Dick Wolf

Interview with Dick Wolf
Interview Date: November 7, 2007
Interviewer: Megan Rosenfeld
Transcriber: Jack Womeldorf

This interview transcript is the property of the Ruth Ann Overbeck Capitol Hill History Project.
Not to be reproduced without permission.

TAPE 1/SIDE 1
WOLF: I’m formally Richard Noel Wolf, known in the community as Dick Wolf.
ROSENFELD: And would you say your address?
WOLF: 146 11th Street SE, Washington, D.C.
ROSENFELD: OK, I’ve got you. It’s November 6—November 7, 2007, and I’m interviewing Dick Wolf at his house on Capitol Hill. Mr. Wolf, tell me where you’re from, if you don’t mind [and] when you were born.
WOLF: I was born in Chicago, Illinois, 1933, and I was adopted by a family when I was 30 days old, and grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
ROSENFELD: What did your parents do?
WOLF: [You] mean, for a living?
ROSENFELD: Yeah.
WOLF: My father had a business of his own with some partners, and it was called the Hayden Fur Business, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and my mother was a housewife.
ROSENFELD: What did Hayden Fur do?
WOLF: Well, it meant that they bought raw hides from slaughter houses, farmers, other dealers, and when they came in on rail cars mainly, or sometimes trucks, they trimmed up the skins and sorted them by weight and varieties, like horsehides, calfskins, cow hides, and then resold them to other dealers or tanneries, and did much of their business over the telephone as well. It was a form of the commodities business.
ROSENFELD: It sounds very western. Where did you go to college?
WOLF: I went to the University of Michigan, 1950 to 1954.
ROSENFELD: And what was your major?
WOLF: I was a political science major and a history major.
ROSENFELD: What brought you to Washington?
WOLF: I went to law school at Yale Law School, and I graduated in 1957; in fact I just celebrated my 50th reunion, and after law school I worked on a research project in New Haven, and then met my wife, who was a medical student at the time at the Yale Med School, and we got married right at the time of her graduation and we moved down here in 1960 and lived in a town called Bladensburg, Maryland. Why did we live in Bladensburg? Because she was a resident and then a fellow up at Baltimore City and Johns Hopkins, and in pediatrics and pediatric cardiology and I took a bus down into downtown Washington where first I worked on the Commission on Civil Rights and after we wrote the 1961 report, 1981, excuse me, 1961 report; I went to work at the space agency.
ROSENFELD: NASA?
WOLF: NASA, and so commuted down into Washington. We were living in a garden apartment at that time, and we were looking for a suitable place to live where Mimi (Muriel), my wife, could continue to commute easily up the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, and we would still be living in town, and so we looked at different locations in the District of Columbia, as well as in the suburbs. We liked Capitol Hill! I remember standing at the corner of 11th and East Capitol Street, and looking down the street towards the Capitol, and it had kind of a pleasant, sort of run-down Southern look to it. We found this house, which we still live in, that was on Philadelphia Row. It was a [unintelligible]. We bought it in 1964—February 1964; moved into it after it was rehabbed, in December of 1964. The house had been completely gutted, there was nothing left of it.
ROSENFELD: Why? Was it in bad shape?
WOLF: It was owned—the people—two guys owned both the house next door and this house. Most of these houses had been converted into five units during World War II. The person who owned this particular set of houses—there were like five of them—stretching from here to the corner of Independence Avenue—must have worked at the Navy Yard, because they had, underneath the red paint, there was a battleship gray paint, so these guys had converted, rehabbed, the building next door to me, into apartments.
ROSENFELD: Which side?
WOLF: This side. The side going north. They had completely gutted this place and were going to do the same thing here, and they had a falling-out, and so this place was on the market, and I bought through Barbara Held Real Estate. We paid $18,500 for it. Why did we buy it? Well, because it was a very handsome-looking house; it backed onto a 30 foot alley and had a tin garage. There were lots of tin garages still remaining here on Capitol Hill. These were [pause]—we called them tin, they were corrugated steel that people built sheds out of and you’ll still find it on farms, you’ll find it up here.
ROSENFELD: Why was that appealing?
WOLF: Why did they do it that way?
ROSENFELD: No, why did that attract you?
WOLF: What attracted me was not the tin garage, but the fact that it had a garage and it backed on the alley, so we had this house, which was, by any standards, pretty cheap, and we’d looked at Bobby Baker’s house, Bobby Baker being the Secretary of the Senate, and a protégé of Senator [Robert C.] Byrd [D-WV] who was still around, and [also a protégé] of Lyndon Johnson.
ROSENFELD: He got into a bit of trouble.
WOLF: He got into some trouble. We looked at his house, in upper Northwest, which was you know, just a typical Washington square colonial, and it cost, it was on the market for the enormous sum of $34,000. I didn’t like it particularly (laughing) and it had all these heavy red draperies which was, sort of, I think, the brothel look (laughs).
ROSENFELD: When you moved in here, what was the neighborhood like? Who were your neighbors?
WOLF: Well, we actually had some interesting neighbors. I forget the lady’s name; her nephew was the Progressive governor of Oregon. She had a disabled son. I forget her name. And then there was Ruth, maiden name was Vorhees, I forget. I’ll get her name. I knew her quite well. Her husband was still alive, I think, for about one year when we bought the house. A protégé of Gifford Pinchot, who’d been the Republican-Progressive-Bull Moose governor of Pennsylvania, and was an associate of Teddy Roosevelt. So this guy was very involved in the conservation movement.
