Historic school’s fate rallies neighborhood

Theodore Coates laughed deeply yesterday, recalling the good times he had as an elementary school student some 70 years ago at the historic Crummell School in the Ivy City neighborhood of Northeast.

“We had a principal there, she gave you a history lesson when you were bad,” Mr. Coates, 75, recalled with a grin. “You walked a chalk line when she got you — them were some good days.”

Things have changed.

“Ivy City has just gone down real bad,” said Bernice Johnson, 24, who’s lived her whole life in the community — a triangle of residential blocks buttressed against the Trinidad neighborhood between Mount Olivet Road and New York and West Virginia avenues.

But a grass-roots effort in Ivy City to prevent the Crummell School from being swallowed up by unwanted development appeared to gain momentum yesterday as Mr. Coates and other former and current residents gathered to share stories about the neighborhood’s history and rally support for pumping life back into the school.

The Crummell School was built in 1911 as one of the city’s first for black children and named after the Rev. Alexander Crummell, an educator and abolitionist. The school slumps, all but abandoned, at the corner of Central Place and Gallaudet Street.

A chain-link fence sags around the school and the sunbaked abandoned lot behind it. Several D.C. police cruisers were parked on Gallaudet Street yesterday adjacent to an abandoned 1980s model dump trunk packed to the brim with debris.

The District declared the Crummell School a historic place in 2002, a classification celebrated by activists who fought for it, though so far it has resulted in little more than fresh plywood over the windows and a new layer of roofing.

Mr. Coates, who now lives in Hyattsville, sat across the table from his brother, Alfred Coates, 77, who also spent his elementary school years at the Crummell School during the 1930s. Their mother, now dead, also went there.

Charles Brown, 52, another alumnus who shared laughs with the Coates brothers yesterday, said the Crummell School is “part of our culture and our history.”

“It was one of the only black schools in the city,” he said.

Once a hub of the community’s life, the Crummell School now languishes about a block south of Dream, the massive nightclub just off New York Avenue. On weekends, Central Place and Gallaudet are among the streets lined with burned-out, lower-income homes that become a packed parking strip for Dream’s clientele.

Yesterday’s gathering was organized by the nonprofit citizens advocacy group Empower D.C. and sponsored by the Ivy City Neighborhood and Oral History Project at the Bethesda Baptist Church, a few blocks from the Crummell School.

Empower D.C. was co-founded last year by Parisa Norouzi, a resident of Columbia Heights in Northwest, who said she helped start the group to bring about sustained improvement in the quality of life of low-income residents across the District.

Miss Norouzi, 27, described yesterday’s gathering as an effort to “document the history of the community” and “celebrate the history of the Crummell School.”

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