torched white-owned shops. Wood, who said he spent hours helping to put out fires, had just reached an agreement to buy his house. He told his wife, Juanita, that he wanted to move to Howard County, where she grew up. She refused, insisting that the city was their home.

So they stayed.

Wood turned to civic activism to salvage his community. He joined a campaign led by the Rev. Walter E. Fauntroy to force out absentee landlords, spur black homeownership and build low- and moderate-income housing. Fauntroy's vision, the pastor and former congressman recounted recently in his office at New Bethel Baptist Church in Shaw, was haunted by what had happened in Southwest, where urban renewal pushed blacks out.

He had hoped for a diverse community, he said, but the free market has overwhelmed his vision: Developers have converted rentals into condominiums, forcing African Americans to move; and black homeowners, enticed by rising property values, have sold and left for the suburbs.

"Cash rules in all matters," Fauntroy said ruefully.

To some, that's not a bad thing.

Keith Bond figured his house on Westminster Street was an investment when he bought it in 1984. He was 32 and worked for the Department of Labor. The building next door was soon taken over by prostitutes and drug dealers. Teenagers stood in the street and threw bottles at each other. His car was broken into, his tires slashed. One night, he saw two men in ski masks threaten to shoot a neighbor if he complained to police about them dealing drugs.

But there also were signs that the neighborhood was changing. A year after he arrived, the first white family moved to the block. "Not just a single person, a family," he said. "If the white people could stay, I could stay."

Now there are new condominiums and restaurants and plans for a Radio One headquarters -- developments Bond lists with an emphatic "Ka-ching!" He loves it when a friend teases him about being a millionaire -- the house three doors away is on the market for $899,000 -- and he no longer has to drive to Greenbelt to buy groceries.

There are things that would have been unfathomable just a few years ago, like hearing the sounds of voices -- voices of women, white women -- as they return home from a night out.