So already, we had some interesting neighbors, and I was very careful about purchasing this house because the freeway system, which had been developed—the plan for the District of Columbia involved a freeway called the East Leg of the Inner Loop, running right in front of our house. It would have been a major ditch between the front of our house and taking both 11th Street and 10th Street, and there was a neighbor of ours, who is still alive, Peter Glickert (now lives in Southwest) G-L-I-C-K-E-R-T. Peter was very feisty. Patent lawyer and a New Yorker who—they later moved to 12th Street, the 100 block of 12th Street SE. Anyway, Peter had fought off the freeway and it had been moved to the Anacostia River edge and was later de-mapped some years later. Peter won the Evening Star award as the “Citizen of the Year”. The Evening Star was still being published when we moved here. I think it stopped being published in 1980 or something like that. But it was much more of a community-minded paper than the Post ever was and they had things like the “Citizen of the Year” award, and stuff like that. So, the neighborhood—we didn’t buy the house because of that; we bought the house because of location, appearance, and the general impression of the neighborhood. We also didn’t believe we were going to spend the rest of our lives here either. [laughs]
ROSENFELD: Because you thought you’d be leaving Washington?
WOLF: No; we thought we’d move somewhere else, or as we had children—the neighborhood was very dicey at that time. I didn’t fully, you never fully (at least we didn’t), fully comprehend what was going on in the neighborhood. The transition between the neighborhood of the 1940s and 50s—the neighborhood had undergone a lot of changes during World War II. A lot of these houses, particularly closer in to the Capitol, the older part of Capitol Hill if you will, had been broken up into lots of apartments—there was a housing shortage in Washington during World War II, so everybody was doubling up, and so lots of these houses were fair game for that kind of thing. The neighborhood still had a lot of blue-collar whites living up here. A lot of them had worked in the government as clerks or worked in the Navy Yard, because the Navy Yard was a huge industrial complex.
ROSENFELD: It was still a big operation in 1964?
WOLF: They still had a factory-type operation called the Gun Factory, down at the Navy Yard, the main building. I think that came to an end shortly thereafter. Most people don’t know (you can attend the Overbeck Lectures and learn about this) that Washington D.C. had a substantial industrial base, which revolved around the needs of the government. It wasn’t like having an automobile factory.
ROSENFELD: What was it?
WOLF: It was the Navy Yard, there was actually …
ROSENFELD: Producing munitions?
WOLF: It was munitions, and building guns, and other things; the Navy Yard employed many, many thousands of people. A lot of the employees lived up here on the Hill in various locations; there was a neighborhood called “Navy Yard” which was over in the 11th Street—11th and M Street [SE] area, and that was some of the oldest housing on the Hill. Of course, you couldn’t really see the connection between the Capitol Hill we know now, and the area down towards the Navy Yard, because the Freeway had been built in the early 60s, came through …
ROSENFELD: So the Freeway was there when you came. Was that Navy Yard neighborhood considered part of the Hill, or had it been, kind of, isolated?
WOLF: Well, it was hard for me to say. I mean, what did I know about Capitol Hill? This was not considered part of Capitol Hill! Capitol Hill, sort of, came up to Eighth Street. This was Lincoln Park, North Lincoln Park, Stanton Park; there are many small neighborhoods in this area. I think if you had to generalize about it, it would be called Southeast. That was the way a lot of people referred to it. There were two major civic groups in the city at that time: one was called the Federation of Citizens’ Organizations, and there was a Southeast Citizens’ Organization. That was segregated up until the 60s.
ROSENFELD: Which was which?
WOLF: The Citizens were white, and then there was the Civic—we had a Southeast Civic Association, which doesn’t exist anymore. It was interesting; when I got involved with the Capitol Hill Restoration Society, it would not belong to any of these, because of the segregated nature of it, believe it or not.
ROSENFELD: Capitol Hill Restoration Society.
WOLF: It was not a member as a civic organization of these groups, because of the segregation issue.
ROSENFELD: What was the neighborhood like, racially?
WOLF: It was mainly white. I mean, people forget that the neighborhood was mixed but mainly white, and working-class white. There was a family, the Lee family, that lived in the 200 block of 11th Street SE. They’d moved up here during the urban renewal of the Southwest. They were the first white—black—family on that street, on that block.
ROSENFELD: On that block of 11th Street. Are they still there?
WOLF: No. They raised their kids, and they both died, and the house was sold by the daughter, and I don’t know where the daughter went. Interlaced within the neighborhood were clumps of black families. There were black churches and white churches. When people walk around Capitol Hill, because it is a dense neighborhood, you say “Why are there so many churches? Why are there so many schools?” Well, the reason is, there were white schools and black schools! White churches and black churches! There was also, I discovered, because one of my closest, I wouldn’t call him one of my closest friends, but someone I worked with very, very closely in the Restoration Society, Larry Monaco—the Monacos moved away about 10-15 years ago. Larry grew up at 12th & C, 12th & D, NE. Well, it was an Italian neighborhood. I gradually came to understand, because I didn’t grow up in a very ethnic city. When I went to New Haven, of course, a very ethnic city, with Italians and Irish and WASPs, and what have you.
ROSENFELD: Although Yale at that time was not particularly connected to the city.
WOLF: Well, it was and it wasn’t. We could talk about that. Some time ago I got to know a lot about that. So you had parishes [in DC], Catholic parishes, for example—St. Peter’s was Irish, St. Joe’s was German, St. Cyprian’s was black, St. Mary’s was Italian. That was typical of big cities with fairly substantial ethnic groups.
ROSENFELD: How did you know these things?
WOLF: I came to know them by observation, because I got active in civic activities, I got to know a lot of different people, some of whom had lived here for many years, some of whom were newcomers. I just picked it up. I mean, my father had spent his youth in Chicago. Well, Chicago was a stew of ethnic groups: Poles, Irish, Italian, you name it, and they lived in different neighborhoods. It was a roiling, brawling kind of situation.
ROSENFELD: This was calmer, and not so roiling …
WOLF: Washington, D.C., was never a … maybe it was the government town aspect of it. But it never had that edge that a Boston or even New Haven, certainly New York, Chicago, any of the big cities with large ethnic populations had. And of course, the industry that was here, aside from the Navy Yard, which could be called in some respects, heavy industry—we never had that. Never had that here, nothing like Baltimore with the big harbor and big industry, which tended to breed what I would call heavy-duty street thuggery. I went to the University of Michigan. If you were there, even then, football was a big thing. Where did they get their football players from? Interestingly enough, not many black players on the Michigan teams of the early 50s, but they had a lot of, a lot of the team came from the Catholic schools of Chicago, Detroit, Hamtramck, which was the largest Polish city outside of Poland in the world.
