The day’s festivities had barely begun, and toddlers were already spraying each other with water guns on the Capitol Hill street lined with ginkgo trees and colorful rowhouses. Bubbles filled the Saturday morning air. A dog named Pretzel ran through a makeshift obstacle course of hula hoops and cardboard boxes.
Block parties are a staple of summer in the District, but few are as storied as the Duddington Place block party — believed to be among the longest-running in the city. To recognize the 50th anniversary of the beloved all-day affair, the D.C. Council declared Duddington Place Day on Saturday.
The street, located between First and Second Streets SE, was once home to one of the finest estates in Washington, Duddington Manor — part of a property that stretched from the Anacostia River to what is now K Street NE, according to the Capitol Hill Restoration Society. Over the years, Duddington Place SE has been home to famous Washingtonians such as basketball player Elgin Baylor and several members of Congress, including Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) and Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), neighbors said. Until recently, presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke lived on the street, and his next-door neighbors would sometimes see the former congressman live-streaming videos from his back porch.
But the street’s greatest pride is its block party, and few people have been to as many as Whiteman, referred to by one neighbor as the “Dean of Duddington Place.” His wife, Rhonda McMillion, has collected T-shirts from parties past, which she hung along a fence at Saturday’s event.
While he missed the first block party in 1969 by a week, Whiteman said the tradition began with a pair of families who had moved to the District from Brooklyn, where such events were already a popular summer pastime. The first year was a simple picnic dinner, a way for neighbors old and new to reconnect. The street, formerly known as Heckman Street, had been predominantly African American, but many white families had begun moving in. The following year, the Washington Evening Star chronicled the event in a July 27, 1970, article headlined “Duddington Place: A Block With No Bloc.”
“The old neighbors — the ones who have lived there for years and years and years and who knew Duddington in its dim, dark past when it was Heckman — surveyed the new crop of bell-bottomed neighbors with cautious, but friendly eyes,” the article read. “Each family contributed 50 cents and a dish of food and a long table was set up in the middle of the street after it was swept and hosed down.”
Whiteman remembers those bell bottoms, he said Saturday. They were his father’s Navy pants from World War II, with the 32-inch waist.
“I could never fit in those again,” he said.
As other neighborhoods began their own similar traditions, “the block parties lost something of their early cachet,” Whiteman said. But the residents of Duddington continued to plan their summers around this day, and the parties only became more elaborate — with pony rides and bounce houses and a nighttime dance party.
“There’s always been a really good spirit,” Whiteman said.
When Whiteman first moved to Duddington Place, he didn’t plan to stay. He and his wife had always meant to move to a neighborhood where they could have more space, a bigger home. But the location was convenient for his job at the Library of Congress. And most of all, there was a sense of community that the family was not willing to give up. They bought their home, raised two children and helped organize almost five decades of block parties.
“It kept us here and very happy for the last 50 years,” he said.
With the houses so close and benches lining the street, Duddington is the kind of place where neighbors sit outside for hours on summer evenings, having drinks and watching their children play. Families help pick up packages for one another and take care of a neighbor’s kids when an emergency comes up.
Christine O’Reilly moved into the neighborhood 27 years ago and raised her two children here. In a city of transients, where few people have family nearby, Duddington was a support network, O’Reilly said. When her husband died in 2006, neighbors rallied together to bring over meals. One neighbor even refurbished two benches with plaques dedicated to her late husband, Eugene Tiller.
“I can’t ever move,” she said. “I’ll be the crazy cat lady that lives on Duddington Place.”
For many years, there were few children on the block, as rising rents and housing prices forced families to move to the suburbs, O’Reilly said. But in recent years, more and more families have chosen to stay in Duddington to raise their children. In 2017 alone, seven babies were born on the block, according to one neighbor.
About halfway down the block, past the face-paint tent and a group of moms playing double Dutch, four boys elbowed their way through a line for Whiteman to fill up their water balloons.
“Can you make one for me?” asked a curly-haired 6-year-old named Luca, who was sipping from a Capri Sun juice bag. Whiteman pumped water into a balloon, smiling as he tied a knot.
Then, Luca sprinted into the street and plopped the balloon onto the ground, clapping as it landed with a splash.