We recently spoke about how good the trolley park renovations were looking at 11th and Monroe St, NW but I just noticed this fantastic old photo at the park. And now we know why it’s called Trolley Park:

From MPD:

Date of Death: February 5, 1997
Rank: Officer
Age: 28
Years of Service: Seven
Marital Status: Married
Children: Two
Location of Death: Georgia and Missouri Avenue, NW

On Feb. 5, 1997, at 3 am, Officer Brian T. Gibson, 27 was ambushed and shot to death while in full uniform sitting in his marked patrol car at a traffic light outside the IBEX Nightclub at Georgia and Missouri Avenues, NW. Within three minutes after the shots were fired, members of the Fourth District apprehended Marthell Nathaniel Dean, who had been escorted from the IBEX club by an off-duty officer just prior to the shooting. Dean was found guilty of First Degree Murder and is currently serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

And from the 4D Listserv:

We have spoken to the family of Master Patrol Officer Brian T. Gibson. They would love to have as many of you as possible join Sunday morning’s Candlelight Vigil to remember the life of their loved one and our law enforcement brother, former Fourth District officer, MPO Brian Gibson, who was tragically killed in the line of duty 15 years ago, just blocks from the station.

You are also welcomed to visit the station over the next few days to send uplifting messages to his family by signing the memorial book.

Here are the details:
Memorial: 15th Anniversary Candlelight Vigil (In Memory of MPO Gibson)
Time: 3am (gathering 20 mins early)
Date: (Sunday Morning- Feb 5th)

Location: Family, friends & colleagues will meet at 2:40am at the Fourth District Station and will walk a couple of blocks to the spot to share memories. Light reception to follow at the station, sponsored by the Fraternal Order of Police.

Those who are able, please set your clocks for 2am, Sunday morning for this special event.

From an email:

On Saturday, February 18, the Humanities Council, in partnership with the DC Public Library, the DC Historic Preservation Office, and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, will host a House History Day during which DC residents will learn how to research the past lives of their homes. House history research is powerful because it provides that personal connection to the past that few other types of historical research can; it allows anyone to forge a strong sense of connection with their neighborhood and their community whether they have called DC home for years, or just moved in last month.

Next month’s workshop will feature hands on instruction from expert archivists and historians; researchers will have time to practice their new skills as well, and are encouraged to bring along as much information about their house’s history as they can.

Sessions include: DC Maps, Historic Building Permit Database, Photo Archives, Microfilm, and DC Digital Museum/Neighborhood Context. The day will consist of two identical workshops in which participants will rotate to each of the sessions. The morning workshop lasts from 10am-12pm and the afternoon workshop from 1pm-3pm. Lunch will be served between the morning and afternoon workshops.

To register please visit here..

Please register for only one of the two workshops. House History Day is free, but we ask that you only register if you are sure you will be able to attend. The workshops are very popular and space is extremely limited. For more information please email info[at]wdchumanities[dot]org.

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 art of making a really good pipe seems to have died out, and many would say that’s a good thing. But if we set aside the health and social issues for a moment, we discover a business that once relied on skilled artisans to make its very finest products. In Washington, D.C., the very best pipes were made by Bertram’s on 14th Street, opposite Franklin Park, and it seems like almost every famous world leader from the early 20th century who smoked had his pipe made there.

Benjamin Bertram Goldmann was born in Leipzig, Germany, some time in the late 1870s, the son of a master pipe maker who passed the exacting craft on to his son. Bertram emigrated to the United States and had a pipe shop first in Baltimore but then moved to D.C., where he settled on 14th Street early in the 1900s. A Washington Post reporter visited the old man in his shop in 1933 and found him muttering about all the bad things that pipe owners and other pipe makers do to their pipes. Beyond not scrupulously caring for a good pipe, anyone who would paint or varnish the outside of a pipe was essentially committing a crime against humanity, according to Bertram. His pipes were handcrafted from carefully selected pieces of briar root imported from Algeria. Only the pieces with the grain just-so were acceptable. Beyond the briar pipe bowls, Bertram used amber, Bakelite, and bands of silver and gold. The pipe bowls were a light, blond color when new and would darken to a rich shade of mahogany as time went by. These pipes were veritable works of art.

