Recovery slow for wracked communities

Forty years after the Martin Luther King’s assassination sparked riots in hundreds of cities across the United States and in the nation’s capital, many D.C. neighborhoods still live with the legacy of violence, decay and indifference that laid waste to vast swaths of the urban landscape.

Substantial strides have been made toward revitalizing devastated neighborhoods, though sometimes at the expense of longtime residents. The real estate boom, gentrification and government growth helped the rebuilding, while simultaneously changing the demographics. The black identity of some areas was lost.

“This has been a very slow and difficult process,” said Albert Hillman, a barber on H Street who was working at his father’s barbershop at the time of King’s death and has lived in the area ever since.

The areas of Shaw, Columbia Heights, the U Street corridor and H Street Northeast, all major social hubs in the city before the riots, for years afterward were tormented by crime and poverty.

That has begun to change, but even today many of the communities feel the effects of the riots. Although the looters left most black-owned businesses alone, the fallout from the riots took their toll on the remaining stores by pushing out many of the residents and putting the neighborhoods off limits.

One of the hardest-hit areas was the vibrant U Street corridor in Northwest, once known as the “black Broadway,” which included the famed Howard Theater, part of the “chitlin circuit,” whose stops included the Apollo Theater in New York and the Regal Theater in Chicago, and featured concerts of black musicians for largely black audiences.

“U Street was the Mecca for black people around here,” said D.C. Council member and former Mayor Marion Barry, Ward 8 Democrat, who in 1968 had recently moved to the District and was part of a campaign to bring King to the District that summer.

Following the riots, the D.C. government leveled about 70 acres of abandoned and burned-out buildings around U Street and nearby Columbia Heights, rendering the area a ghost town, and the Howard Theater was forced to close in 1970. Nobody wanted to be involved in such a desolate area. Many of the business owners were concerned that rioting would reoccur.

“The private sector was just not willing to make such a risky investment,” said Sean Madigan, a spokesman for the D.C. Office of Planning & Economic Development.

Only after the arrival of a Metrorail stop in 2001 was the area ready for redevelopment.

“That was the catalyst for a lot of the development down there,” said Mr. Madigan “We saw about a billion dollars’ worth of investment within a half a mile of the Metro stop. This was an area that had become just a bunch of vacant parcels of land.”

Today, the area is largely revitalized. Just last month the neighborhood saw a major boost with the opening of DC USA, a 540,000-square-foot mall with a Marshall’s and a Target. Nearby are numerous restaurants and coffee shops, all on the same land that was largely considered untouchable by developers only 10 years ago.

In nearby Shaw, the Washington Convention Center has been the cornerstone of the region’s rebirth, attracting other hotels and restaurants.

During the ‘70s and ‘80s the only patrons willing to set up shop there were churches, offering help and housing for the city’s homeless and indigent while the private sector ignored the area. Today, real estate developers and entrepreneurs are lining up to get their hands on land in Shaw.

“In five years from now, the only way people will know there was a riot here will be from the Heritage trail signs,” said Alexander M. Padro, the executive director of Shaw Main Streets, a nonprofit organization that promotes the area’s development.

Story Continues →