Downtown

Streets of Washington is the brilliant blog covering some of DC’s most interesting buildings and history written by John DeFerrari. John is also the author of the equally brilliant Lost Washington DC. ‘Streets of Washington Presents…’ will feature some fascinating buildings and history from around PoPville.

The Old Post Office building at 12th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW is easily recognized and admired these days, though it wasn’t always so. The building was threatened with demolition in the early 1970s and spurred the creation of Don’t Tear It Down, a group dedicated to preserving the city’s historical heritage. After successfully pushing to save the Old Post Office, Don’t Tear It Down, which eventually was renamed the D.C. Preservation League, went on to advocate for many other historical structures in the city and continues to be the city’s leader in encouraging real estate development that doesn’t needlessly destroy important historic structures.

Postcard view of the Old Post Office (Author’s collection).

Monumental as the building is, people have wanted to change it almost since the day it was completed in 1899. The site for the new building was the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue, always the less-desirable side of the street in the 19th century. The land south of the avenue where an old creek had been turned into the city canal tended to be swampy, unstable ground, not particularly suited to construction of large buildings. The area immediately to the west of the Old Post Office had been known as Murder Bay during the Civil War, an area of dingy saloons, gambling dens, bordellos, and ramshackle frame shanties housing hundreds of poor people, mostly African-Americans. “The water soaking through from the canal kept the ground continuously wet, and the feet of the people passing churned the soft ground into black and odorous mud, making even the ground consistent with the depravity that existed there,” remarked The Washington Post in 1888. In the decades after the war, the worst problems had been addressed; the old city canal was turned into an underground sewer, and light industrial buildings—machine shops and lumber yards—began to fill the area. It was this edgy, semi-industrial neighborhood that was chosen one day in 1890 to be home of the enormous new government office building.

Continues after the jump. (more…)