Change and Renewal

Change and Renewal. Tour of Duty. , When the Southeast-Southwest Freeway above you was constructed along the route of Virginia Avenue in the 1960s, houses and businesses were destroyed and hundreds of residents were relocated., Fashionable dwellings (included the home of Thomas Smallwood, mayor, 1819-1822 and 1824) once lined Virginia Avenue. After World War II ended in 1945, people began moving away because the Navy Yard cut jobs and new suburban developments beckoned. Many houses were abandoned., Diagonally across the street today is Townhomes on Capitol Hill. It is the third development to occupy that site. By the 1890s, small buildings were constructed there to house the poor in a hidden H-shaped alley called Navy Place. Discrimination limited housing for the poor, particularly poor African Americans, forcing many into unhealthy and crowded settings like the alley seen below., In 1934 Congress outlawed alley dwellings, and Navy Place was later razed. It was replaced in 1941 with Ellen Wilson Dwellings, named for President Woodrow Wilson's first wife who had promoted slum clearance. It was originally reserved for low-income whites, preventing the return of many earlier inhabitants. By the late 1960s, it had deteriorated. It closed, and after years passed with no building activity there, neighbors stepped in with a public-private partnership to build the current innovative cooperative., The houses across the street on this block of I Street that survived population shifts and freeway construction are typical post-Civil War middle-income housing. The corner building at 700 I Street was constructed in 1893 as a drug store. Beneath the modern siding of 706 I is a typical 1902 brick bay-fronted Victorian.