ROSENFELD: So you’d had exposure to …
WOLF: Oh, yeah! My father’s warehouse had originally a large Polish group of workers, and later, as black migration took place from the South, he had black workers, because it was heavy, dirty, smelly work. Those were the lowest level jobs you could get which were reasonably well paying. So I was sort of exposed to that. I mean, I grew up in a very well-to-do suburb of Grand Rapids called East Grand Rapids, which is a miniature version of Shaker Heights or Shorewood outside of Milwaukee.
ROSENFELD: When you moved here, how would you characterize your attitudes about race?
WOLF: Well, obviously, I must have been, I was a pretty open person, because I worked at the Commission on Civil Rights, and that was in the days when that was not an establishment thing to do. It was kind of aberrant, and when I was at the University of Michigan, you know, I had these propensities, that probably came from my family. They were Democrats, and they were also immigrants, living in a very well-to-do suburb that was white Protestant, in the main. There were a few Catholics, but in the main, it was not. And so, I was not exactly a “happy camper” during school. I went to school on a campus; that was the kind of place it was, the suburb’s taxes went … I suppose it would be akin to Scarsdale or Brookline, or something like that. In any event, so I went from kindergarten through the 12th grade on one campus. It was a very small school. We had the biggest class they ever had, graduating, even though we were all Depression babies. It was a class of 72-75 children, kids, in my graduating class! But it was, you know, it was a class where, in 1950, 100% of the class went to college of one sort or another, and that was very unusual in those days. So, in any event, I had this odd-ball background in the sense that my father and mother were immigrants, my father’s business was outside the mainstream of business in the city, and he traveled a lot throughout the Midwest.
ROSENFELD: Were you Catholics? Were you raised as Catholic?
WOLF: Jewish.
ROSENFELD: Jewish. Oh, so that put you …
WOLF: … distinctly in a minority. (both laugh) You know, Grand Rapids, Michigan does not have a very large Jewish population at all. I mean, it was quite small. They’d had one for a long, long time; it wasn’t exactly … The first congressman and mayor of Grand Rapids was Jewish, but they were German Jews, which were different, you may or may not know, from the East European immigrants.
ROSENFELD: Well, when you came to Capitol Hill, were you a practicing Jew?
WOLF: Yeah. I was not looking for a Jewish neighborhood, obviously.
ROSENFELD: Were you looking for a temple?
WOLF: Well, we did belong. As soon as we moved here, we joined a congregation called, it wasn’t even called Temple Micah at that time; it was called Southwest Hebrew Congregation, and then it affiliated with the Reform movement and we’ve been members ever since. My wife’s a lot more active than I am. [It] moved uptown, it moved up on Wisconsin Avenue, they built a new building, but that’s where we’ve … our children went to Saturday school, and all the rest of it. They were both Bas mitzvaed, my two daughters.
ROSENFELD: When were your children born?
WOLF: 1964; 1965 and ’66. They were born …You know, we’ve lived in this house… This is the only house they ever knew. You know, Capitol Hill … One of the things that was attractive to me, and maybe to my wife was the fact that you could make your life up here. You could build it out of nothing, and you didn’t have to go through some establishment procedure. Capitol Hill Montessori, which our kids went to, and I as president for the time, a couple of years, was something that the neighborhood created. We did all sorts of interesting things, and I got to know people. Most people who lived up here that we associated with were not burdened with large past historical problems of any sort (laughs). Many, many people who moved here had very good educational backgrounds, they were smart. Most of the people we knew had worked for the government in one way or another.
ROSENFELD: When you say …
END OF TAPE 1/SIDE 1
TAPE 1/SIDE 2
ROSENFELD: Talking about historical antipathies, I’d asked you that question.
WOLF: This was not, quote-unquote, an “established neighborhood”. It didn’t have established schools. It had, I suppose St. Peter’s could be called an established school; been around for a long time. You know, friends of ours established the … the Day School.
ROSENFELD: The Capitol Hill Day School?
WOLF: Day School, and we knew people from its earliest days. It was, actually … our children, after they did not go to school up here after they left the Montessori, went to Burgundy Farm School and then from there in the fifth and sixth grades, they transferred to Georgetown Day School.
ROSENFELD: Why did you choose not to use the public schools?
WOLF: They were terrible. I did not have enough time in the world—had time for some things but not to transport to the schools. I think there was one grade school that was … Brent at that time that was considered a reasonable school. I just … as far as I was concerned; as far as we were concerned, we’re just not going to get into that set of problems. The schools …
ROSENFELD: Because they were—the schools, were desegregated here in, I think, 1959.
WOLF: Well, there was a school case, a special school case involving the District of Columbia called Bolling v. Sharpe, which was a year after the Brown decision. The schools became desegregated. For example, but basically, they became almost totally African-American by the mid-60s, because I had a secretary at work who graduated from Roosevelt. She was white, Jewish, in 1964. That was sort of the last class that was fairly integrated at Roosevelt. See, when I went to the University of Michigan I also knew a lot … There were a lot of people at Michigan from Washington, DC. In fact, my dentist I use today I met my first day at the University of Michigan.
ROSENFELD: Who’s that?
WOLF: Ted Miller is his name. He does not … his family … his father had a liquor store here …
ROSENFELD: Here on the Hill?
WOLF: No, in Anacostia. They lived in Anacostia for a short while, and then they moved to upper 16th Street which Ted told me, at that time, that Jewish families had just started moving up there, and this was in the 40s. Because not only was there segregation residentially on the basis of race, there was also segregation here on the basis of ethnicity and religious background. For example, the Miller Company, which was a very prominent developer of Spring Valley and other upscale neighborhoods, both in Northwest Washington and in nearby Maryland, discriminated against Jews, for example, in selling their property, as well as blacks. There was a case that originated here in Washington, a 1948 or ’49 case, involving these restrictive covenants, which were found unconstitutional. But the Miller Company, for example, (laughs) you know, this sort of tickled my fancy, tried to participate in Southwest urban renewal as one of the developers, and they were prohibited from doing that, because of their past discriminatory practices. Although HUD [Housing and Urban Development] itself in the 50s was not a bastion of non-discrimination, because public housing was not desegregated here until the late 50s and early 60s. I mean, when I did—was involved in redoing the old Ellen Wilson public housing project, we delved into the background of it, and it had been originally … this was a New Deal project when it was built in 1939, it was segregated.