Bertram passed the business on to his son, Sydney Bertram Goldman (c. 1904-1960), who ran the store during its peak years. The shop sold President Franklin Delano Roosevelt his famous goose-quill cigarette holders. It also sold only the best pipe tobacco and cigars. When Winston Churchill was in town he bought his fine Romeo y Julieta cigars, made in Havana, from Bertram’s. They sold for a dollar apiece at the time. According to the Post, Bertram’s also supplied Joseph Stalin with its best Capitol Blend pipe tobacco via the Soviet Embassy. General Douglas MacArthur’s iconic corncob pipes came from Bertram’s. Entertainers such as Edward G. Robinson and Red Skelton were also customers.

The location of the former Bertram’s store (Photo by the author).

The store moved a few doors up to 920 14th Street NW in 1947. The new building was festooned with a rather eccentric carved glass frieze of a hunting scene on its facade. When the new place opened, Sydney Goldman, who had served in the Marines during the war, made a point of hiring 49 disabled veterans to work in the pipe-making shop.

Continues after the jump.

The store began to decline in the 1960s after the death of Sydney Goldman. His widow, Mae Goldman continued to run the business, but the neighborhood was becoming increasingly seedy. The business was becoming more difficult as well: Cuban cigars, of course, were no longer available, and Algerian briar was becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. In September 1966, when burglars entered the shop through a skylight and made off with $25, Bertram’s responded by installing a metal sheet over the skylight. As if offended by this rebuke, the burglars returned a week later, pried away the metal, and this time made off with almost $4,000 worth of cigarette and pipe lighters, hunting knives, and amber figurines. According to some reports, the Bertram’s pipe factory was also ransacked and set on fire during the riots of April 1968.

By the 1970s, Bertram’s was surrounded by peep shows and porn palaces. Finally in September 1977, Mae Goldman decided to close the business, selling the building to Rodman’s for use as a discount liquor store. In a neighborhood of deadeningly uniform office buildings, the site of the former Bertram’s store, now transformed to match, stands out for its unusually low scale.

* * * * *

Special thanks to Jerry McCoy, who of course had a copy of the Bertram’s postcard before I did and who first publicized this little known Washington institution.

I’m super psyched to be able to share some old photos from Tony T. Most folks know Tony T as owner of The Pug located at 1234 H St, NE. Turns out Tony’s dad took lots of photos around DC back in the day. Tony was kind enough to share some of them with me, so I’m gonna post the best ones this week. These are two of my favorites. President John F. Kennedy from (Tony thinks) 1962. I believe the bottom one is after JFK threw out the first pitch at a Senators baseball game. Awesome.

I feel like the McCoy Sisters Beauty Salon from North Capitol Street (NW side) could be from a movie set. What do you think – 50s in this photo:

And 70s in this photo:

It was a sad day in Washington in August 1981 when The Washington Star ceased publication after more than 128 years of service. The Star’s tenure had stretched back before the Civil War, an amazing run that witnessed the historic sweep of the city’s development from small town to sophisticated metropolis. “The Rock of Gibraltar in Washington journalism is The Washington Star, one of the world’s really great newspapers,” historian Fred A. Emery wrote in 1935. The rise and fall of this bygone institution has its own grand sweep, with its greatest achievements occurring when it was quartered in the majestic marble building at 11th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, that still bears its name today.

The Star began inauspiciously enough in December 1852, one of dozens of newspapers that sprang up for limited runs in 19th century Washington City. In fact, two other D.C. newspapers had already used the Star name, the Columbian Star from 1822 to 1827, and the first Washington Star in 1841. The third Star, the one that would matter, began as a four-page broadsheet with a run of 250 copies, printed on a hand press in a small office at 8th and D Streets, NW. The paper’s first owner, Captain Joseph Borrows Tate, sought to distinguish the Star from all the other rags published throughout the city by striking a tone of impartiality: “The Star is to be free from party trammels or sectarian influences…devoted in an especial manner to the local interests of the beautiful city which bears the honored name of Washington.” The paper’s neutral stance and focus on local news became its trademark and, in time, gave it broad appeal and commercial success. It also led at times to overly innocuous reportage, as in this oft-quoted remark by reporter William Tucker that appeared in the paper’s first edition: “Our courts are sitting, but the business with which they are engaged is not of a very interesting character.”

