Southwest Quadrant

The Island

Map: Southwest Washington before clearance, ca. 1950

The Southwest Quadrant of Washington, D.C., occupies a peninsula of high ground between the Washington Canal on the north, the Anacostia River on the east, and the Potomac on the west. Pierre Charles L’Enfant recognized the terrain in 1791 when he drew his original city plan. The canal, opened in 1815, deepened the neighborhood’s geographic isolation from the rest of the capital and gave it an early nickname: “The Island.”¹

The isolation shaped the community that grew there. Free Black Washingtonians settled the eastern half of the Southwest in the decades before the Civil War. By the late nineteenth century, a dense alley-dwelling system had developed behind the street-front rowhouses, and Black families occupied most of it.² By one count the Black community of Southwest numbered 14,000 by the early twentieth century.³ Irish and German Catholic families clustered in the western blocks, worshiping at St. Dominic’s Church on E Street SW, a congregation established in 1852. A Jewish immigrant community, concentrated west of 4th Street SW, the block the residents called “4½ Street,” supported two Orthodox synagogues by the 1880s.¹

The Talmud Torah Congregation organized in 1887 at 467 E Street SW. Its building, with Moorish towers rising above the residential blocks, became one of the neighborhood’s unmistakable landmarks. The Voliner Anshe Sfard Congregation organized in 1908 at 607 4½ Street SW. In 1936, both congregations merged with Har Zion to form Beth Sholom Congregation and Talmud Torah, though the buildings stood through the following decade.⁴ The Jewish community of Southwest was not large, perhaps 200 families at its peak, but its institutions anchored the commercial corridor at a time when the neighborhood’s Black residents had few equivalent public platforms for civic life.

The Fourth Street commercial corridor served both communities and the waterfront workers who moved along it daily. Barber shops, sandwich shops, a movie theater, and dozens of family-owned businesses lined the block. Max Morris, whose family had arrived from Eastern Europe a generation before, operated a department store at 712 Fourth Street SW. Schneider’s hardware stood nearby. The corridor was not wealthy; it was local, dense, and busy.⁵

The alleys held what the street fronts did not. Names like Willow Tree Alley and Louse Alley identified blocks of Civil War-era housing where Black families had lived for three generations. Gordon Parks photographed the alleys in November 1942 for the Farm Security Administration, centering his series on Ella Watson, a government charwoman who had lived in Southwest her entire life.⁶ His images show overcrowded rooms, outdoor toilets, and children playing in narrow passages between brick walls. They also show a community with its own institutions, its own rhythms, and its own understanding of itself. Parks titled his most remembered image “American Gothic.” Watson stands before an American flag, mop and broom in hand, her expression direct and unsmiling. She understood the subject of the photograph and the audience for whom Parks made it.

The Willow Tree Athletic Club organized the neighborhood’s youth sports and social life. Joseph Owen Curtis, a Southwest resident, documented the club in photographs taken between the 1930s and the 1950s. His 321-photograph collection at DC Public Library records the football team, the social gatherings, the Randall Junior High School playground two blocks away, and the unremarkable street life of a working-class neighborhood that knew it was a neighborhood.⁷

The conditions in the alleys were genuinely severe. The Public Health Service documented a death rate of 30.1 per 1,000 in the alleys in 1910, nearly twice the rate of street-front residents, and a child mortality rate of 373.5 per 1,000 for children under one year.⁸ Those numbers followed the neighborhood through every subsequent decade, invoked first by housing reformers who wanted to build better housing and then by planners who wanted to build something different entirely. The reformers and the planners shared the statistics but not the intent.

The Authority and the Plan

Map: RLA project areas and demolition boundary

Congress passed the District of Columbia Redevelopment Act in 1945.⁹ The law created the D.C. Redevelopment Land Agency with broad eminent domain authority, framing its mandate as addressing conditions “injurious to the public health, safety, morals and welfare.” The RLA became formally constituted as an agency in 1946. Its authority extended not only to land purchase but to clearance, planning, and resale to private developers. No comparable federal agency had held that combination of powers before.

The National Capital Park and Planning Commission published a comprehensive plan in 1950 that identified Southwest as a “problem area” requiring redevelopment.¹⁰ The commission did not select Southwest purely on the basis of housing conditions. The quadrant’s proximity to the Mall and to the Capitol made it visible in a way that drove the planning commission’s priorities. A “blighted” neighborhood directly south of the federal monuments was, in the commission’s framing, an aesthetic and political liability. The planners saw clearance as renovation of the capital’s image as much as improvement of the residents’ conditions.

