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, taverns, and boarding houses. Mary Todd Lincoln shopped here., Over the years countless demonstrations and parades, including President Lincoln's funeral procession, have made their way along Pennsylvania Avenue. Collectively, those who marched , soldiers, suffragists, civil rights activists, anti-war protesters, gay rights advocates, and the Ku Klux Klan, to name a few , are reminders of the freedoms of expression and assembly embedded in the Constitution and expanded by the Civil War., At the time of the Civil War, the area across Pennsylvania Avenue was a run-down neighborhood of theaters, saloons, cheap hotels, light industry, and houses of ill repute. It was known as "Murder Bay" and sometimes "Hooker's Department," a pun on the name of Civil War General Joseph Hooker. It remained a light industrial area until the 1930s, when a growing federal government consolidated offices scattered around the city in a new complex of Neo-classical buildings known 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 while preserving some of the best of its 19th-century landmarks.