Tate sold the paper within a year to William Wallach (1812-1871), an aggressive Texan who worked hard to build up the business, moving its office to the southwest corner of 11th and Pennsylvania in 1854. Wallach hired a promising young reporter, Crosby S. Noyes (1825-1908), in 1853, and Noyes quickly became the Star‘s star. One of his many assignments was to report on the hanging of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, WV, in 1859, which he did in flowery, dramatic prose. The Star maintained an anti-slavery stance in those days and, once the Civil War began, was decidedly pro-Union, despite the strong Southern sentiments then common in Washington.

Crosby S. Noyes (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The paper grew in prestige during the war years, aided by its exclusive connections with an early incarnation of the Associated Press. Through the AP, the Star‘s vivid coverage of the war’s impact on Washington was relayed across the country. The New York Times often reprinted war reports from the pages of the Star, and the paper’s prestige increased. Supposedly, as soon as Abraham Lincoln finished delivering his second inaugural address, he handed the text to Crosby Noyes so that it could be printed in the Star.

In 1867, Wallach retired and the paper was bought by Noyes and four other investors: Samuel H. Kauffmann (1829-1906), Alexander “Boss” Shepherd (1835-1902), Clarence D. Baker, and George W. Adams. Shepherd, who would become governor of D.C. in 1873, sold his share of the enterprise within a few years, as did Baker, and Adams remained a behind-the-scenes investor. That left Noyes and Kauffmann to establish a family dynasty that would preside over the Star for another 100 years. Noyes exercised editorial control, while Kauffmann served as publisher and handled the business side.

Continues after the jump.

The Star‘s new home in 1881 (Source: Library of Congress).

In 1881, the Star was forced to move from its quarters on the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue to make way for construction of the grand Post Office Department building, so well-known now for its iconic clock tower. Kauffmann and Noyes decided to move directly across the street to a narrow, four-story building on the northwest corner of 11th and Pennsylvania. The paper was steadily growing during these years, and the new building was almost immediately too small. The company gradually acquired adjacent properties on Pennsylvania and 11th until it had a large enough plot to build a monumental skyscraper of a building.

The project began in 1897 with many of the leading architects of the day participating in a competition to design the Star‘s new home. James G. Hill, architect of such prominent buildings as the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and the Stoneleigh Court Apartments, submitted a proposal, as did the firm of Hornblower & Marshall, designers of the Smithsonian’s Natural History Building, and Glenn Brown (1854-1932), an influential secretary of the American Institute of Architects and author of the landmark History of the United States Capitol. The winner, however, was William J. Marsh (1864-1926). Marsh had just started an independent practice with Walter G. Peter (1868-1945), whom he had met while they were both working at Hornblower & Marshall. Marsh may have had the inside track on this competition since he had previously designed homes for Crosby Noyes and two of his sons.

The Evening Star Building prior to 1918. The tall building to the left is the Raleigh Hotel. (Source: DC Public Library Commons)

Marsh designed an ostentatious, marble-faced office tower in the then-fashionable Beaux-Arts style. The shining white structure was a powerful statement of the Star‘s position of power and pre-eminence. In comparison, the Washington Post‘s smaller grey-granite building up the street, done in the Romanesque-Revival style, looked out-of-date. A postcard of the new building unabashedly proclaims, “The Evening Star Building of white marble is the most beautiful newspaper building in the world.”

The Star’s business office, circa 1921 (Source: Library of Congress).

