Alley Lives in Washington
It’s funny how history gets framed, and forgotten, especially in a place changing as fast as Washington, D.C. Alleys in D.C., a Washington Post reporter told us a couple weeks ago, were “once dreaded.” Now they’re becoming “fun, even chic.” Back in the bad old days – which the reporter glosses from the time around the Civil War up through, apparently, the 1990s or even the aughts – D.C. alleys were not safe places to be. They certainly weren’t used in the creative, community-generating ways the reporter describes happening today. This is not just ahistorical reporting, it's anti-historical -- as if centuries of history simply didn't happen -- and it's part of the blank-slate mentality that plagues the discourse about what D.C. was, and is, and should be.
The problem is that the article ignores the incredibly rich and creative life that has simmered in D.C. alleys from the beginning. In 1980, James Borchert published a ground-breaking history of the culture of the city’s alley dwellers, Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, Religion and Folklife in the City, 1850-1970. Borchert argues that D.C.’s alleys, portrayed from the outside as desperate no-go zones by the city’s middle class, were in fact on the inside places of intricate culture and community life. In D.C.’s alley communities, immigrants from Ireland held onto their traditions, and later black migrants from the rural south nurtured their folk life, safe in a spot separate from the racist big city. Here’s a classic image of D.C. alley life, juxtaposing the formal white marble city with the everyday life of the alley. (This photo was taken in 1941 by Marion Post Wolcott.)
Of course, most of this internal alley culture has not been remembered, because so little of it was written down. Many, if not most, alley dwellers over the city’s history have been illiterate, so they couldn’t record their own history in writing. And mainstream publications like the Washington Post, then as now, focus on the middle class community of its readership or the pathological problems of the urban poor, but rarely document the real community life of poor people. The historical evidence we have of D.C. alley dwellings consists largely of photographs, most of which were taken or commissioned by housing reformers intent on the alley dwellings’ destruction. These reformers had been inspired by Jacob Riis’ work documenting the impoverished tenements of New York City at the turn of the twentieth century. Here’s a typical Riis photograph, published in his sensational book, How the Other Half Lives, which documented the lives of poor people in New York City in the 1880s and served as a call to action for those who would help the poor (or at least, demolish their decrepit housing).
Immigrant mom + dad+ 5 kids in a two-room apartment: yikes! Somber faces all around. Riis traveled to D.C. shortly after the publication of his book, and inspired our local housing reformers to get to work. The photos commissioned by D.C.’s alley reformers, like Riis’ photographs, are propaganda: they are designed to make the point that this housing is unsanitary, overcrowded and unfit for humans, especially children. These photos were made to illustrate books like Charles Weller’s 1909 Neglected Neighbors: Stories of Life in Alleys, Tenements and Shanties of the National Capital and other works written to encourage demolition of poor people’s communities. Weller warns darkly that white middle class people who think the alleys have nothing to do with them should remember that black women who live in alleys take in their white laundry, and care for their white babies: so even the middle class person who doesn’t personally step foot inside an alley can be infected by its filth. The early photos of D.C.’s alleys are not neutral documents – not that much historical evidence ever is. Here's a photo taken by Weller to illustrate his book. Check his caption.
Contrast this with the work of someone like acclaimed African-American photographer Gordon Parks. Here’s his photograph of a kid in an alley in Southwest D.C. in the 1940s, shortly before urban renewal was to raze most of the quadrant, displacing 23,000 people and 1500 businesses. (Borchert includes this photo in his book.)
This is a kid who does not look particularly oppressed by his neighborhood conditions. His clothes are too big and his housing is too small – yeah, he’s poor. But he’s got a quiet beam of a smile, radiates a certain confidence and even a jaunty sense of ownership of space.
