Change and Renewal ,
- was constructed along the route of Virginia Avenue, SE,in the s,houses were destroyed and hun- dreds of residents were relocated.Once,fashion- able dwellings (including the home of Thomas Smallwood, mayor, - and ) had lined Virginia Avenue.After World War II ended in , people began moving away because the Navy Yard cut back employment,and new suburban develop- ments beckoned.Many houses were abandoned. Townhomes on Capitol Hill,the new buildings that look old on the northwestern side of Seventh and I streets,are the third development to occupy the site. By the s,a hidden H-shaped alley called Navy Place occupied the site,lined with tiny dwellings that housed Washington’s very poor. The poor had few choices for housing, and African Americans also faced discrimination.Consequently many were forced into unhealthy and crowded alleys. In Congress outlawed alley dwellings,and Navy Place was razed and its occupants had to leave.It was replaced in with public housing for whites called the Ellen Wilson Dwellings, named for the wife of President Woodrow Wilson who had pro- moted slum clearance.Navy Place’s black residents were not initially allowed into the new housing. Ellen Wilson Dwellings also deteriorated, eventually closing.After years passed with no building activity there,neighbors and others stepped in with a pub- lic-private partnership to build the current mixed- income innovative cooperative. The older houses here that survived population shifts and freeway construction are typical post- Civil War middle-income housing. The I Street house was constructed in as a drug store.Beneath the modern siding of I is a typi- cal brick bay-fronted Victorian.
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