The RLA published its plan for Project Area B, a 76-acre tract, between 1950 and 1952. The agency’s own survey of the area produced statistics that appeared in Justice William O. Douglas’s subsequent Supreme Court opinion: in Area B, 64.3 percent of dwellings were beyond repair; 18.4 percent needed major repairs; only 17.3 percent were satisfactory; 57.8 percent had outdoor toilets; 60.3 percent had no baths; 29.3 percent lacked electricity; 82.2 percent had no wash basins or laundry tubs; 83.8 percent lacked central heating.¹¹ Black residents made up 98 percent of Project Area B.

Large-scale acquisition and demolition began in 1952. One property owner refused. Max Morris, the Jewish merchant who operated the non-blighted department store at 712 Fourth Street SW, declined to sell to the RLA. His store was not in disrepair. The RLA planned to take it anyway, along with every other property within the project area, and convey the cleared land to private developers who planned to build something more consistent with the commission’s vision. Morris argued that taking one private owner’s property to give it to another private developer was not a public use under the Fifth Amendment. He died before the case concluded; his executors, Samuel Berman and Solomon Feldman, carried the challenge to the Supreme Court.⁵

The Court heard argument in October 1954. Justice William O. Douglas wrote for a unanimous Court on November 22, 1954. His opinion disposed of the Fifth Amendment challenge in three paragraphs and then expanded the concept of “public purpose” beyond anything the amendment’s drafters had written.

The ruling upheld the RLA’s authority to condemn Morris’s non-blighted store, and with it the authority to condemn every non-blighted property within any designated renewal area in the United States. The Court held that once a legislature determines an area to be blighted, the entire area may be cleared, including the parts that are not blighted, because addressing blight is a legislative function and the judiciary has no role in second-guessing the legislature’s method. The opinion’s closing passage added aesthetics to the list of legitimate public purposes, finding no Fifth Amendment obstacle to the District’s decision to make the capital beautiful as well as sanitary.¹¹

Berman v. Parker was the constitutional premise for every urban renewal clearance in the United States for the following fifty years. The Court cited it in Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff (1984) and in Kelo v. City of New London (2005), the latter of which applied the same logic to a Connecticut waterfront redevelopment that had nothing to do with blight at all.⁵ The opinion’s birth in Southwest Washington, in the condemnation of a Jewish merchant’s non-blighted store in a 98-percent-Black neighborhood, is the historical fact from which every downstream clearance in the atlas descends.

Image pendingDemolition of residential blocks in Southwest Washington by the D.C. Redevelopment Land Agency, ca. 1955, with cleared land and remaining structures visible along the project boundary.Sought from D.C. Redevelopment Land Agency Photograph Collection, DC Public Library, The People's Archive, 1955

The Clearance

Map: Demolition and the rebuilt Southwest

Between 1955 and 1963, the RLA razed 99 percent of the structures within the 560-acre renewal boundary.¹² The clearance was not selective. The agency demolished the sound buildings alongside the deteriorated ones, the commercial corridors alongside the alleys, the churches alongside the rooming houses. The full street grid within the boundary came down. Bulldozers graded named alleys, including Willow Tree Alley and Louse Alley, to bare earth. Randall Junior High School, the Willow Tree Athletic Club, and the community spaces that Curtis had photographed in the 1930s and 1940s disappeared from the ground.⁷ The Talmud Torah Congregation’s Moorish towers, a landmark visible from several blocks, fell during the mid-1950s clearance after the congregation, which had merged with Ohev Sholom in 1958, relocated to Shepherd Park in Northwest.⁴ The half-demolished towers were among the last images of the old Southwest widely reproduced in the press.