The building was completed and opened for business in June 1900. As described in great detail in the rival Washington Times, its interior held many wonders. Inside the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance, one passed through a marble-clad lobby to the richly-decorated business office. The walls were clad in exquisite white Paonazzo marble from the famous Carrara quarries of Italy and carved into elegant Renaissance Revival arches and pilasters. Frederick Dielman (1847-1935), a celebrated painter who had recently produced murals for the new Library of Congress building, was commissioned to prepare seven great allegorical paintings of the newspaper industry for the lunettes in the upper portions of the walls. The effect was of being in a Renaissance church or grand library rather than the business office of a newspaper.

Editorial offices were on the seventh floor, with a commanding view of the city from the windows to the west and south. Editors (the news editor, city editor, telegraph editor) had their desks along the windows, all equipped with telephones, electric bells, and pneumatic tubes for sending messages around the building. The open space in the middle of the room was filled with roll-top reporters’ desks, a typewriter on each. On the other side, a row of telephones stood at the ready, providing instant communications with the Senate, House of Representatives, City Hall, and District Building. It was the height of modern journalistic efficiency.

On the eighth floor was the composing room, in a double space that extended through the ninth floor to provide a cavernous, skylit working space. It was outfitted with 18 of the latest Morgenthaler linotype machines, sophisticated devices that set lines of type in cast bars of lead for use on the two enormous printing presses down in the basement. The equally large basement printing plant included not just the presses but also electric generating equipment capable of independently supporting all of the building’s needs.

Management of the paper passed to a new generation with the deaths of Samuel Kauffmann in 1906 and Crosby Noyes in 1908. Two of Noyes’ sons took over, Frank taking Kauffmann’s place as president in 1906 and his brother Theodore becoming editor in 1908. Under the Noyes brothers, the Star’s greatest period of expansion took place, and it became one of the most profitable newspapers in the business. It continued to focus on local news and printed only the safest of opinions on its editorial pages, thus ensuring that none of its many advertisers were offended. Meanwhile, its competitors languished. The Post had sullied its reputation by seeming to incite the race riots of 1919. According to Constance McLaughlin Green, “Newspapermen despised the Washington Post, a ‘poison sheet’ without moral integrity.” Of the other two major papers, the Times had “swung far to the right,” according to Green, thus marginalizing itself, while the Herald “offered a bland diet only occasionally spiced with biting, politically loaded comments.” With such anemic competition, the Star could afford to be arrogant.

The Star Building circa 1921, after construction of the 1918 annex (Source: Library of Congress).

In 1918, the company built a large annex next to the original building along 11th Street, and it became the industrial heart of the expanded business. The new space was equipped with no less than 34 Morgenthaler linotype machines and four presses in the basement. On an average day, 890 4-pound ingots of lead were melted down to make the day’s press plates. (The metal was melted down and re-used each day.) A typical print run in 1927 was 100,000 copies of a 32-page paper, requiring 38 massive rolls of newsprint, or 596 miles of paper. The finished papers were loaded on to 17 trucks for distribution across the city each weekday afternoon and Sunday morning.

Everyone seems to agree that the real turning point for the newspaper—from rising star to falling star, as it were—came in 1954, when the Post absorbed the Times-Herald. (The Times and the Herald had merged in 1939.) The Times-Herald had had a slightly higher circulation than the Star, although the Star‘s advertising volume far outpaced any of its competitors. But the acquisition of the Times-Herald put the Post well ahead of the Star in circulation for the first time—over 380,000 by 1955 compared to the Star‘s 250,000. By 1959, the Post pulled ahead in advertising volume as well, and the Star never caught up. While the Post had taken over the spot as the city’s newspaper of record, having come a long way from its “poison sheet” days of the 1920s, top management of the Star seemed oblivious to the sea-changes. Insular and used to longstanding success, they thought their paper was invulnerable. Instead, it was doomed.

As if to symbolically punctuate the Star‘s decline, the company decided in the late 1950s to abandon its venerable home on Pennsylvania Avenue and construct a new building at 225 Virginia Avenue, SE. The move gained key logistical advantages for the paper’s printing operations; the soon-to-be-constructed I-395 freeway would provide direct access for speedy afternoon distribution, and a railroad spur offered equally direct access to newsprint and other raw materials. In addition, the new building boasted roughly three times the floor space of the old one. Nevertheless, the company had traded an elegant structure at a prestigious address for a hulking, utilitarian box in an out-of-the-way, run-down area.

