A Navy Town

A Navy Town. An East-of-the-River View. , Long before Metro opened a Green Line station here in 1991, the B&O Railroad's Alexandria Branch line ran a block behind you, along the river. The Washington and Anacostia Street Railway ran along Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue a block ahead. The railroads and the area's location on the river near the Washington Navy Yard brought industry here in the early 1900s., Pittsburgh-based Firth-Stirling Steel opened the Washington Steel and Ordnance Co. just down river at Giesboro Point, now part of the military base. The plant made armor-piercing projectiles from 1907 until 1928, selling most of them to the Washington Navy Yard. Washington Steel's 300-acre campus replaced small farms and the Buena Vista resort, once popular among the area's many German immigrant farmers. At its peak during World War I (1914-1918), Washington Steel employed 1,600 men. These workers made a ready market for the housing and goods offered by local businessmen., World War I transformed Anacostia. Just north of the plant, the Navy Department built the riverside Anacostia Naval Air Station. The Army Signal Corps Air Service installed Bolling Field and took over the old Washington Steel property in 1935. When the Navy acquired Bolling Field five years later, Anacostia became a true Navy town., Pauline Munson Chapman grew up in Anacostia in the 1940s and remembered waving to trainloads of sailors, who sometimes tossed candy from the windows. "Poplar Point was all Navy barracks," remembered Rev. Oliver Johnson, who lived nearby in the 1950s. On their way to school, he and his pals collected caps presumably dropped by inebriated sailors returning to their barracks from nearby taverns.