ROSENFELD: Who, segregated which way?
WOLF: It was white, it was white, working-class white.
ROSENFELD: In your first years here, I wonder about the businesses in the area—where did you shop, what was the …
WOLF: Well, there was a Safeway, of course, across from Eastern Market.
ROSENFELD: On Seventh Street [SE].
WOLF: On Seventh Street. There were little Safeways all over the neighborhood.
ROSENFELD: Safeways, or neighborhood groceries?
WOLF: There were Safeways. There were some few neighborhood groceries, I think. What’s that grocery I wouldn’t, I really don’t shop at on Pennsylvania Avenue in the 300 block, I forget.
ROSENFELD: Roland’s?
WOLF: I call it “Roland’s Ripoff”. (both laugh) There were these corner groceries, which I occasionally go into on an emergency basis, all over the neighborhood. But we would shop at the Safeways … where else did we shop?
ROSENFELD: Did you have to go off the Hill to buy clothes, and stuff like that?
WOLF: Sure.
ROSENFELD: I mean, I remember there was a dime store at the corner of Seventh and Pennsylvania. When that closed you couldn’t buy a needle or thread anywhere.
WOLF: Well, there was a Kresge’s Five and Ten, and I remember we bought some things for our kids there, you know, buy notions and stuff. I think they even had a lunch counter there, an old-fashioned lunch counter. Yeah, that closed. If you went shopping, you could go to Woodie’s downtown, or Garfinkel’s.
ROSENFELD: Did you drive everywhere when you did that, or was there public transportation?
WOLF: Take a bus. We could drive. The subway didn’t come in until the 70s, so you either had to bus or drive.
ROSENFELD: Would you say it was more of a walking neighborhood then?
WOLF: I would say it is more of a walking neighborhood now than it was then, although when I went to work at the space agency I could walk to work and often did from here.
ROSENFELD: Where was it located?
WOLF: The space agency; originally it was on Fourth and Maryland Avenue SW. Originally, when I went to work for it, it was on Jackson Place. We had to move; it was Jackson Place—Dolly Madison House. It was really a pretty interesting situation. I remember, we were very close to the White House. I can remember—a wonderful spring day—it was after the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, so it must have been in 1961, and I was working at the Commission and it was a beautiful spring day, and there was some visiting dignitary, maybe it was the French president or something, came, and they had this wonderful parade, not parade, but …
ROSENFELD: Ceremony?
WOLF: Limos coming down in front of the White House—you know, Washington is beautiful in the spring. It was just a gorgeous day, and of course, the Kennedys were just the absolutely—after the dull days of the Eisenhower administration, they were these bright lights and beautiful people, and all the rest of it, and I was young. You want to talk about springtime; that was really “springtime in America”, as far as I was concerned.
ROSENFELD: Well, how was that reflected in this neighborhood? Were there a lot of people who had come to Washington because of the new era, and they were young and full of …?
WOLF: Yes, yeah, full of ideas and energy, and so forth. I think, I suppose some who are older than I am would reflect on the New Deal as being like that for them. I would say that the Kennedy administration was like that for me. Mimi was working at Children’s Hospital at 13th and V—the old Children’s Hospital, which was in its way a kind of a wonderful place, too. Albeit from a standpoint of the facilities, the new hospital is a big step up, but the old hospital was built in such a way that the staff all knew one another, because it was small. The departments were not as segregated as they were. She really liked that, because she’s a people person, really, and she liked that interaction both with the patients and with the staff. It’s now somewhat more sterile.
ROSENFELD: It’s huge, yeah. Were you in Washington when Kennedy was assassinated?
WOLF: Yeah. It was just a terrible time here. Things went downhill, because the Johnson administration got itself embroiled in the Vietnam War, and the environment here got to be dominated by the anti-war protests, and by the … a great pall was hanging over Washington (laughs) if I could say that after the Kennedys and all the bright sunshine as they described it, you came into the Johnson era …
ROSENFELD: Was that reflected in the neighborhood?
WOLF: Yes, it was. In my opinion it was.
ROSENFELD: How?
WOLF: There were a lot of people who lived here, who were embroiled in the anti-war movement … this neighborhood …
ROSENFELD: Why was this more in the anti-war movement neighborhood, as opposed to a fighting-the-war neighborhood, a pro-war neighborhood?
WOLF: It’s the nature of the people up here. It was a very, very liberal group of people, very pro civil rights, very … it had other aspects to it, I mean, this was the 60s. (laughs) Sort of liberation. It was an interesting conglomeration of newcomers in the sense that there were a lot of people involved in social welfare programs, poverty programs, civil rights programs, and at the same time, (and also involved in their own personal workings-out of their personal problems). I mean, we were not involved in that. Young families like us who were simply trying to make our way with young kids. I think a lot of that sort of what I would call a personal working out of issues revolved around the churches to a certain extent. We weren’t members of those organizations. So it really didn’t touch us, but I would say both St. Mark’s and—the other Episcopal church. What’s its name?
ROSENFELD: St. James’?
WOLF: No, the one over here on G Street SE.
ROSENFELD: Oh, Christ Church.
WOLF: Christ Church—were centers of sort of both social action and social interaction (laughs). When we came here, for example, Bill Baxter, who was the rector at St. Mark’s was really… St. Mark’s was being operated as a crash pad! Coffeehouse! It was in bad shape; in fact, all the old-timey white churches up here were in bad shape.
ROSENFELD: You mean physically in bad shape?
