History of H Street, Union Station: Sunday, May 20

From the NE DC Historical Society:

Come join us this Sunday, May 20, 2007 as we continue to explore the history of our Northeast Washington communities- -past, present, and in years to come. Our community focus will be "H Street."

Place: Laboratory 1 of The Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H Street, NE
Date: Sunday, May 20, 2007
Time: 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Admission: Free and Open to All

Presentations will include:

"An Overview of the History of the Greater H Street Neighborhood" by Richard Layman

"The Swampoodle Neighborhood" by Kathleen Lane. The Swampoodle neighborhood was located in what is today the Union Station railyard. Some of Ms. Lane's ancestors lived in Swampoodle and then relocated onto H Street after the neighborhood was razed. She wrote her master's thesis on the neighborhood.

And, "The History of Union Station" by Bill Wright. Mr. Wright is writing his dissertation on the history of this great railroad station, which opened in 1907 and has experienced decline and rebirth in the 100 years since.
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Nancy Schwartz was the principal investigator, and Donna Hanousek the principal researcher, with assistance from Lee H. Rogers and others, on the Capitol Hill North/Near Northeast Social and Cultural History Study conducted in 2001/2002, which was funded by the Historic Preservation Fund by the DC Historic Preservation Office, with additional support from the Capitol Hill Restoration Society. I was the project administrator. (Kevin Palmer did a significant amount of graphic design and publication development.)

Interestingly enough, in the "modern era" it was the first historic preservation project that received significant opposition--I aver it was organized specifically by certain development interests in that neighborhood, and their allies. Which is something that I think the Ward Planner in DCOP was never willing to acknowledge--I don't really remember if HPO understood this or not, but I am sure they got tired of dealing with it. This pre-dated opposition in Armsleigh Park and Brookland. Having to figure out how to deal with this was pretty instructive and forms a goodly part of how I think that such projects should be conducted in the "modern era."

(I would say that we haven't yet adapted historic preservation promotion approaches to the modern circumstances of property rights and other opposition tactics. But that's a topic for another day.)

The H Street context statement was excerpted in the Voice of the Hill newspaper.