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Belmont Road is one block long, hypotenuse of the triangle 18th and Columbia make; first street south on 18th Street as it slopes downhill towards the White House, away from Kalorama Park. This intersection features a colorful weekend marketplace. Farmers sell squash, green apples, corn, berries and real tomatoes. Latinos sell radios, tapes, and watches. Muslims vend perfumed oils. There are regular bake sales and a bag lady sells costume jewelry from her tv tray, next to the man doing $5 foot massages by the flower stand.
When we first moved in to the Adams-Morgan neighborhood in 1972 there was none of this -- no open-air market, no Ethiopian, French or Caribbean restaurants fragranting the air on 18th Street. It was the winos huddled outside the boarded up buildings and the rats scavenging the gutters in daylight that we noticed first.
In 1972 young whites had already started moving back into the old houses around the Circle -- DUPONT Circle, the large white marble fountain Pierre L'Enfant planned when he drew the orbs and all their convergences around the city, the Circle connecting the downtown academic/government/legal districts to the more residential, ethnic areas of town. Mayday had been the year before and thousands poured into the city that day, stopping traffic and congregating especially at the Circle. The Circle where congas beat all night. Young people slept on the grass, shared bread, cheese, wine and smoke. The leaflets were as thick as flowers and you could meet anyone you knew, if you stayed on the ringed benches where all the pie-pieces of the streets came together long enough.
In 1972 the left-over platoons of demonstrators decided to stay. Students at GW or Georgetown, or others who had simply packed up on too many buses for too many moratoriums to stop the war, just decided it was easier to live and sleep here instead of always travelling in to march. A counter-cultural community grew in the city our parents had left, in the streets and neighborhoods they had evacuated when the blacks came up from the south. When we marched through the ghetto shouting anti-war slogans people responded as they never would have in the suburbs. We were touched, drawn to this black heart of the city nestled at the empire's throat.
Adams-Morgan rests between the hilltop overlooking the zoo and the Circle -- a neighborhood of black families, rooming houses, halfway houses, mom and pop stores, auto garages, delivery services, print shops. On the west it borders the embassies and the green snaking wonder of Rock Creek Park.
Belmont Road in 1972 was a bundle of contradictions. The top half, near the park, was full of boarded-up apartments, piles of trash, discarded furniture and mud. One attractive house stood fortressed in the middle, where a gay society figure lived alone. Across from his house stretched a long tall wall, formed by the side of the Richfood Store. These bricks regularly changed their message according to whoever passed by last:
RICH PIGS WILL DIE - NLF WILL WIN
PAUL VOLKER SUX
HOUSING FOR PEOPLE/NOT FOR PROFIT
USA OUT OF NORTH AMERICA
EL SALVADOR LIBRE
WOMEN UNITE TAKE BACK THE NIGHT
LAST COLONY OF THE EMPIRE - CHOCOLATE CITY DC.
At the other end of the street was a corner apartment house called The Belmont where people brought out card tables on good days and barbecued while their radios played. It was a favorite spot to deliver soliloquies until the police came, and where the gentle mongrel Killer knew to hang around for scraps. Killer's master, Mr. Brooks, had a withered hand and a friendly hug. Resident manager of the Belmont, presiding over neighborhood fights and street corner drinking bouts, Mr. Brooks was the first to welcome us when we moved across the street into 1804, the building that had been empty since the Drum and Spear Bookstore moved out.
Melinda and I rented the six-bedroom house with its tiny closet kitchen, large dining room and foyer, and huge, bayed living room over a cavernous basement, where the real kitchen from the last century had long since rotted away. We named ourselves AMAZON NATION and Louise, Pamela, Jude, Barbara, Rachel and Sharon all moved in. Rachel, Barbara and Louise only lived there weekends since they had beds at Runaway House down 18th Street where they counseled five nights a week. We made it cozy with music, wall-hangings, posters, pillows, great improvised dinners, a dog and two cats. The First Sex women's herstory study group met there, as did both men and women of the Washington Free Community around us. You were as likely to run into someone's lover each morning in the hall, female or male either, as you were to run into your housemate, or maybe become lovers with her yourself, after a playful party night or a long bathtub conversation together.
Amazon thrived three years on that fierce street corner as the block mellowed and changed. The condemned building up the street was purchased and renovated by two gays. And after a huge Christmas feast where the rats stole the duck carcass we left out on the table, we learned how to fight the rat wars in our own basement and win. We borrowed a small animal trap from a farmer, hung it over the dining room fireplace, and emptied it every day of the last night's catch while our morning coffee brewed.
Meanwhile new neighbors joined us next door. They named themselves Common Sense House, started their own Maoist study group, and published a small political journal we contributed to. They also installed racks of bean sprouts in their basement for the new cooperative grocery we were all helping to start on 18th Street.