WOLF: Well, in terms of congregational change. The Presbyterian Church, all these churches, were in difficulty. I would say, maybe St. Peter’s wasn’t. I’m not quite sure why that was. St. Joe’s was basically not operating as a church. I mean, it may have been maintained by the diocese. These sorts of community organizations were in great flux. The old-time residents and parishioners had left or [were] dying out, and you had these newcomers coming in and their view about religious organizations was a lot different than the old …
ROSENFELD: You mean they saw it more as social action agencies and the church should get involved?
WOLF: I think so. Capitol Hill was never Georgetown in any respect. Because I’ve known a lot of Georgetowners. I’ve known a lot in connection with the things I’ve been involved with.
ROSENFELD: How would you describe the difference between Capitol Hill and Georgetown?
WOLF: Georgetown was basically much more of an elite place which attracted people with money and connections, having the grand salons, and dinner parties where the elite meet to eat. Georgetown had … it was never a bastion of Republicanism. It was a bastion of either old Washington money, which played whatever party was in power, or it was the Democrats. You know, it was sort of the idea that they’d come to town in the New Deal to do good, and they did well, in the law firms and so forth. Capitol Hill … the newcomers were, in their own way, were very much like the people who had preceded them; they were government workers. That’s changed a lot in the last few years, and of course, housing was relatively cheap here. There was a fair amount of turnover because as families developed here, they didn’t see the schools as being acceptable, so they moved out to the ’burbs. People, rather than moving to Northwest, although some did, they basically moved out to Maryland or Virginia.
ROSENFELD: And did you come to a point where you thought about that?
WOLF: Sure.
ROSENFELD: What made you decide to stay?
WOLF: Stubbornness (laughs). It was so easy to go to work for both of us, and it was primarily, me getting involved in civic activities up here. And basically, saving the fabric of the city. I never came here with any idea in mind of that.
ROSENFELD: What were you first, after the Montessori school, which is always a good training ground—what was the first thing that you joined, got involved in?
WOLF: I joined the Restoration Society because it was the only group on the Hill that seemed to be interested in things like liquor licenses, that sort of thing, and what the Hill was going to look like. That was partly what attracted me. The first thing I got involved with was over on 10th Street. It’s almost right through the alley; you can see the house. It’s a house now. It’s called the Organ Factory. There was a guy named Sid Yudain who was the founder of Roll Call. Capitol Hill real estate guy, I think his name is Bill Richards, who bought this place. I think they ran out of money or something, and they wanted to convert it to what amounted to a bar! In the middle of a residential neighborhood. They were going for what was called—you could have a club here, and you still can as a matter of right. You could serve liquor in a club, but you need—you had what was called a Class B license. They wanted a Class C license, which meant that somebody could walk up to the bar and pay for a drink. That was different from a Class B license, a club license. So we had a neighborhood battle over that, and the guy who led it was Joe—I can’t remember his name—he lived right next door. [ed: Joe Stewart]
ROSENFELD: To the house?
WOLF: To the house. He was Bobby Baker’s assistant in the Senate, and later ended up as Secretary of the Senate. He owns some property around here. Anyway, some of us got interested in that. We had a case before the ABC Board,
ROSENFELD: There were no ANCs then.
WOLF: No, there was nothing. There were just some civic organizations here. There was something called the Capitol Hill Community Council, which was basically a debating society, so far as I could tell. They were Southeast Citizens, Civic, they were basically inept. The Restoration Society had some interest in these things. In effect they would appear. There was a guy named Curley Boswell; the Boswells are an old family up here. Curley was an antique dealer, interested in what he called preservation. It was a motley crew of people, I will tell you. We got involved; Larry Monaco and I got involved in it, and I think, with us and Peter Powers, we actually reformed it. We made it a modern organization in the sense that we were all lawyers. We all understood the application of administrative procedure; we understood how the mechanisms of government worked, and so we were able in these various zoning cases, ABC cases, and what have you, to work the system. This was before CHAMPS or anybody was here. In fact, the Restoration Society, some of us pushing it, put out three business directories in the 70s because of the need to underscore the fact that that 1) were businesses up here, and 2) that there were residents who wanted to encourage businesses to locate here.
ROSENFELD: Do you still have a copy of any of those?
WOLF: Our archives; we have a pretty good archives.
ROSENFELD: At the Restoration archives.
WOLF: Yeah. Which is over at GW [ed: George Washington University Gelman Library].
ROSENFELD: Let me ask you something. When you brought these actions to stop the bar on 10th Street going through the ABC board, did you have to demonstrate in any way neighborhood backing? How was that done? Did you have to take a petition?
WOLF: We got neighbors. We got petitions, we got neighbors together. We had a—you want to talk about how integrated the neighborhood was, there was a woman on the other side of the Organ Factory, a black lady by the name of Mrs. McCloud, I’ll never forget this. A church-going lady, probably in her 70s at the time. We had her as a witness. She came up in white gloves and everything, and she was a great witness. (laughs). She didn’t want [it] next door to her.
ROSENFELD: Now when you call it the Organ Factory, had it in fact been … a place where organs were …
WOLF: Yes. The Hill was filled with what we would call, what I would call these alley businesses.
ROSENFELD: Do you remember any others, besides organs?
WOLF: Well, until into the early 80s, in the 200 block of, between, I would say, 11th and 10th Streets, there’s an alley. There was an alley business that made Formica cabinets. There were some car repair places.
ROSENFELD: Well, there still are.
WOLF: There still are.
ROSENFELD: Thank heavens!
WOLF: Yeah. Well, we’re fortunate in the sense that we’ve retained some businesses that are very useful for supporting, you know, the needs of the neighborhood. We’ve been very careful about that. For example, when Larry Monaco and I got the non-conforming use regulation changed, not to eliminate non-conforming uses, but to permit where these old grocery stores were going out of business, to permit neighborhood-serving uses to continue. In other words, we were not interested in having law firms or lobbying firms there, but we were interested in having the little groceries, or dry cleaners, and that sort of thing, so we were conscious of the fact that the neighborhood needed to have and retain those kinds of a variety of uses. So the Restoration Society has never been anti-business at all, but it’s been pro-business in the sense of the neighborhood-serving kinds of businesses.
