Back in 2015, Georgetown was witness to one of the more ham-fisted attempts at extortion. An individual purchased at auction a group of tax lots on an alleyway between Potomac St. and 33rd. He then proceeded to seek approval to erect fences blocking homeowners from using the alleyway. It was a fairly naked attempt to get the homeowners to pay-up. It failed, largely due to the intervention of the DC Attorney General’s office.
I bring this story up because a similar story appears to be playing out on the other side of Georgetown.
First let me relate the public story you may have heard over the weekend:
An historic wall has just been listed for sale for $50,000. The wall occupies a tiny sliver of a lot between the Truist Bank at 30th and M and the rowhouse at 1213 30th St. According to an article in DC Urban Turf the wall has a whimsical backstory:
In the early 1970s, Allan Berger’s father got wind of a tax lien auction in Georgetown. During a break from his job in the federal government, he wandered over to see what was on the block.
“He wanted to be able to say he owned property in Georgetown,” Berger told UrbanTurf.
Berger’s father came away from the auction as the proud new owner of an interesting piece of property: a red wall near the corner of 30th and M Street NW (map). Now, his son has put the wall up for sale.
In short, this story is bullshit.
Berger’s father did not obtain this lot in a tax lot auction in the 1970s. He acquired it in 1992 from a woman who was in the business of acquiring these sort of lots. As I explain more below, she bought the lots in the 60s in a tax auction and the transfer to Berger’s father has some suspicious elements.
(ed: To DC Urban Turf’s credit, they corrected their article after these facts were pointed out to them)
But before I get to that, let me talk about the wall itself.
The DC Urban Turf article does not discuss the wall’s provenance, but I am fairly confident that it is actually a remnant of the historic Union Hotel, which once stood at 30th and M.
This hotel was originally built in 1796 and later served as a military hospital during the Civil War. Louisa May Alcott served as a nurse there. As NPS wrote:
[Alcott] wrote a book about her experiences at the Union Hospital called “Hospital Sketches”. In it she describes the scene on the streets outside:
“Long trains of army wagons kept up a perpetual rumble from morning until night. Ambulances rattled to and fro with busy surgeons, nurses taking an airing or convalescents going in parties to be fitted for artificial limbs. Strings of sorry looking horses passed, saying as plainly as dumb creatures could, ‘why in a city full of them is there no horsepital for us?’ Often a cart came by, with several rough coffins in it and no mourners following; barouches, with invalid officers, rolled round the corner and carriage loads of pretty children, with black coachmen, footmen and maids.”
Life in the hospital was a tremendous strain on Miss Alcott and she succumbed to typhoid fever. Six weeks after it began, her nursing career came to a close when her father came to Washington and took her home.
It returned to service as a hotel after the war, but was later converted to flats, as you can see from this 1888 map:
You can also see in this map how the building abutted 1213 30th St. (That row of homes was built in the 1870s-80s. You can see a walled up window in the wall from when the hotel had an empty lot to the north). The former hotel was torn down in the 1930s and replaced with a gas station, as you can see in this photo from 1971:
While the former hotel was gone, the wall remained because the structural beams of the home next door were attached to it. The gas station was itself later torn down for a bank. According to DC Urban Turf, previous owners of the bank agreed to maintain the wall despite not actually owning it.
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