The RLA also demolished the street itself. Construction of the Southeast-Southwest Freeway, Interstate 695 and Interstate 395, consumed F Street SW, a highway corridor that bisected the southern part of the quadrant and further severed the neighborhood from the waterfront to the west.¹⁰

The Southwest Freeway’s path through the quadrant is one of the two most direct expressions of the planners’ purpose for the cleared land. The other is the composition of the replacement housing. Approximately 23,000 residents, among them roughly 23,500 by the National Capital Planning Commission’s count, left the Southwest between 1952 and 1963.³ Of those, about 5,900 families held tenancy of some kind; approximately 1,500 businesses closed.² Nearly 70 percent of the displaced residents were Black; in Project Area B specifically, the figure was 98 percent.¹¹

Researchers have not yet verified exact building and housing-unit counts; the HABS DC-856 document at the Library of Congress is the primary source for those figures, and one published secondary source estimates nearly 5,000 structures demolished at a 99 percent demolition rate.¹² What the secondary sources confirm without exception is the outcome: by 1960, the Washington Housing Association estimated that only 12 to 13 percent of displaced households had returned to the rebuilt Southwest, and none of the returning households had moved to the new units west of Rock Creek Park.³ The RLA offered no right-to-return guarantee. The replacement housing included Greenleaf Gardens, constructed by the National Capital Housing Authority in 1957 as public housing, and River Park Mutual Homes, a cooperative development designed by Charles M. Goodman that opened in 1963. Harbour Square Cooperatives, designed by Chloethiel Woodard Smith and completed in 1966, incorporated the four Federal-period Wheat Row houses at 325-331 Fourth Street SW and the Duncanson-Cranch House, which the Historical Society of Washington had persuaded the RLA to spare in December 1954.⁴ The Thomas Law House, dating to 1796 and a National Historic Landmark, survived on Sixth Street SW. St. Dominic’s Catholic Church at 530 E Street SW survived, its rectory demolished for a Southwest Freeway on-ramp that now wraps the church’s facade on three sides.

The Maine Avenue Fish Market, the oldest continuously operating open-air fish market in the United States, survived by a narrower margin. The original RLA plan had included it in the clearance boundary. Vendors and community members pressed for its preservation, and the RLA relented. The fish market is the one clear community-organized preservation victory from the clearance era, and it matters precisely because the clearance took nearly everything else.¹

The public health record for the alley-dwelling community was real. The case for demolition rested on documented conditions that demanded remedy. What the clearance failed to do was remedy those conditions for the people who had lived in them. The 23,000 displaced residents dispersed to Anacostia, to Barry Farm, to public housing east of the Anacostia River, and to Northwest neighborhoods that were also absorbing Black Washingtonians displaced from other projects. The Southwest they left behind was rebuilt for a different population at a different price point, by design, under the same authority that had presented itself as a public health program.

Who Fought and What Was Recovered

Map: Sites of resistance and surviving institutions

Southwest’s clearance generated very little organized resistance at the time. That fact is part of the historical record, not a gap in the research. The strongest documented challenge to the RLA came from a white Jewish merchant asserting a property rights claim, not from the displaced Black majority. Morris’s executors carried the case as far as it could go; the Supreme Court dismissed it unanimously.⁵ The Historical Society of Washington secured Wheat Row by pressing the RLA directly; that was a preservation victory for Federal-period architecture, not a displacement-prevention victory for the neighborhood’s residents.⁴

The fish market vendors won. The municipal fish market on Maine Avenue had occupied the waterfront since before the Civil War. The vendors organized, the community supported them, and the RLA backed down. One block of working waterfront remained. The lesson the vendors’ victory teaches is the same lesson the contrast with the rest of the clearance teaches: organized standing before the agency, at the planning stage rather than the demolition stage, could produce a different outcome. But most of the Southwest’s Black working-class residents lacked the legal, financial, and political resources to establish that standing in 1952.

The absence of organized resistance is itself significant. It is the reason Reverend Walter Fauntroy, a Shaw pastor who watched what happened to Southwest from across the Mall, made a specific decision in 1966. When the RLA began planning renewal of Shaw, Fauntroy founded the Model Inner City Community Development Organization, MICCO, to give Shaw residents a seat in the planning process before demolition began rather than after.² Fauntroy named Southwest explicitly. What the RLA had done in Southwest, he said, was what he intended to prevent from repeating in Shaw. MICCO’s intervention produced a different outcome in Shaw: not a stop to displacement, but a negotiated process that gave residents some voice in the replacement plan. The asymmetry is the lesson. Southwest residents did not have MICCO. Shaw residents did.