ROSENFELD: For small businesses.
WOLF: Small businesses.
ROSENFELD: How did things change after the riots? And were you here?
WOLF: Oh, yeah. We were here. It was very scary, because … I came home … there was a colleague of mine at the General Counsel’s office at the space agency, who dropped me off at the corner of 11th and Independence that afternoon, when the riots had started. The air was filled with smoke and cinders. Mimi came home from—in her little Volkswagen—from Children’s Hospital at 13th and V. She had gone up the top of the building and saw fires, smoke coming out, and said, “I’m going home.” She barreled down 13th Street, just ahead of a bunch of kids rioting in the street. She said, “I didn’t stop for any stoplights or anything.” I said, “Yeah, you did the right thing.” (laughs) “Just keep going.” And so the police came by and said, “If you’re going to stay here, keep your bathtub filled with water, blankets nearby, so that in case you have fire, you can deal with that.” We had our bags packed in the front hallway. We did not get hit with a lot of burning up here. What we did get … up at the corner of 11th and East Capitol Street where Massachusetts Avenue comes in—there’s now a condominium—there was an apartment house with a ground floor that was a Peoples’ Drug Store. It had a soda fountain there; we used to take the kids there. We had the lady who helped take care of the kids would take them up there. That was looted. There was a High’s store, dairy store, across the street, which is now a house.
ROSENFELD: Across the street from here?
WOLF: Well, it’s diagonally down the street. That was looted. You’d see these kids running down the street carrying these five gallon containers …
END OF TAPE 1/SIDE 2
TAPE 2/SIDE 1
WOLF: I can understand that. Maybe they were just brazenly stupid, but the … I remember, we used to go out to Maryland to a dry cleaner we had used when we lived in Bladensburg. It was out in Hyattsville. He was really good, and I liked him because there was a Chinese laundry directly across the alley from where this guy … and he had a dry-cleaning plant inside as well; Mr. Carlson, and the Chinese laundry guy would do a shirt for 20 cents, and Carlson was doing it for 22 cents, and I said, “How come you’re two cents more?” And he said, “Cause I like a little meat with my rice.” (laughs) And I thought, well, that’s a pretty good answer, actually. He was the kind of guy, if something got torn in the laundry, something, he’d say, “How much did this shirt cost” or something. Give him a figure and he’d open up the cash register and just give me the money! So I went out there, and that Saturday morning, we drove out; there was a huge pillar of black smoke coming from the—there was an ice plant over near Uline Arena. Ice plants use ammonia. Somebody must have torched it. It looked like there was a war going on here with these pillars of fire. So we went out 295 and we got off 295 to go into Hyattsville; there was a turnoff. We got into PG County; there must have been seven patrol, PG County patrol cars lined up eyeballing everybody coming out of the District of Columbia. They were looking for trouble. If they had seen a car, I’m sure, full of black men, they would have stopped it, right then and there. And PG County …
ROSENFELD: They were white cops?
WOLF: They were white cops. PG County, you have to understand, was the Old South.
ROSENFELD: In those days, they were the cracker …
WOLF: PG County, because my wife used to run clinics when she was at Hopkins, down in, what’s the capitol, the PG County …
ROSENFELD: Upper Marlboro?
WOLF: Upper Marlboro. Well, you were in the South! They had tobacco farms down there, tenant farmers, and PG County for years, up until this day, is sort of the black hole of social welfare that’s outside of Baltimore city in Maryland. There were a lot of poor whites down there; it was a tough nut place.
ROSENFELD: Well did you think of, sort of leaving town for a while, or did you?
WOLF: No, we didn’t, but we were offered, were given—our suburban friends, you know [said] “You ought to come out here.” And I said “Golly, we’re not going to leave this house!” We had these children; I don’t know. I felt that somehow we could protect ourselves and the children and the house!
ROSENFELD: And in fact, you did.
WOLF: We did. It was pretty bizarre. After the High’s was looted, the National Guard—there was National Guard and policemen and actually an Army division had been called in here. They had other divisions, you know; there’s a bunch of Army bases around Washington. The Johnson administration brought in additional armed forces around here. This city was basically an armed camp. I remember, there was a car, olive-drab vehicle, must have been an Army vehicle, that came down the street. It had tape across the windows to keep—if bricks were thrown—to keep the windows together. And they stopped at the High’s store, which had been looted and was open. They threw in tear gas to keep people from going inside and torching the building, and they put some tape across the glass, which was still intact, and then raced off somewhere else. Baseball—it was right near the opening of baseball season out at RFK (It wasn’t called RFK at that time.)
ROSENFELD: Griffith.
WOLF: No it wasn’t Griffith. Griffith Stadium was long gone. This was the new DC Stadium. The day of the opening of the baseball season, there was, either National Guardsmen or a soldier on every corner on Independence Avenue, probably on Constitution Avenue too, but I know on Independence Avenue … standing there with a gun. All summer long, of course, we had military around here. Of course, on the Capitol grounds they’d set up—I think the Marines had established a perimeter down there with sandbags and machine guns and so forth on the east side of the Capitol. So that was actually one of the arguments we made when we were dealing with the Architect of the Capitol over the Master Planning for the Capitol. You’ll find it ensconced in the Master Plan, the existing Master Plan, where we convinced them, and convinced the planners that they’d hired, McCargen and Associates, that it was having a healthy residential community in Capitol Hill, right adjacent to the Capitol of the United States, was worth at least a regiment of Marines. That would provide …
ROSENFELD: What context—was this about the Marine Barracks on Eighth Street?
WOLF: No. Here was the Capitol of the United States. This was before planes—there were planes trying to crash into the Capitol after 9/11. This was before, when the Capitol was exposed; I suppose they felt it was exposed to possible rioting.
ROSENFELD: You had to call them up and say …
WOLF: No. This occurred as we got into discussions. We had a number of iterative problems with the Congress of the United States, over expansion of the Capitol into Capitol Hill.