Speaking of kids in alleys, childhood nostalgia trigger alert: when my little brother and I were growing up in D.C.’s Mt. Pleasant neighborhood in the ‘70s and ‘80s, we and our crew of neighborhood friends played in the alley behind our house. It was impossible to roller-skate in the alley, because it was so rutted, but we ran around a lot back there, playing games, dancing. We certainly didn’t play games orchestrated by adults, like the games the Post reporter describes – I have no memory of any particular recognizable “games” we played, just that we “ran around” -- and in fact we had no adult supervision back there at all. Whatever adult was charged with looking after us on a given afternoon was, I am sure, tucked away in the house, quite glad we were out of their hair. Not to say we didn’t have some good wholesome family times in the alley, too, because I played lots of catch with my dad there – a long narrow alley is perfect for throwing a baseball back and forth – and he and my brother continued that in another alley after we moved a block over. My point is: people, certainly not just us, used the alleys. They fixed and washed their cars back there, rode bikes, held yard sales, kicked balls, played scrappy games of baseball, talked to each other, dragged TVs into their backyards on warm autumn days and filled the alley air space with the sounds of the exploits of the, ahem, Washington Football Team. In 1989 my high school best friend and I took photos for our senior yearbook in the alley behind my house. We were trying to look tough. What better place for two white girls, or anyone else, to feign toughness than an alley?
But there’s no place for toughness, real or not, in D.C.’s alleys today, according to the Post piece. Instead, alleys are becoming places of (ouch) “communal whimsy”! I have no problem with crime rates going down. I’m sure some of the people who were hanging out in the alley behind our house in the ‘80s were the same people who were scoping it out in preparation of burglarizing it, which happened a couple times. (My white family was part of a gentrification trend in the city’s central neighborhoods in the 1970s: we probably seemed ripe for the picking, though we didn’t actually own much of value beyond my parents' advanced degrees.) Even today, remarkably, some alleys in Mt. Pleasant and I’m sure elsewhere are home to drug dealing, prostitution, and public defecation. As one of my friends who lives along one of these still-grubby alleys says, you almost have to admire the folks who keep hanging on, pursuing their low-level, pungent crimes, seeming to willfully ignore the orderly whimsy their more upscale neighbors would rather impose on the alleys.
That’s not to say there hasn’t been more organized “community uplift” activities in alleys in the city’s history, too, similar to what the Post describes taking place today. For instance, in 1964, the group Neighbors, Inc., based in Ward 4 and founded in 1958 to promote neighborhood racial harmony in the midst of tense times, got together to reclaim a vacant lot that sat in the middle of the block formed by 8th, 9th, Longfellow, and Madison Streets NW, in the Brightwood neighborhood. This was a lot that was, like the gardens described in the Post article, completely hidden from street view, surrounded by interior alleys. The Neighbors, Inc. members were working to turn the lot into what they called a “neighborhood commons.” The attempt at collective creation of communal spaces, in hidden alley spots and other places, was happening all over D.C. in the 1960s and ‘70s – it’s far from a recent phenomenon, and it’s a fascinating history. And – importantly – much of this work was undergirded by a politics of justice. Here's Neighbors, Inc. celebrating their 4th anniversary in 1962. (Photo from a 1983 issue of their newsletter, Neighbors Ink.)
Alleys are special because they are hidden, and because they are wasted space. It’s hard to preserve waste space – unproductive space, space just for hanging out or frittering away time, which is, of course, how real community is built – it’s hard to preserve this in a city where property values are climbing so sky high. Developers are doing the best they can to monetize alley space – the development of Blagden Alley the Post piece references is the best example so far. It must in equal parts tantalize and infuriate developers, all this wasted space rotting back behind million dollar homes, that could – should! – be converted into cash. Here’s a 1912 propagandizing map warning of the dangers of Blagden Alley, again from Borchert’s book. Note the guy wielding the knife in the upper left, and the guy attacking the other guy in the “blind alley” in the center (“blind” referring to an alley that twists in such a way that it can’t be seen from the street).
Scary! (If indeed it really ever was that dangerous: Borchert argues that some alley dwellers hyped the notoriety of alleys in an effort to scare off outsiders, like cops, who they didn't want hanging around their living spaces.) But no worries, the Post tells us, it's safe for you and your children today.
Look, I think it’s cool that people are hanging out and making friends in alleys. The Washington Post piece is cute. But there seems to be a real glut of reporting, in the Post and elsewhere, on all the cute hijinks people new to the city are getting up to these days. To not be curious about how people have used these spaces in the past is to deny the rich history of everyday life that’s fast being forgotten in this city. It’s easy for people to see themselves as pioneers if they can’t see the traditions on which they’re building. And the pioneer mentality – the idea that we are the first to do this, that we are reclaiming this space from its miserable or simply unused past, that it has never been used creatively or filled with love before – be it in alleyways or anywhere else – doesn’t help build real relationships across race and class and difference, which we so desperately need in this fast-changing city.
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