Pennsylvania Avenue

Pennsylvania Avenue. Civil War to Civil Rights.

“Main Street” for the city and the nation.

, Just a few steps ahead is Pennsylvania Avenue the inaugural parade route for every president since Thomas Jefferson and “Main Street” for local Washington since the city’s founding. Jefferson planted the first trees along the avenue, and in the early days of the city it was a promenade lined with shops, hotels and boarding houses. Mary Todd Lincoln shopped here. The street was also the scene of President Lincoln’s funeral procession., Pennsylvania Avenue has been the scene of countless parades and demonstrations. Collectively, the people who have marched along the avenue , soldiers, suffragettes, civil rights activists, anti-war protesters, gay right advocates, and the Ku Klux Klan, to name a few , serve as reminders of the freedoms imbedded in the Constitution and expanded by the Civil War., By the start of the Civil War, the area across Pennsylvania Avenue had become a run-down neighborhood of theaters, saloons, cheap hotels, light industry, and houses of ill repute. Its activities earned it the name “Murder Bay” and sometimes “Hooker’s Department” after Civil War General Joseph Hooker, whose plan it was to concentrate the activities of prostitutes in this area. It remained a light industrial area until the 1930s when a growing federal government consolidated offices that had been scattered in rented buildings around the city and built the complex of Neo-classical buildings known collectively as the Federal Triangle., In the 1970s, the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation began revitalization of this side of the Avenue, bringing new office, commercial and residential buildings to the street while preserving some of its 19th-century landmarks.