Postcard rendering of the new building (Author’s collection).
The demise of the Star was a long and drawn-out affair. Circulation actually continued to increase throughout the 1960s, although advertising revenue steadily dropped off. The afternoon format became more and more of a liability, no longer fitting the daily routines of a changing culture and also posing distribution challenges. “Realistically, it was probably hopeless by ’65 or ’66,” a former executive was quoted as saying in the Star‘s final edition. As the paper relentlessly lost money, the Kauffmann and Noyes families began to look for an outside buyer. In 1974, a wealthy Texas banker, Joe L. Allbritton, took control of the paper, eventually buying out the shares owned by the Kauffmann and Noyes families.

Allbritton wanted to turn the paper around, but he faced insurmountable odds. A key part of his strategy was to leverage the income from the company’s profitable WMAL broadcasting stations to cover the paper’s losses while fixes were being planned. However, the Federal Communications Commission balked at Allbritton holding on to two different mass media outlets in the same market. Tense times at the paper ensued, with staff accepting pay cuts and a reduced work week to keep the business alive. In 1978, four years after taking over, Allbritton sold the Star to Time Inc. The media giant made more changes, bringing in new editorial leadership, changing the physical design of the paper, and switching to morning delivery. It didn’t help. After just three more years, Time closed the Star for good in 1981.

Meanwhile, the old Evening Star Building endured quietly on Pennsylvania Avenue. Initial plans, after its namesake had moved out, were to convert it to a 330-room hotel. Instead, it was converted to generic office space, and much of it was rented to the federal government. As various “modernizations” were undertaken, nothing of the original interior decoration was preserved—the Carrara marble, the mahogany trim, the Dielman murals—all vanished. In 1981, the owners proposed a massive renovation and enlargement of the building, a project that was finally carried out 9 years later. The 1918 addition on 11th Street was torn down in 1987, as were smaller structures abutting the building on Pennsylvania Avenue, and a large new addition, designed in a style sympathetic with the original, was put up in their place.  The Evening Star Building is now one of the most valuable properties in downtown Washington.

The 1959 building in Southeast was sold to the Post, which used it as a printing plant for many years. The D.C. government leased the building in 2007 with the intention of using it as a new police headquarters but subsequently determined that that option would be too expensive. The city bought the building outright in 2009, and it is currently being extensively renovated to house several other D.C. government agencies.

Thanks to Kim Williams, D.C. Historic Preservation Office, for her assistance with this article. Sources included Fred A. Emery, “Washington Newspapers” in Records of the Columbia Historical Society (Vol. 37-38, 1937); Merrill E. Gates, Men of Mark in America (1906); Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington: A History of the Capital, 1800-1950 (1962); John Clagett Proctor, Washington Past and Present: A History (1930); Pamela Scott and Antoinette Lee, Buildings of the District of Columbia (1993); Washington Board of Trade, The Book of Washington (1927); a draft National Register of Historic Places nomination for the Evening Star building from 1990; and, of course, numerous newspaper articles from the Star as well as its chief rivals.

Last Friday we spoke about the strange Burger King in Van Ness and other quirky buildings around town. I have to say that the Barrel House Liquor Store located in Logan Circle at 14th and Rhode Island Ave, NW has to be one of the best in town. It’s got it all, in addition to the great door which we’ve noted before, it’s got one of the few awesome neon signs in DC:

And it’s old. A reader sent the following awesome ad from 1948:

Whoa. Without question my new favorite. Anyone know what year?

From a press release:

President Lincoln’s Cottage opened Seat of War: A Panoramic View of Civil War Washington Through Historic Prints early this month in the Robert H. Smith Visitor Education Center. This exhibit illuminates President Lincoln’s Civil War Washington through historic prints from our collection. It will run through the new year and close on January 15, 2012.

More info on Lincoln’s cottage here Directions from the Petworth metro here.