Kenneth G. Peters is the author of the new book Georgetown's Retail Past: Generations of Shops and Restaurants in One of America's Great Historic Neighborhoods. He is a retired attorney, and he lives in Washington, D.C.
Q: What inspired you to write Georgetown’s Retail Past?
A: Before coming to Washington in 1971, I lived in
Philadelphia and Boston, two very historic cities. I was fascinated by their
history, and I loved being in particular buildings or places and wondering
about those who had lived or worked there in the past. When I came to
Washington, I began reading everything I could find about its history, and my
interest in that history has continued ever since.
When I retired from practicing law in 2012, I realized I now
had an opportunity to really pursue my interest in local history, and I began
looking for ways to do so. I did some work researching the history of people’s
houses and enjoyed it, but the projects only came along sporadically. I needed a
research project that I could do on my own schedule. Since I have lived in
Georgetown for 19 years, something about the neighborhood’s history seemed worth
exploring.
I noticed that while there has been much written about
Georgetown’s houses and its institutions, little has been written about the neighborhood’s
non-industrial commercial past. I decided to research that untilled ground and
see where it would take me. After a while, I concluded that there was enough
material for a book, and I resolved to write one.
Georgetown’s Retail Past is not by any means the definitive
book about the neighborhood’s retail history. Rather, it is a first effort on
which I hope others may build in the future.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn
that especially surprised you?
A: I had two main sources. One was public records: the
census, city directories, land records, building permit records, tax records,
survey atlases, and records of the District of Columbia Surveyor. My legal
training and experience were helpful, as I was familiar with those records and
knew how to navigate and interpret them.
City directories were a particularly important source. The
first step in my research was to collect city directory listings for all retail
businesses on Wisconsin Avenue and M Street (the neighborhood’s two main
streets) for 30 selected years from 1860 to 2014. I entered those directory
listings into a database – actually, a large Excel spreadsheet.
In the course of my research, whenever I found information
in other years’ directories about businesses on the two main streets, I added it
to the database. The database now contains 12,400 directory listings, and I
continue to add to it as I learn new things.
The database enabled me to see the mix of Georgetown
businesses change in response to economic trends like the transition from
horses to cars for transportation, the evolution of grocery stores from small
corner shops to (eventually) supermarkets, the decline of the barbershop and
the advent of home appliances in the 1920s.
The database made it possible to see how the owners of bars
and liquor stores coped when Prohibition suddenly made their businesses
illegal. It revealed how individual businesses moved around, and helped me
identify family relationships among the owners of different stores.
The second major source was the press: the Washington Post
and Evening Star as well as a local newspaper called The Georgetowner. Georgetown merchants were ordinary people who
did not often draw the attention of the press. Only some Georgetown businesses
advertised, but their ads were revealing. Obituaries were a source of biographical
information. Sometimes there were articles about neighborhood stores, often
covering traumatic events like fires, robberies and liquidation auctions.
I used other sources as well. The Georgetown Citizens
Association has for some years conducted oral history interviews with long-time
neighborhood residents, transcripts of which are available on its website.
The Peabody Room in the Georgetown Branch of the District of
Columbia Public Library has a collection of files about each building in the
neighborhood, containing press clippings and photographs from the past. Going
through those files was one of the first steps in my research. Ancestry.com was
an important resource because the census, city directories, and other records
are searchable there.
What surprised me was how many Georgetown stores were owned
by immigrants. We generally do not think of Washington as an immigrant
destination, perhaps because until after the mid-20th century Washington lacked
the kind of vibrant immigrant neighborhoods found in cities like New York,
Chicago, Boston and Baltimore.
Immigrants were here, though, and I discovered that many of
them owned stores in Georgetown. For
example, 83 (29 percent) of the 289 stores on the two main streets in 1920 had
foreign-born owners. I could not identify the national origins of all 289
owners, so there may have been other immigrants among them.
Some immigrants’ families ran multiple businesses for
multiple generations. An example was Hyman Brodofsky, who arrived in the United
States in 1892 and started a clothing store. Seven of his descendants over the
next three generations ran stores in Georgetown. Bridge Street Books, founded
by Brodofsky’s great-grandson Philip Levy (now deceased), still is owned by the
family today.
The entrepreneurial spirit of the immigrant merchants is impressive.
If someone’s first store failed, we see him or her try again later. When
markets changed, they adjusted their inventory and their business models, as
happened during the Great Depression or when ready-made clothing caused dry
goods stores to fade away. They bought the buildings in which their stores were
located, and in many cases invested in other buildings as well. Late in their
lives, many of them lived in suburbs like Bethesda, Chevy Chase, Silver Spring,
and Arlington.
