The police arrived before the sun was fully up. They took several Georgetown University students under custody on drug related charges. The campus was shocked to hear the news. By noon it was clear the arrested students’ lives were changed forever.
This could describe what happened last Saturday, but in this case GM is talking about slightly earlier events. Thirty years earlier.
At 4:30 AM April 30, 1980, the police raided a home at 1401 Foxhall Rd., which housed a group of Georgetown students. Along with other raids, the cops arrested 8 GU students and 10 other individuals for the sale of cocaine and LSD. Along with the arrests they seized a pound and a half of cocaine and 30 tabs of LSD. Continue reading →
In the Library of Congress’s digital photograph collection is a group of photos taken by Carl Mydans of the capital’s poorer neighborhoods in the 1930s. A subset of these photos is of Georgetown. GM’s used them before occasionally, but Shorpy.com’s use of one of the more amusing of the shots last week inspired GM to do a little comparative work with the old shots.
For instance, the photo above of three boys playing with trucks on the sidewalk is on the 3400 block of O St.
Washington, DC has only produced a few indigenous music styles. Second only to Go-Go, hardcore punk has come to stand as the city’s greatest rock-and-roll export. While the image of Georgetown and the image of hardcore punks are not ones that often get confused, there is an odd link that ties these two things together: the Haagan Dazs.
In the early 1980’s, the manager of the Georgetown Haagan Dazs was a Glover Park teenager named Henry Garfield. He hired one of his Glover Park friends, Ian MacKaye, to work at the ice cream store. By this time, both Garfield and MacKaye were already active in the burgeoning DC hardcore scene. The dissonance between the public perception of the hardcore punks and their actual behavior in Georgetown was discussed at length by MacKaye in this contemporaneous documentary (the Georgetown part starts at 1:40):
Or in a parlance of a later age: it was hip to be square.
Soon after the photo above was taken, Garfield was given his dream job to be lead singer of the seminal band Black Flag. He quit his job at Haagen Dazs, moved to Los Angeles, and changed his name to Henry Rollins. The rest is history.
MacKaye stayed in DC. After singing for his own seminal band, Minor Threat, for three years MacKaye eventually played guitar in yet another seminal band, Fugazi. While Fugazi is in an extended hiatus, MacKaye can still be seen playing along with his partner Amy Farina in the Evens.
Photo by Susie Horgan from Punk Love, an excellent photographic history of hardcore.
This week WETA is broadcasting an excellent documentary on the history of Washington through the 1960’s. Given that this included the Kennedy era, unsurprisingly Georgetown is prominently featured.
Besides rhapsodizing briefly on the link between the Kennedy mystique and Georgetown, the documentary’s first specific Georgetown reference is to mention the late great Rive Gauche restaurant. The fancy French restaurant on the northwest corner of Wisconsin and M was the standard of fine cuisine in the city in its time. Washington native Maury Povich states in the documentary “We always thought when we were young that you had to have a lot of money to go to Rive Gauche. That was picking at High Cotton.”
The documentary also briefly mentions Clyde’s (which opened in 1963, inspired at least in part by a stray New Yorker left lying around a beatnik hang-out on 31st St.) and Blues Alley. Continue reading →
On Friday, regular reader William posed this question in the comments section to this post:
[W]here exactly does the north end of Georgetown end?
Georgetown is one of the few neighborhoods in the District whose boundaries are actually laid out by federal law. The Old Georgetown Act states that:
there is hereby created in the District of Columbia a district known as “Old Georgetown” which is bounded on the east by Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway from the Potomac River to the north boundary of Dumbarton Oaks Park, on the north by the north boundary of Dumbarton Oaks Park, Whitehaven Street and Whitehaven Parkway to Thirty-fifth Street, south along the middle of Thirty-fifth Street to Reservoir Road, west along the middle of Reservoir Road to Archbold Parkway, on the west by Archbold Parkway from Reservoir Road to the Potomac River, on the south by the Potomac River to the Rock Creek Parkway.
