July 2011
Barracks Row was not always cupcakes and cosmos, a fact that might surprise some newcomers to the Hill.
"The porno queen of 8th Street, that's what they called me," laughs Margot Kelly. That was near the start of her 40 year odyssey: cleaning up 8th Street. Barracks Row. It's been a bumpy ride.
In the late 1960s, when the liquor store closed in a building she owned across from the Marine Barracks, Kelly was approached by a man wanting to open a bookstore. A bookstore on 8th Street! Fancy that, she thought.
She instantly leased him the space and fantasized, in six month's time, adding a winding staircase to the second floor "for a tea room where people could sit and read.”
"I don't intend to have that kind of bookstore," he said, red-faced.
With the lease already signed, she insisted he paper over the windows. The store quickly closed. "He was a nice young man," she remembers.
Foul Fowl and Happy Hookers
Hanging in Kelly's kitchen is a cartoon of the street created by a Marine at the beginning of this century with plushly upholstered prostitutes hanging out of upper windows, street people leaning against storefronts, and pedestrians gaily tossing trash.
It's amusing to those of us that have lived on the Hill for more than say five years to overhear conversations - let's go to 8th Street for brunch, lunch, dinner, a drink. Kelly was there before Lola's and Ted's. Before many folks dared cross the Berlin Wall that was the Eastern Market Metro Plaza.
She was there when the Shakespeare Theater Rehearsal Studio was a seedy movie house where vile stuff clutched stickily to your sandals and there were ominous rustlings beneath the rickety seats; when their main offices across the way -- that grand Victorian with the mansard roof--was a grocery with rotting chickens on top of the freezer, pigeons cooing in the roof beams, and an owner sneering about gentrification and how he was serving the poor.
Kelly grew up in Berlin and came to the U.S. in 1950, as a secretary at the German Diplomatic Mission--later, the Embassy. By the early 1950s she'd married and divorced. Realtor Millicent Chatel sold her a little house in Northwest and talked her into selling real estate.
She joined Chatel's Georgetown office. "We were all divorcees. It was marvelous," which comes out mawvelous. Her German accent is still buffed and shiny.
Chatel also urged her to buy real estate, advice she seized on: renovating and renting out several houses in that part of town, but rarely selling. "When you've got something good, you hold on to it," she says.
Answering phones one day, as new agents often do, she took a call from a man with a house for sale on East Capitol Street. "A coming neighborhood," pronounced Chatel, who led her gaggle of agents on tour. Kelly got the listing; Chatel opened an office on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Along with a friend, Kelly bought a house at 504 7th Street. "$11-12,000 with $2,500 down," she remembers. "A dump."
They let it to a woman for $100 a month, collecting the rent for months before "something broke and I went to see -- and saw the red light bulb in an upstairs window. I almost cried," she says.
That dump, with a stellar view of a neighbor's chickens and the rats that scurried around the metal feed bowls, became her first home on the Hill.
It was around the corner from Barracks Row.
In Washington's early years, this corridor was a bustling main street, lined with shops serving the Navy Yard and the residential community; it remained so through World War II, when abruptly and with few exceptions, "it was boarded up. Dead," she says.
When Kelly arrived, real estate on 8th street was a bargain. Though close to Pennsylvania Avenue it retained a little small town charm, it "looked like hell across from the immaculate Marine Barracks," she says. And that block was "the most architecturally interesting. It needed and deserved to be put back into shape."
In 1967, she bought the red brick building at 8th and G Street, with windows overlooking the Marine Commandant's residence. Built in 1900 as the first luxury apartment house on Capitol Hill, it was a shambles. "My God," she says, "It looked like hell, with the retirees from the Navy Yard drinking their pensions. Guys sleeping everywhere. The stench!"
The Ship's Cafe, the bar next door, was particularly offensive, "Drunks sprawled on the sidewalks," she says. When the existing DC old boys wouldn't revoke the bar's liquor license she bought that building too; then the building next door, and the one after that....
Arms Against a Sea of Troubles
Others joined her in reclaiming the block, hanging in through recessions, riots, and housing crises, along with the loitering, drunkenness, and prostitution. But then The Broker restaurant began offering limo service to members of congress and Innervisions started selling office and art supplies. In 1988, the old City Bank building at 8th and I was renovated by landscape architects, Oehme and van Sweden.
In the early 1990's, Kelly established the Barracks Row Business Alliance, collecting dues from businesses to support street cleaning and fancified tree boxes. The Community Action Group, worked with the homeless. The Marines cleaned-up. Street festivals were attempted. The People's Church started piping classical music into the street, Reverend Hall heard it discouraged loitering. It did.
Momentum built as the Shakespeare Theatre took over the movie theater on the west side of the street for rehearsal space and then, most prominently, restored the grand Victorian across the way for their executive offices.
"It was a pretty dreadful movie theater," Michael Kahn chuckles. As for the office building, the company's artistic director likens it to Hitchcock's Psycho: "A miniature version of the place where Anthony Perkins' mother lived," he says. The staff, he adds, "was nervous about the neighborhood."
The rehearsal hall became the arena for monthly meetings with council members, officials from the fire department, the police, and the Navy Yard. Pepco said "no problem" to Kelly's idea of installing electricity in the tree boxes for strings of white lights. Donuts were served.
Main Street Redux
It was at one of these meetings that a representative from the National Trust for Historic Preservation spoke of the Main Street Program, which was successfully revitalizing blighted historic areas around the country. Hiring the Trust to run a formal program was too costly for the bare-bones budget of the BBA, but ideas could be borrowed.
Using their guidelines, the BBA continued to beautify and popularize the street, meanwhile Kelly was luring in retail, taking a fingers-crossed leap with some promising shops, carrying some for many months hoping they'd hang on as the street improved. Alvear Studio was one of them.
"Margot is as tough as nails--but without nails you'd have no foundation," says Chris Alvear, who for a decade owned Alvear Studio - the retail hub of the street - with his partner Francisco Pliego. "She started the BBA and Barracks Row Main Street! That was all Margot.”
"I remember having a drinkie and a sigawette," he says, spoofing her patois. "And she said, 'Why should I rent this spot to you and your Mexican imports?' Look what she did for us. Oh my God!"
As the street improved, Alvear's rent rose and the store struggled. Kelly was lenient, but "Mexican imports in a recession?" he shrugged. "I love her. The woman gave me the best years of my life. I wish I had my store back," he sighed, more-or-less to himself.
Meanwhile, community interest was growing. In 1997, fund-raising for a full-scale Main Street program was launched and in one year's time, $60,000 had been raised and a separate organization created to manage the project.
Kelly made the announcement in a BBA newsletter, explaining that the new non-profit would "build on the area's diverse roots, provide a spectrum of services for the residents of the area, create new jobs and business opportunities and make the area more visually attractive."
In 1999, Kelly received a Capitol Hill Community Achievement Award for her years of service to Capitol Hill--and establishing the Main Street program.
The change in the neighborhood is "incredible. Hard to believe," says Michael Kahn.
When Kelly turned 75 in October of 2000, in characteristically decisive fashion, she dialed back her involvement though not her interest in Barracks Row; she remains on the Main Street Board of Directors. She still has unfulfilled wishes: "We should have respectable retail," she says. "We approve of the wonderful restaurants...but we need a happy combination of shopping and dining."
And she'd really like to see those tree lights twinkling along the street.
Margot Kelly still lives on the Hill in a white columned house with the wisteria-draped patio paved with bricks from the site of the old Griffith Stadium, "was a complete gut job," she says.
"They told me I was out of my mind," she adds, blue eyes twinkling.
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