Recovery began slowly, and it began from outside the neighborhood. In 1983, filmmaker Dolores Smith began interviewing former Southwest residents at the DC Public Library. Over two years she recorded 33 oral histories with people who had lived in the neighborhood before the clearance, worked there, and been forced out.¹³ The interviewees named streets, businesses, families, and institutions that the clearance had taken. They described the fish market in the mornings, the Talmud Torah towers against the sky, the Willow Tree Athletic Club’s football seasons, and the alley communities that the planners had photographed as a social pathology but that the residents had experienced as home. Smith released the documentary film in 1991. The oral history collection, held at the DC Public Library’s People’s Archive, remains the primary first-person record of what the clearance destroyed.

The Joseph Owen Curtis Photograph Collection at the People’s Archive contains 321 photographs from the 1910s through the 1980s, fully digitized and accessible to researchers and to the public.⁷ Curtis was a Southwest resident. His images of the Randall Junior High School playground, the Willow Tree Athletic Club, and the neighborhood streets document a community at the level of individual children’s faces and the arrangement of chairs in a room. No government archive produced an equivalent record at that scale. Curtis made it himself, over seven decades, because the neighborhood was his and he wanted it documented.

Between 2016 and 2018, the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum conducted nearly 200 oral histories across six Washington neighborhoods, including Southwest, for the exhibition “A Right to the City.”¹⁴ The museum partnered with Walking Cinema to produce “Before the Bulldozers,” an augmented-reality walking tour that overlays Curtis’s photographs on current Southwest streetscapes through a mobile application. A user standing at the corner of Fourth and E Streets SW can look through the phone’s camera and see what stood there before 1955. The application is available through the museum’s website and through Walking Cinema. The archive behind it, ACMA.03-119 at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, contains the full oral history record.

The Southwest Neighborhood Assembly, founded in 1964, operates a History Task Force that has pursued Historic District designation for the remaining pre-renewal structures and maintains an archive that includes the HABS DC-856 document describing the full renewal boundary.¹² The assembly holds the most complete institutional memory of Southwest’s clearance and rebuilt form of any currently active civic organization in the quadrant.

What the recovery has not done is reconstitute the community. The oral histories and the augmented-reality tour document what was here. The people who were here, and their children, mostly live east of the Anacostia River or in neighborhoods that are themselves now facing displacement pressure.

Image pendingWheat Row, 325-331 Fourth Street SW, four Federal-period rowhouses dating to ca. 1794, incorporated into Chloethiel Woodard Smith's Harbour Square Cooperatives after the Historical Society of Washington secured their preservation in December 1954.Sought from Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, HABS DC Collection, 1966

The Third Displacement

Map: The Wharf and present-day Southwest

Many people displaced from Southwest in the 1950s moved to Barry Farm, a public housing complex built on a hill in Anacostia in Ward 8. Barry Farm occupies land that free Black families had farmed since Reconstruction, land the federal government purchased from those families and on which it built public housing in 1942. The residents the RLA sent there from Southwest were not the first displaced community to arrive at Barry Farm, and they were not the last. Between 2012 and 2019, the District Housing Authority relocated 444 Barry Farm residents under the New Communities Initiative, DC’s current iteration of the HOPE VI public housing redevelopment program, which promises residents the right to return to rebuilt mixed-income developments at their former sites.² Empower DC and the Barry Farm Tenants and Allies Association have fought in court to hold the District to that promise. The people now defending their right to return to Barry Farm are in some cases the grandchildren of people the RLA moved there from Southwest sixty years ago.

The District has also returned to the Southwest waterfront. The Wharf, a $3.6 billion mixed-use development approved by the DC Zoning Commission in 2013, covers 27 acres along the Washington Channel, the same waterfront from which the RLA cleared 23,000 residents.³ Phase 1 opened in October 2017 with three hotels, two office buildings, two apartment buildings, two condominium buildings, a 6,000-person concert venue, and a collection of restaurants. The condominiums carry a median list price near $2 million. The cooperative housing units built in the 1960s for residents displaced by the original clearance carry a median list price near $382,500.¹² The distance between those two numbers is the distance between the clearance and its consequence. The people displaced in the 1950s could not return to the luxury development that replaced what replaced their neighborhood.

Greenleaf Gardens, the first replacement public housing in Southwest, built by the National Capital Housing Authority in 1957, now faces redevelopment pressure of its own.³ Empower DC and the Southwest Neighborhood Assembly have co-hosted community forums on preserving public housing in the quadrant. Greenleaf’s residents are not the original Southwest community; they are the residents the public housing system placed there after the clearance. A third displacement on the same ground is the specific risk the two organizations are working to prevent.

