The Fires of 1968 SEVENTH AND H STREETS NE
ON FRIDAY, APRIL 1 5, 1968, the 600 b lock of H Street went u p in am es. e Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated a day earlier, and grief-stricken, angry men and women had taken to the streets across the city, looting and burning. According t o a fir eman, the alley behind Morton’s Department Store became “a freeway for looters” carrying “television sets, clothes, everything.” Yet other people brough t firefig hters chairs and co ff ee. When Morton’ s fir st opened downtown in 1933, it was among the few white-owned department stores that did not discriminate in hiring or sales. In fact owner Mortimer Lebowitz was a former Urban League president who had marched with Dr. King. Nevertheless, looters ransacked and torched his store here. “ e riots did not happen in a vacuum,” recalled Sam Smith of the Capitol East Gazette . In 1968, “24 percent of the [area’s] labor force was unemployed or underemployed.” A er the smoke cleared, 90 buildings, containing 51 residences and 103 businesses, were gone. Most stores that weren’t destroyed closed, never to reopen. While the city cleared land for sale, it didn’t pay to repair existing businesses or develop new ones. In 1984 the H Street Community Development Corporation formed to attract developmen t. e corporation and other nonpro ts built housing and commercial buildings, but H Street s u ered from relentless suburban competition. It took the rehabilitation of the Atla s eater, starting in 2002, and a new appreciation for the charms of the neighborhood’s close-in, 19th-century buildings for H Street’s revival to take hold.
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