DC By the Book

Excerpt: Billy's neighborhood, Brightwood, was mostly white, working- and middle-class, and heavily ethnic: Greeks, Italians, Irish Catholics, and all variety of Jew. The families had moved from Petworth, 7th Street, Columbia Heights, the H Street corridor in Northeast, and Chinatown, working their way north as they began to make more money in the prosperous years following World War II. They were seeking nicer housing, yards for their children, and driveways for their cars. Also, they were moving away from the colored, whose numbers and visibility had rapidly increased citywide in the wake of reurbanization and forced desegregation.

Excerpt: Billy lived in a slate-roofed, copper-guttered brick colonial on the 1300 block of Somerset, a few blocks west of the park. In contrast with the row houses of Park View and Petworth, the houses here were detached, with flat, well-tended front lawns. The streets were heavy with Italians and Greeks. The Deoudes family lived on Somerset, as did the Vondas family, and up on Underwood lived a wiry kid named Bobby Boukas, whose parents owned a flower shop. All were members of Billy's church, St. Sophia.

Excerpt: They walked the east side of Georgia's 6200 block, passing the open door of the Arrow cleaners, a business that had been in place since 1929, owned and operated by Bill Caludis. They stopped in to say hey to Caludis's son, Billy, whom Billy Georgelakos knew from church. On the corner sat Clark's Men's Shop, near Marinoff-Pritt and Katz, the Jewish market, where several of the butchers had camp numbers tattoed on their forearms. Nearby was the Sheridan Theater, which was running Decision at Sundown, another Randolph Scott. Derek had seen it with his dad. The crossed to the other side of Georgia. They walked by Vince's Agnes Flower Shop, were Billy paused to say a few words with a cute young clerk named Margie, and the Sheridan Waffle Shop, also known as John's Lunch, a diner owned by John Deoudes. Then it was a watering hole called Sue's 6210, a Chinese laundry, a barbershop, and on the corner another beer garden, the 6200. "Stagger Lee" was playing on the house juke, its rhythms coming through the 6200's open door.

Excerpt: Derek lived in Park View, south of Petworth, now mostly colored and some working-class whites. He attended Backus Junior High School and would go on to Roosevelt High School. Billy went to Paul Junior High and was destined for Coolidge High, which had some coloreds, most of whom were athletes. Many Coolidge kids would go on to college; far fewer from Roosevelt would. Roosevelt had gangs; Coolidge had fraternities. Derek and Billy lived a few short miles apart, but the differences in their lives and prospects were striking.

Excerpt: The trouble started after dark, at the Peoples Drug Store at 14th and U, where trouble was not uncommon. Fourteenth and U's four corners marked the busiest and most notorious of all intersections in black Washington, a major bus transfer spot in the middle of D.C.'s Harlem, a hub for heroin addicts, pimps, prostitutes, and all manner of hustlers, as well as law-abiding citizens and neighborhood residents just trying to move through their world. The People's Drug sat beside the Washington, D.C. office of Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, housed in a former bank. The SNCC and NAACP offices were nearby as well. Hostility between juveniles and the store's black security guards had become a regular occurrence at this particular Peoples in the past few weeks. On this evening, the guard on duty, employed by an outside service, confronted a group of young men who were swinging a dead fish outside the store and bothering passersby with lewd gestures and remarks. The security guard told them to move on, but the boys did no comply. They called him "punk" and "motherfucker," and when he retreated, a couple of them followed him into the store. The manager phoned the police. A physical altercation ensured between one of the boys and the guard, and the boys were expelled. The manager locked the front door. by now a crowd had begun to form outside the Peoples. As was common in the inner city, word has spread quickly via the "ghetto telegraph, and the story had mutated to suggest another beat-down of a black boy at the hands of the authorities. Confusion and curiosity turned to anger as the crowd grew. The crowd pushed against the plate glass of the front show window. The glass imploded just as MPD patrol wagons and squad cars began to arrive. |---------- DC BY THE BOOK TOUR --> U Street had been DC’s African American cultural center for the first several decades of the 20th century and had declined since its heyday. But it remained an important gathering place and shopping district in a city where many African Americans still did not feel welcome downtown. The People’s Drug that also stood at this corner is where, on the evening King was shot, patrons gathered around a radio to listen to the news. When burning and looting broke out soon after, the stores here were the first to go.