The New Communities Initiative includes not only Barry Farm but Park Morton in Ward 1 and Northwest One in Ward 6, each a site where the promise of a right to return has required active legal and organizing defense to enforce.² Each of those sites echoes the Southwest structure: a designation of blight or obsolescence, a clearance plan, a promise of replacement, and a return rate that depends entirely on whether residents have organized representation at the planning table before the demolition crews arrive.

The Buzzard Point peninsula at the southernmost tip of the Southwest Quadrant, an industrial site now planned for large-scale mixed-use development including a Major League Soccer stadium that opened in 2018, completes the geography of displacement in the quadrant.¹⁰ The industrial workers and the few remaining residents of Buzzard Point received displacement notices years before the stadium opened. The planning process for Buzzard Point produced no organized representation for those residents comparable to what MICCO produced for Shaw in 1966.

Reverend Fauntroy’s lesson remains the organizing principle the record supports. Southwest happened in 1952 because there was no MICCO. Shaw happened differently in 1966 because there was. Barry Farm, Greenleaf, and Northwest One are happening now. The organizing groups whose contact information appears at the end of this page are the ones trying to be MICCO before the bulldozers arrive, which is the only time the effort works.

The record of Southwest is in the oral histories at the People’s Archive, in Curtis’s photographs, in Smith’s documentary film, in the Smithsonian’s walking tour, and in the assembly’s History Task Force files. The archive is deep and it is public. Anyone who wants to know what stood here before 1952, and whom the government sent away, can find out. The record of what should have happened instead is in every subsequent community that fought early enough to shape what the RLA’s successors built, and in every community that did not.¹³

Footnotes

1. Howard Gillette, Jr., Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C., Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital, University of North Carolina Press, 2017. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. WETA Boundary Stones, “Southwest DC Urban Renewal: ‘Negro Removal’ Displaced 23,000 Residents,” 2018. https://boundarystones.weta.org/2018/09/12/southwest-dc-urban-renewal-negro-removal-displaced-23000-residents ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

4. James M. Goode, Capital Losses: A Cultural History of Washington’s Destroyed Buildings, 2nd ed., Smithsonian Books, 2003. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. Amy Lavine, “Urban Renewal and the Story of Berman v. Parker,” The Urban Lawyer 42, no. 2 (2009). Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1511343 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

6. Gordon Parks, Washington, D.C. FSA-OWI Photograph Series, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, 1942. Public domain. LOC catalog: https://www.loc.gov/item/2017764971 ↩

7. Joseph Owen Curtis Photograph Collection, DC Public Library, The People’s Archive. 321 photographs, 1910-1988. Fully digitized at https://digdc.dclibrary.org/do/7d7c6262-bdcf-42c3-8e97-b3cedf60394d ↩ ↩² ↩³

8. Nicholas Freudenberg et al., “The Problematic Role of Public Health in Washington, DC’s Urban Renewal,” American Journal of Public Health (2018). PMC full text: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6225879/ ↩

9. District of Columbia Redevelopment Act, Public Law 592, 79th Congress (1945). ↩

10. National Capital Planning Commission, A Redevelopment Plan for Southwest Washington, D.C., 1956. PDF at https://centennial.ncpc.gov/pdf/1956_A_Redevelopment_plan_for_Southwest_DC.pdf ↩ ↩² ↩³

11. Berman v. Parker, 348 U.S. 26 (1954), decided November 22, 1954. Justice William O. Douglas, writing for a unanimous Court. Full text at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Berman_v._Parker/Opinion_of_the_Court ↩ ↩² ↩³

12. Francesca Russello Ammon, “Commemoration Amid Criticism: The Mixed Legacy of Urban Renewal in Southwest Washington, D.C.,” Journal of Planning History 8, no. 3 (2009). DOI: 10.1177/1538513209340630 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

13. Dolores Smith, Southwest Remembered: A Story of Urban Renewal (oral history project), DC Public Library, The People’s Archive, conducted 1983-1985; documentary film released 1991. Finding aid: https://thepeoplesarchive.dclibrary.org/repositories/2/resources/2235 ↩ ↩²

14. Anacostia Community Museum, A Right to the City (exhibition), Smithsonian Institution, 2018-2020. Archival records: ACMA.03-119, https://sova.si.edu/record/acma.03-119 ↩