From Ruin to Rebirth in D.C.

"I feel like I'm in another city," Robinson said. "I get the feeling I no longer belong."

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The symbols of Washington's metamorphosis are the cranes that have become a ubiquitous presence over its skyline in recent years. Since the late 1990s, developers have delivered a litany of amenities that other cities take for granted: big-box retail, dozens and dozens of shops and cafes and restaurants, a 20,000-seat arena. Just last week, the city celebrated the opening of Nationals Park, a publicly funded, 42,000-seat baseball stadium.

The dollar figures are dizzying. Since 2001, along the riot corridors alone, developers and the government have poured more than $3 billion into new housing, offices, theaters and the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, according to District officials. During the 1990's, Metro spent more than $500 million to open four stations in neighborhoods along two of the corridors, each station helping to catalyze further investment.

The breadth and magnitude of the changes, said Robert Peck, former president of the Greater Washington Board of Trade, has turned Washington into a "bustling, cosmopolitan city."

In their decayed state, Peck said, the riot corridors still possessed the potential to help drive the city's transformation. "When people ran out of room in the old downtown, it was the riot corridors that provided the cheapest place to buy," he said. "For certain developers, there was no other place to go. For people who wanted cheap housing in the city, it was the place to go."

In their heyday -- the 1940s through the early 1960s -- the corridors were bustling shopping strips, primarily for Washington's black middle class. Women bought earrings at Kay's Jewelers on H Street, and men flipped through suit racks at Morton's on 14th Street or Cavalier's Men's Shop on Seventh. There were bakeries and hardware stores, car dealerships and electronics shops, places to dine and dance or buy records and evening gowns.

Yet even before the riots, the corridors had begun a steady decline as desegregation propelled middle-class black families to leave those neighborhoods and whites moved to suburbs where new shopping plazas were drawing patrons from downtown.

By April 1968, the neighborhoods around Seventh, 14th and H streets were inhabited by a black population that was largely poor and working class. They endured rat-infested housing and low-paying jobs. Their children attended dysfunctional, decaying public schools, where three of every four students read below the national average.

Conditions were so dire that King, a renowned pacifist, warned of a repeat of the rioting that had erupted the previous summer in cities such as Detroit and Newark.

"I don't like to predict violence," King told a congregation at Washington National Cathedral, "but if nothing is done between now and June to raise ghetto hope, I feel this summer will not only be as bad, but worse than last year."

Four days and four hours later, King was gunned down in Memphis. Word of his death ignited civil disturbances in more than 100 cities across the United States. In Washington, Stokely Carmichael, the civil rights activist who had injected the term "black power" into the national dialogue, led a throng up and down 14th Street, demanding that shop owners shut down to honor King's memory.