GM was digging through some histories of Georgetown recently and found out that Georgetown was the scene of several duels as late as 1859 involving such characters as Henry Clay and two of Francis Scott Key’s sons.
According to the Chronicles of Georgetown, in 1826 Senator John Randolph of Virginia dueled Henry Clay in Georgetown. Senator Randolph was a vocal opponent to a strong federal government and apparently a total weirdo. From the Senate floor he said some pretty nasty things about Henry Clay for his activities as John Quincy Adams’ Secretary of State. He even went so far as to call him a “black-leg” which according to Dictionary.com means either a swindler (especially in gambling) or an infectious and fatal bovine disease causing gaseous swellings of the muscles.
While GM is on his honeymoon, he’s publishing his top ten favorite things about Georgetown. Today we’re finally at number one: the history.
Georgetown is an old place. People have lived here since the mid-eighteenth century. Over the 250 or so years it’s existed, Georgetown has seen many people and stories pass through it. First it was a rough and tumble port. Eventually it grew to be a finely built and respectable municipality. With the decline of the C&O Canal among other factors, the village became the location of poor Irish and African American slums. Roosevelt’s new dealers started the gentrification ball rolling, and now it’s almost uniformly expensive (although GM insists there are still deals to be found if you look hard enough).
That’s the broad-brush history of Georgetown. And yes, frequently the history of Georgetown is told like a walking tour of which famous politician lived in what house. That’s all fine and good, but GM is more interesed in the more obscure history, like how our streets used to be called something else, and the fact they used to make rope in Montrose Park, or the fact that according to the 1920 census, GM’s block was full of cops, government clerks, and tradesmen.
Is that a trait unique to Georgetown? No, of course not. Neighborhoods across DC have their own unique histories as well. And if GM lived in those neighborhoods, it would probably be his favorite thing there too. But as it is, he lives in Georgetown, on a street that was once called “Road Street”, in a home that once housed an Irish draftsman, and discovering odd things like that (or that 31st street used to be a hippy hangout) is by far his favorite thing about living here.
Sadly for GM, his honeymoon is over this weekend. He’ll be back Tuesday to cover all the things he missed while he was traveling on the rails through Europe. Thank you for bearing with him.
Think Georgetown in the 1950’s and 60’s and most people think of JFK and socialite doyennes. Almost totally forgotten from those days in Georgetown is a coffeehouse and a community of beatniks and free-spirits once located in a small courtyard off 31st st. Nowadays it’s the office complex called Hamilton Court at 1232 31st. St. Find out the wine-soaked pot-scented history of this perfectly ordinary looking office complex after the jump:
It was exactly 48 years ago tonight that the resident of 2720 Dumbarton Ave. heard a knock at his door and opened it to find John F. Kennedy standing there in the falling snow, less than 14 hours after being inaugurated President. That resident was journalist and socialite Joe Alsop and his was the only private residence Kennedy visited that evening. Some stories claim that Kennedy stayed there till dawn smoking cigars and talking with his friend Alsop. More stories, however, state that Kennedy stayed only for a few hours, had a bowl of terrapin soup, and headed back to the White House around 3:00 AM. (Although, yet another line of stories state that he stayed long enough for a brief liaison with Angie Dickinson, or some other young starlet).
Some in Georgetown may insist that the neighborhood is still at the center of the DC political universe; but there will be no doors in Georgetown knocked upon by Obama tonight. Maybe that shows how far Georgetown has fallen, or maybe it just shows how special that night was 48 years ago.
According to the 2000 Census, Georgetown’s population is only 3% Black. However, this was not always the case. Through the 19th century and into the first half of the 20th century, Georgetown had a substantial African American population (reaching around 50% of the population at the turn of the century). The majority of these residents were descendants of slaves that lived in Georgetown or emigrated there shortly after the Civil War.
This day being Martin Luther King’s birthday, GM suggests you take a stroll through our neighborhood and visit some of the landmarks of Black Georgetown. Some suggestions are listed below.
The Georgetown Metropolitan 
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