The Far Side of Rebirth
A forsaken neighborhood, near Capitol Hill and yet firmly apart, stands on shifting, strange ground, with opulence in the distance.

By Paul Schwartzman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 19, 2007

The rubble stretches toward the horizon, a wasteland of broken bricks, chunks of concrete, upended trees and shrubbery yanked from the earth. This is the crushed vestige of a lost neighborhood where 1,200 public housing residents once lived, where 50 apartment buildings once stood.

And there, amid the vast emptiness, stands a virtual afterthought: a lone strip of surviving rowhouses. Inhabited.

Before a neighborhood becomes the new hot place, before developers christen their creations and retailers and restaurateurs open their doors, there is an inevitable rite of passage, a transition, in which the past and future can be glimpsed at the same moment.

So it is here on the cracked pavement of Third Street SE, a mile south of the Capitol and just north of where the Washington Nationals are building their stadium. It's a neighborhood on the precipice, about to transform from blue collar to white, from industrial grit to marble grandeur. Yet, for now, it's a ghost town.

To walk the neighborhood is to come upon a montage of incongruous sights. A spry 70-year-old man selling bundles of firewood across from a cavernous hole. A $1 million penthouse lair overlooking a former trash-transfer station. An old church clinging to a corner surrounded by vacant blocks once occupied by its congregants. Four horses inexplicably stabled beneath the elevated Southeast Freeway's thumping clamor.

"It's bizarre," Scott Swenson, 44, a writer who recently moved to the neighborhood, said of the vista as he walked Boo-Boo, his black Labrador and whippet mix, along the perimeter of a leveled block. "But it's bizarre with a lot of potential."

To an outsider, it might seem lonesome or just plain odd to live in a dust bowl of isolation. But for Vivian Turner, who has resided on Third Street for 17 years, it is a respite from what was once all too common: police sirens shrieking, neighbors fighting, people yakking at all hours on the pay phones once bolted to the sidewalk below her bedroom window.

"It's peaceful," Turner said, sitting in her living room across from a hanging woodcut of two hands clasped in prayer. "It's a blessing that I'm here."

For generations, this terrain was the other side of Washington's proverbial tracks, literally and psychologically separated from Capitol Hill and the rest of the city by the freeway. Repair shops, cab companies, greasy spoons and dance and strip clubs resided here, not to mention the families and seniors occupying the 758 units that were the Arthur Capper/Carrollsburg housing project.

In 2001, District and federal officials decided it was time to take down the wall and lure the rest of the region to the banks of the Anacostia River. They hatched plans to raze the housing project and build offices, a park and 1,500 units of market-rate and subsidized housing. Three years later, the Nationals claimed the southern side of M Street for their ballpark, adding another sprawling dimension to one of the largest redevelopment projects in the country.

Now, from Turner's corner, she can see more than half a dozen bulldozed blocks as well as harbingers of the gilded future: a new Transportation Department complex to the left, a Marriott hotel and the Capitol Hill Tower apartment building straight ahead, all of it a short walk from the Nationals' new stadium, rising on the horizon like the Taj Mahal.

"From the pits to the palace, from nightmares to dreams," said Turner, 52, a receptionist at a Northwest apartment building and the mother of two adult daughters. She shook her head. "I just watch with amazement."

Swenson became familiar with the neighborhood by frequenting now-demolished clubs on nearby O Street. Now he has returned as a property owner, spending $400,000 for a two-bedroom at the recently opened Capitol Hill Tower, which boasts of a "sky-lit indoor pool" and "mahogany-finish entry doors."

For the moment, he does not mind that when he walks outside he faces the grime-encrusted facade of a Department of Public Works facility. That, too, will go, he said. Meanwhile, he is witnessing a rebirth, brick by brick. "You see the future," he said. "We're just waiting for it to come up around us."

Others wonder whether they'll be welcome in the new world. Sarah Davies is the owner of the Charley Horse Co., which offers carriage rides around the Mall. For 15 years, she has kept her horses -- Bartholomew, Michelangelo, Zoe and Pooh Bear -- beneath the freeway, in a stable she rents from the District government.

Until recent years, a printing press and a warehouse were across the street. Most people didn't know she was there, she said, and the rest, including those who parked outside for a smoke or a catnap, didn't much care. But she doubts that a stable will fit in with a neighborhood brimming with comfort.

"It's not like this is a hospital -- it's not essential," she said, standing outside the stable, the Capitol visible in the distance through a thicket of bare trees. Still, she said, her stable, partly by virtue of its odd location, "makes a contribution to the flavor of D.C. I don't want to be part of a sterile world."

Others worry about more practical matters. The Rev. Thomas Moon once could count on 75 congregants showing up for Sunday services at St. Paul's AUMP Church at Fourth and I streets. But with Capper/Carrollsburg demolished, including the buildings that adjoined the church, the pastor typically finds himself facing just 30 worshipers, and often fewer.

"The weirdest thing is driving in on the freeway and looking over here, and where you once saw a whole community, all you see is one little church," he said. "We're shrinking."

The pastor talks of opening a day-care center for families moving to the nearly 300 rowhouses planned for the area. But the church's 83-year-old bricks will need a cleaning; otherwise, it's "going to be like a sore thumb." And, Moon asked, how will St. Paul's pay for all that? "You wonder what the future will bring," he said.

Five blocks away, Andy Lee, the owner of Market Deli at First and L streets, counted on the public housing residents, as well as the cabbies and mechanics, to buy his drip coffee ($1.38 for a large). Now he relies on the hard hats putting up the condominium high-rises. When the buildings are complete, he asked, when the neighborhood is remade and the construction workers are gone, what then?

Will the lawyers and lobbyists buying the new granite-laden apartments drink drip coffee from foam cups?

"I'm dealing with blue collar, and I'm going to be surrounded by white collar," Lee said from behind his metal counter, his sandwich board offering a menu of cheap fare, including a $2.95 BLT and $3.30 Salisbury steak. "People like that don't come to the Market Deli."

Around the corner, Sok Reed, who opened a wig and beauty supply shop last year, nurses a more optimistic view. Her clientele, assembled over two decades in her previous shop on the Southwest waterfront, is mostly black. Now, she said, she's ready to draw white women moving into her new neighborhood by adding blond wigs to the stock adorning the mannequin heads cramming her shelves.

"Eva Gabors," she said, pointing to the brand.

Across the street, several businesses have moved out, leaving banners and signs advertising their new addresses in Northeast. Soon, Bennie Meeks, 70, still selling firewood from an empty lot on I Street, will be joining the exodus.

When Meeks started leasing his spot a decade ago, a recycling warehouse and a strip club commanded the opposite corners. Both are gone. Meeks never got to know his neighbors all that well, but the sight of the dancers coming and going provided its own kind of amenity. "I didn't have much to say, but I still liked to look at them," he said, seated in his white pickup, his denim shirt buttoned to the top, his smile framed by a white beard.

Meeks is pleased he found a new place to lease on Kenilworth Avenue, behind a pizzeria just over the Maryland border, but he will miss his spot, with its clear view of the halls of power. No matter what, Meeks said, the sight of the Capitol dome made him feel as though he was somewhere that mattered, not only to himself, but to the world.