Real life example of historic preservation vs. urban renewal revitalization strategies: H Street NE, Washington, DC

This comes up in the context of the H Street neighborhood, which is going through fits and starts of revitalization, as well as fits and starts discussion (and survey efforts) with regard to historic preservation and historic designation. (There is an article about this in the Hill Rag, "Survey results: the buildings of H Street.")

(Disclosure: Among other tasks, I led a historic preservation effort in 2001-2002 in the H Street neighborhood. I was one of the founding board members of H Street Main Street. And they kicked me off a couple years later. "too much telling truth to power" but also I was impatient. I was on the ANC6C Planning and Zoning Committee from 2003-2005. And I did other stuff.)

I was asked a couple questions about this recently, which made me step back and think about revitalization once again. I became committed to historic preservation-based revitalization strategies out of a recognition (and learning from examples from elsewhere in the city and across the country) that historic preservation based revitalization strategies, which are asset-based (people, buildings, businesses, place value) are sustainable and work over the long term, while urban renewal strategies, which only see value in land and land clearance and new construction, typically don't work very well, because what they produce tends to have little in the way of what we might call distinction value. A bunch of new buildings for the most part (with a couple exceptions, such as Bethesda Row) don't provide people with a real reason to visit and more important revisit time and time again.

The viability of the H Street NE commercial district was wrecked by the 1968 riots. It's not that the district wasn't in decline before the riots, of course it was, as all commercial districts in the city were losing out year after year as businesses decamped for the suburbs, following their customers who were moving out of the city in droves, and as the suburbs became the centers of growth in the metropolitan region. Businesses on H Street, such as Ourisman Chevrolet or Woolworth's, left starting in the very early 1960s, and Kresge converted their standard store into their downmarket division (an early version of a discount dollar store) Jupiter brand, etc.

After the riots, urban renewal plans were created for many places in the city, including H Street. For the most part, everything in the H Street urban renewal plan was accomplished:

- construction of Hechinger Mall
- construction of a bridge over the Union Station railyard
- construction of two office buildings on the 600 block
- long term leasing (20+ years) of the office buildings by DC Government agencies
- infill new housing (8th St., 10th St., 3rd St.)
- two senior housing apartment buildings (Delta Towers, Capitol Towers)
- strip shopping center (H Street Connection)
- condominium housing on Wylie Court
- construction of lower income garden apartments where the old "Trinidad" Streetcar barn had been located.

Plus the H Street Community Development Corporation was created and it did some other projects as well. It bought and held onto the Atlas Theater. It bought some of the oldest buildings on the corridor dating from the 1870s and continued to let them rot, eventually tearing them down and replacing them with a godawful one story dumpy building, and tore down other buildings dating from the 1890s probably, and built in their place the Autozone parts store.

But when I moved to the H Street neighborhood in September 1987, for the most part we could agree that the commercial district especially, "wasn't great" (I'd say it s***ed) and the area was dangerous.

In the first couple years of my living there, more than 30 people were murdered in the area of Orleans and Morton Place, as it was one of the city's primary centers for crack distribution. Not quite like "New Jack City" but very bad nonetheless.

But the urban renewal plan had accomplished virtually everything it set out to do and the neighborhood--a few blocks from Union Station (which reopened to great fanfare in 1988), about one mile from the U.S. Capitol, and a little more than one mile to the heart of downtown--still languished.

Starting in the late 1990s a group of residents reached out to the merchants association (independent of the H Street Community Development Corporation) and worked to bring new attention to the commercial district.

And note also that since the riots, about every five years or so, a new initiative to support H Street commercial district revitalization was announced with great fanfare, usually with little substantive impact.

In 2001, the neighborhood-merchants group organized an initiative to apply for the city's Main Street program. In 2000, a group of people led by Adele and Bruce Robey worked to get control of the Atlas Theater. While they weren't successful, this did lead them to create the H Street Playhouse, and it put the Atlas in play, which eventually came to be controlled by the Sprenger Lang Foundation, which went on to rehabilitate the theater in a $22 million project. About 25% of the funds for the renovation of the Atlas came directly or indirectly from federal historic preservation tax credits.

These were the building blocks that attracted the entrepreneur Joe Englert, who has gone on to open many nightlife establishments in association with a variety of restauranteurs and financiers. These are the establishments--in "old" eligible for historic designation buildings--that have driven the repositioning of the H Street commercial district into the "Atlas District."

So much for the $100 million+ urban renewal plan.

Note also that I attribute a great deal of the success to the announcement and opening of the New York Avenue metro station (really at Florida Avenue and 2nd and M Street) which led many people to decide that it made sense to buy a house and live north of H Street (previously people with choices stayed south of the corridor) and be within walking distance of the subway station.

Now on the blocks that 20 or so years ago were riddled with dead bodies, you have couples pushing baby carriages.

Of course, it helped that other things happened too. Improvements in the quality of municipal government. And changes in trends that for the first time in about 40-50 years, began to re-favor urban living.