We all had read about white people colonizing and changing a poor neighborhood, but usually thought of it in terms of our parents. We didn't consider how it applied to us. We noticed some of the mom and pop stores were going, and the increasing evictions of poor people, their broken down furniture and faded belongings littering the street. But there was so much colorful life replacing them; new government-blessed experiments in worker-managed businesses: bicycle repair shops, recycling centers and crafts stores, that enchanted us and took up our time.
We didn't bother to learn too much about the schools either -- Adams and Morgan -- that the neighborhood had been named after. The runaway kids we worked with were mostly suburban and had dropped out of schools long ago. If anything they went to free schools we helped them create -- with whimsical names like Osh Kosh Choo Choo or Bonzo Ragamuffin Prep. But some of us stayed long enough, or listened hard enough, to learn the history of this neighborhood before we came. We found out that Adams and Morgan had been converted to community control in the 60s by the parents that lived here and that there were community meetings there where Home-Rule for a city still controlled by Congress, was discussed and planned.
In 1975 the suburban runaway youth we'd been counseling went back to the suburban counseling centers and shelters we'd helped create. More black youth started coming to us, overnight it seemed. It was only later that we realized that the city eviction rate had skyrocketed 700% that year. All we knew as that the war had ended; it took awhile to realize the war had just come home.
We closed up Amazon that year, forced out by a rent increase. Jude and I got apartments several blocks away, next to the fire station, but our stay there was short since we couldn't stop the sale of that building either. When we knew we were leaving we set out on an apartment-hunting stroll and ran into Mr. Brooks. He winked and told us there were two vacancies at The Belmont. We endured his sloppy kisses and moved in later that week.
For three years after that we laid low, crafting solitary pleasures and enjoying our jobs with the runaway kids down the hill, learning to integrate our staff as the neighborhood changed. By 1978 the Belmont had become much more run-down than when we first knew it and was filling up with refugee families from the South. The Salvadorans lived all around us, used more water, had more babies and relatives and filled the stoops nightly with their laughter and complaints. They called our building The Boat -- having noted how it bowed itself around both corners of the streets, rising like a beached hull, higher than the townhouses around it, a boat of refuge after so much fight.
In 1979 we were faced with a now familiar ultimatum: buy your building or move out. Endless rounds of meetings and translations began and we finally became one of the first low-income groups to purchase our building, certainly the first bi-lingual one to succeed. On April 4, 1980 the 12th anniversary of Martin Luther King's death, we went to settlement and threw a tremendous party that night, starring a local theater group who'd composed a drama based on our fight.
Barely a year into ownership we knew it was unworkable -- we were managing our low-income coop through a rehab process that would make our own units too expensive for us to afford.
One Sunday, woken from deep sleep at dawn I smelled smoke and stood up naked squinting into a thick grey cloud where the hall used to be. Phone wires fried when I reached for them, I pulled on my nightgown to answer the banging at the door. Gas-masked firemen lifted me barefoot down hot tiled stairs. Paul, the drunk we couldn't get rid of, had the building in flames, his stove and belongings already melted, floors above him going fast. When I reached the street Opal, the ragged-out old artist in the corner unit, was giving him money for another beer. The Salvadorans were huddled together counting faces. Us whites and blacks cursed Paul in English, trying to keep from hitting him while the cops looked on.
After that we went through the year and a half left of vacating and selling the building in shock. Most of us on the Tenant Board lost our jobs as we worked with insurance agents, realtors, bankers, city officials and lawyers, and tried to clean up the fire-damaged units that were left. A cartel of tax attorneys approached us, eager to take the building off our hands.
* * *
White linen-covered tables and soft lighting fill the corner apartment where Mr. Brooks died; this room that once housed our tenant's office and the long harried bi-lingual meetings. In the front yard where cardgames and barbecues once thrived, Salvadoran waiters and waitresses now tend white metal tables with Campari umbrellas set in them. Jose and Carmen's efficiency is a Hair Stylists. Lupe's an antique store. Enrique's home is a Latin craft import shop. Opal's is an art/card store with displays of champagne bottle and silk flowers in the window where her old hat collection once hung.
By the time the new parent-planned school on 18th Street was built, many of them had been forced to move by rising rents. The school rose anyway, sparkling and new, housing a health clinic, day care center, and a swimming pool where the races and ages uneasily mix.
Most of the communes have become Yuppie-hives. Each condo efficiency in these chopped-up townhouses now sells for the price the whole house went for when we first arrived.
The wall's still there. It still says Rich Pigs Will Die. But that message is part covered now. MOM & DEAD scream the punks, PENIS CANCER, and one stenciled message perhaps most enigmatic of all, LEOPARD-SKINNED PUMP.
We left Belmont Road that fall, pasting our farewell leaflets on the ginkgo trees.