I also was surprised by how long Georgetown has been a
retail center. All the way back in 1830,
there were 132 retail stores on the two main streets, including a dozen dry
goods stores, nine shoemakers, two jewelers, five clothing stores, three
bookstores, and 37 grocers. By 1877 there were 262 stores on the two main
streets, and the number has been that many or more ever since.
Q: What do you see as some of the most common perceptions
and misconceptions about Georgetown?
A: An obvious and accurate perception is that Georgetown today
is an affluent neighborhood of expensive homes. However, many people may not
realize that Georgetown has not always been such an upscale enclave. It began
as a tobacco port. Later, after the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal opened with its
terminus in Georgetown, the neighborhood was a canal port.
The Georgetown waterfront was an industrial area, occupied
by mills, power plants, cement plants, and even a rendering plant. While there
were a few affluent families, Georgetown was a largely working-class
neighborhood through World War I. It had a distinctly small-town character,
despite its connection to the nation’s capital.
In 1915, the wife of the secretary of war was overheard
lamenting to a friend that, in order to find a house with a yard suitable for
her children, she might have to go to Virginia. The wife’s friend said, “Too
bad! You will have to pass through Georgetown.” That kind of perception may
have made today’s historic, restored Georgetown possible, because for decades
developers were not interested in the neighborhood.
Surprisingly little has been written about the process by
which the working-class neighborhood became today’s Georgetown. Restoration began
with a few people who came to Washington during the 1930s to work in New Deal
government agencies and faced a housing shortage.
The WPA Guide to Washington, published in 1937, refers to
journalists, government employees and others who “appreciated the charm that
lay beneath dilapidation” and bought small Georgetown homes. In the 1950s the
process gained momentum, and the Kennedy family’s connection to Georgetown cemented
the neighborhood’s new image in the early 1960s.
A common misperception is that there is no subway station in
Georgetown because neighborhood residents opposed it. While there were a few
opponents, it actually was construction challenges that ruled out a Georgetown
station, particularly the difficulty of tunnelling under hundreds of historic
structures and how very deep underground the station would have had to be to be
in order for the trains to run under the river.
Washington’s Metro system was originally intended primarily
to bring commuters to downtown Washington, and the planners may have been less
motivated to overcome these challenges because Georgetown was not then an
employment center.
Q: Where did you find the photos you used in the book?
A: There are 98 photographs in the book. Fifty-nine are
recent photos of buildings that in the past housed stores that the book talks
about. I took those photos myself. I do not pretend to be a great photographer!
I was not able to find many photographs of retail Georgetown
from the past. It is likely that because of the neighborhood’s past déclassé
image there was not much interest in photographing its commercial streets.
The historic photos that I did find came from the
collections of the Library of Congress, particularly the Historic American
Buildings Survey and the National Photo Company Collection. A handful came from
other sources, such as the Smithsonian and the Kiplinger Library at the D.C.
History Center.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: A good question, to which I wish I knew the answer.
Georgetown’s Retail Past has just been published, so I am only now beginning to
cast about for another project.
Researching and writing Georgetown’s Retail Past took 12
years, because I was not working at it even close to full time. It was a
retirement project to which I turned my attention as I was inclined and as time
permitted. At the age of 77, I am not sure I have enough life expectancy left
for another project like that!
I definitely will be
pursuing my interest in Washington history in some form, though. Perhaps a
smaller, more narrowly focused book or some articles.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Although I have said a lot here about trends, the book at
its core is about individual businesses and their owners. It contains short
histories of 159 Georgetown businesses: who started the business and when,
where was it located, what the building was like, what businesses had been
there before, what the store sold, were there other owners in later years, did
it advertise, what members of the founder’s family were involved in running it,
how well-known was it, what challenges did the owners have to overcome, and,
especially, what about it was noteworthy or unusual?
Some readers may be intrigued by Georgetown’s retail history
because they are curious about what was here before their own time. Georgetown’s
Retail Past contains plenty to satisfy that curiosity. It tells the stories of stores and
restaurants from as far back as the 1830s through the 1940s.
Other readers may be intrigued because of nostalgia, an
interest in hearing about businesses that they patronized years ago.
Restaurants in particular may inspire such nostalgia, because Georgetown has
been a dining and entertainment center since the 1960s. Fifty-three of the
book’s historical sketches are of restaurants and stores that were popular in
the years since 1960.
The book relates the story of the cultural and legal clash
during the 1960s and 1970s between residents seeking a quiet, genteel
neighborhood on one side and owners and patrons of youth-oriented bars on the
other. It also tells of the opening and impact of the Georgetown Park
mall.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
