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
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