ROSENFELD: And this is occurring at this same …
WOLF: No. I’m probably getting you out of sequence. After the riots, the Congress engaged in what I would call expansionary moves, and the big issue that came up was, the House of Representatives wanted to take the space now occupied by—is it the Madison Library, which is the newest library on Independence Avenue? Take that space and build another House office building, a fourth House office building, and move the Madison Building to the square occupied by St. Mark’s. This was in the very early 70s.
Well, the neighborhood went bonkers over that. The Restoration Society was a leader in opposing that. But, you know, the neighborhood was pretty galvanized. We got some very good newspaper stories in the New York Times. I forget the guy; he’s still around. He lived on New Jersey Avenue at that time, who wrote a number of very good stories in the Times about that, so we had the national press involved in this issue of the expansion of the Capitol. Of course, it was also a time when there were questions being raised about the ever growing expansiveness of staff and so forth. Frank Keenan, as a staffer over there, was involved in staffing up to look at this issue and came up with a very favorable report saying, maybe the Congress ought to look elsewhere for … maybe it ought not expand in landbank as much as it did. Because, so, the story is that I got, a neighbor who was a graduate of the University of Oklahoma, was in Carl Albert’s class at the University of Oklahoma. Carl Albert was president of the student body and a Rhodes Scholar, Speaker of the House, and she was the editor of the student newspaper. She knew the Albert family; they’d continued that relationship, and so we got her to make calls to the Albert kids; children and family. I would say that we defeated the Speaker of the House over this issue.
ROSENFELD: He didn’t live in the neighborhood?
WOLF: No, he did not. There was a speaker, a Republican, maybe the Minority Leader, from Illinois, who lived up here, may still live up here.
ROSENFELD: Bob Michael.
WOLF: Bob Michael. He’s a pretty nice guy.
ROSENFELD: Yeah, that was more modern [times]. So that was the key, was getting Carl Albert.
WOLF: Later; that stimulated a decision on the part of the Architect of the Capitol, George White at that time, to go through a Master Planning effort. That’s when we convinced them; look, if you’re going to expand, go north and south. For example, there’s a garage area next, going south, that has actually been built to accommodate another building. They also took an FDA building in the Southwest; they call it the Ford Office Building, which is basically where staffers are located. [ed: what is now the Ford Building was an FBI Building—called the Idents Building. The FBI vacated the building, probably after the Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue NW was completed. The FDA building, officially FOB #8, 200 C Street SW, was across D Street from the Ford Building. It was occupied by FDA from its completion approximately 1965–2000.]
It was not far from where I worked. Most of my civic activity has been involved, as you know, with the Restoration Society. I was president from 1977 to, for three years. Now I’m president again (laughs) in my dotage. The whole purpose, as I see it, of CHRS, has been to preserve the physical integrity of the Hill, and the idea behind it was—some people differ on this—they just like the architectural aspect of it. My take on it is, it’s preserved and created the opportunity for a community to exist and develop up here. And particularly for families. There is no family housing being built in Washington any more. I have served on a number of boards and commissions dealing with planning in this city. I told somebody last night; I was at another one of these “what do you think” sort of sessions. Everybody knows what I think. [Rosenfeld laughs] And I said, “I have never met one planning director in this city, in the 25 years or more of Home Rule, that has ever, ever said anything about the importance of neighborhoods and communities! And children, and families. And I said, “It continues to this very day; is something missing from your brain?” And I said, “How can you restore; spend billions of dollars restoring the schools and not pay any attention to where the children are going to come from to be in those schools?” Because the numbers—I know the numbers—the numbers of families in this city are shrinking. And have been shrinking for years. And it’s reflected in the school population, because when we came, moved to this city, the school population was something like, between 120,000 and 130,000. It’s now down, even with charter schools being built into the numbers, to maybe a little over 60,000.
ROSENFELD: Let me ask you—how did the work or activity of the Restoration Society change with Home Rule?
WOLF: I don’t think it changed all that much. The planning for the city was done through the National Capitol Planning Commission. Over the years, the National Capitol Planning Commission has changed a lot. They made a lot of mistakes, this elitist group who supposedly carried with them the notions of the “City Beautiful” movement, and all that. They became enamored with urban renewal and highways. They’re the reason we had urban renewal and why we had the highway system. They also instituted the subway system. It was a very “top down” sort of planning operation. Basically, it got, I think … I think it lost its way because it got enamored with post World War II notions of the way cities ought to be. When I was in New Haven, that’s the way it was. New Haven underwent an urban renewal. I cannot tell you how many times New Haven has gone through urban renewal. Finally, I heard Scully, Vincent Scully, who was the great architectural—say they discovered Historic Preservation for the city of New Haven! Duh! The failures in New Haven—that’s one of the things that really stuck in my mind. That was a city that frankly, aside from Yale, did not have many assets. Whereas Washington, DC, has a lot of assets.
ROSENFELD: So you didn’t want to see that happen here?
WOLF: Well, I could see what was happening in Southwest, even though, in retrospect, if you look at what’s being planned for the Southwest, the Andy Altman Anacostia Waterfront Initiative. It’s, in my opinion, less community minded, more intense, less in the way of good buildings designed by good architects. Now you may not like, and I certainly don’t like, some of the architecture down there, but they had some of the world’s best architects working down there.
ROSENFELD: Down where?
WOLF: In Southwest, for the urban renewal. And if you go to Harbor Square, where many Hill people have moved, you will find very spacious and attractive apartments, condos. You will not find those things being built in the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative. It’s all condos. You will find most of what’s being built today in Washington, is condos, and small ones.
ROSENFELD: What’s wrong with that?
WOLF: Because it doesn’t accommodate a variety of people. All it accommodates are “empty nesters” and singles. Period. Sports and entertainment. This city does not have a really good way of looking at things. I’ve had many, many arguments, and this goes all the way from our planning directors to Brookings. Brookings people are some of the worst thinkers about the fate of Washington, DC.
ROSENFELD: The Brookings Institution?
WOLF: Yes. They have a whole section that’s headed up by this woman who is an economist. She was the last chair of the … what is that group that took over Washington when it went broke?
