Newseum, a Developing Story

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At the Newseum, News Is the Attraction

At the Newseum in Washington, visitors can take in the history of news, then create some of their own by taking on the job of a journalist.

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Ah, city living. It's easy to take for granted -- unless you can remember when a scene like this was but a dream on somebody's drawing board.

"People said, 'Are you scared to go down there?' " recalls Michael Kahn, artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre, a pioneer in the quarter's revitalization. The company recently opened its second performance space in the neighborhood.

"What's happened over time is kind of amazing to me," says Kahn, who expects the Newseum to add even more energy -- and hopes that visitors will notice the theaters and other nearby attractions.

"When we opened, the three blocks surrounding us were virtually empty," says Rob Wilder, co-creator in 1993 of the restaurant Jaleo on Seventh Street. On a night walk through the neighborhood, "our banker . . . was literally afraid for his life. Ultimately we got him comfortable with the fact we knew what we were doing."

At first Wilder didn't bother serving lunch on weekends because the streets were empty. Now weekend business is about double that of weekdays.

"We felt like we were on the edge of the Earth," says Miles Groves, president of the Downtown Neighborhood Association, recalling the mid-1990s.

There were about 1,500 residents, not enough people to qualify for an advisory neighborhood commissioner. Now there are more than 5,000 residents, according to the Downtown Business Improvement District.

"For God's sake, there wasn't a place to get a pizza," says Docter, now the advisory neighborhood commissioner, who moved with his wife from Kensington in 1991. "There wasn't a place to get anything. . . . What's going on now fully justifies my moving downtown, and nobody's going to give me a crazy look anymore!"

A big moment came in December 1997 when MCI (now Verizon) Center opened. The Seventh Street corridor became a restaurant row. Gallery Place turned as busy and dizzy as the colors on the Chinatown arch. The old General Post Office building was transformed into the Hotel Monaco, and the refurbished National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian American Art Museum reopened. Woolly Mammoth Theatre, the National Academy of Sciences' museum and Madame Tussauds moved in, and the Textile Museum announced plans for a second location.

It all seemed willy-nilly, fabulous, unimaginable -- but it had been imagined. For once, the planners and the zoners got more or less what they had sketched on their drawing boards. They fended off some of the office developers -- who, left to their own devices, would replicate the profitable sameness of K Street everywhere -- and insisted on such concepts as "mixed use" and "a living downtown."

"To achieve a living downtown we needed to have a mix of uses that would keep people on the street at night and weekends, after office workers had gone home," says Ellen McCarthy, former D.C. director of planning.

The Newseum is the apotheosis of this way of thinking.