ROSENFELD: Oh, yes. The something Commission. Alice Rivlin.
WOLF: Alice Rivlin. I know Alice Rivlin from Georgetown Day School. Her—one of her kids, Doug Rivlin, was kind of a boyfriend of my younger daughter’s. She’s [Alice is] totally clueless. She knows something about economics. She does not know anything about how cities develop and neighborhoods develop. And she admitted that. They have these people … basically they talk about housing for … they now talk about inclusionary housing, they talk about workforce housing. I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, frankly. I’ve seen some of the studies that have been done. Basically, they use various land-use devices to try to encourage that. Well, I did, along with David Perry, start the renewal of the old Ellen Wilson [Housing] and the first Hope VI in DC.
ROSENFELD: I’m sorry. The first what six?
WOLF: Hope VI. Hope VI was a response, by the Congress, to the failures of traditional public housing. Now, why did they fail? Traditional public housing actually was a big success during the 30s and 40s and even 50s. It failed miserably as the population mix changed and drugs got going, and then the ultimate failure of public housing in the United States occurred when the Reagan administration made what I call a Faustian pact with the advocates for the poorest of the poor, the ACORNs [Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now] of this world, and they said, “Public housing will only be available to the poorest of the poor.” Working class people were driven out by the problems, the overwhelming problems that were brought in to public housing, by the poorest of the poor.
ROSENFELD: So Ellen Wilson, I remember when it was that sort of barracks.
WOLF: It was a dump. It was so bad, and the Housing Authority here was so bad—it was called DPOD at that time. Now it’s called the Housing Authority. It had been literally empty for ten years when we finally got a hold of it as a last resort. We had these itinerant directors of our Housing Authority. Finally it went into what’s called receivership at HUD. It had been remodeled a couple of times, had been stripped down by vandals. It was just a mess, just a total mess. We decided we had to do something … it was a terrible … neighborhood menace—
ROSENFELD: When you say ‘we’, you mean Restoration Society?
WOLF: No, it was me, not the Restoration Society. The Restoration Society was helpful. Most people in the Restoration Society board at that time, as well as most people on Capitol Hill thought we were just going to recreate the mess all over again, and “what do you guys know about anything?” Well, we didn’t know anything. But, like a lot of people on the Hill, we’re resourceful. You know, we may not know anything about what we’re doing, but we’ll find out. [After all, I] went to Yale Law School. This was a place where you reinvent yourself every day supposedly. Some ways are not so good [laughs] and some are OK. You can tell Duncan [husband of interviewer] that my first day at Yale Law School, we were welcomed by Harry Schulman, who is the Dean. He’s sort of a grim-looking dark, had a very dark personality. He was a labor law professor. He’d achieved fame as the permanent media arbitrator between the UAW [United Automobile Workers] and the Ford Company, at a time when that was—when the labor unions were extremely powerful. The Ford Company was a powerhouse itself. So, he welcomed us in this way. He said, “Yale Law School is the intellectual oasis on the Yale campus.” He said, “But the behavior of the law students” … (because we had no rules or regulations—nothing! —women were around, girls were around all over the place, at all hours of the day and night—a new phenomena for me, coming from the University of Michigan). He said “The reputation of the law school in terms of the behavior of people, stinks.” What? [laughs] I was 21 years old at the time … but I knew—
ROSENFELD: To get back to Ellen Wilson, you—
WOLF: When we got to Ellen Wilson, David Perry, who is a very smart guy—he was formerly the number two person at the Federal City Council, and he actually has a background in planning…
ROSENFELD: Where does he live?
WOLF: He lives on E Street Northeast. I knew he and his wife very well. They’re now divorced—Sarah Campbell. Both very smart cookies. He said, “Let’s do something.” I think David had more of a social welfare outlook on this. I just saw it as a terrible blight.
ROSENFELD: An eyesore.
WOLF: Well, it was blighting in many ways. It was a menace. We went out—we found out all we could. The first thing we did was to hire Amy Weinstein. We paid for, out of our own pocket, to do some things, and Amy took a very modest stipend to come up with some ideas. We organized a group of people, including some former residents there, and made a CDC out of it—the Ellen Wilson CDC—we did whatever we could, by hook or by crook, we got …
ROSENFELD: Can you tell me what CDC stands for?
WOLF: Community Development Corporation. It’s very common here. Most of them are abject failures. It comes out of the various actions that were taken by the government in the 60s to create, to try to deal with urban decay. There have been many CDCs in DC.
ROSENFELD: So they enable you to be … an entity that can contract …
WOLF: They enabled us to be an entity that could receive grants and federal money and so forth. I don’t want to go into a long recitation about this, but we were—we hired the right architect, we found a developer who knew what she was doing, and got into the development of this thing. We had to go through a competitive process, both locally and then nationally, to get this award. Our developer partner, Telesis, which is located in Georgetown… The woman who runs it, Marilyn Melkonian, is a very sharp cookie. During the Carter years, she was the [Assistant] Deputy Secretary for Public Housing at HUD in the Carter administration. I think Moon Landrieu was the Secretary at that time of HUD. He had been the mayor of New Orleans. Anyway. Yeah, he’s Mary Landrieu’s father [ed: U.S. Senator from Louisiana] (laughs). But anyway, we got the capital grant. It’s a very, very successful project.
END OF TAPE 2/SIDE 1
TAPE 2/SIDE 2
WOLF: I’ve found, living here to be a way for me to have, not only a satisfying social environment, and I wouldn’t call myself the most social person around. But I like dealing with people who are doing interesting things. It satisfied my predilections for being kind of entrepreneurial in my own way, in making things happen. I feel a lot of what we’ve done up here (and it’s been not a solo performance at all, there are lots and lots of people involved), sometimes you have to sell them on your ideas. It’s been a very satisfying way to live my life.
ROSENFELD: In these various projects that you’ve been involved with—and we can get more specific about that in a minute—what is your usual role? Are you the researcher, are you the person who calls the meetings?
WOLF: [You] do it all. There’s no staff. You do it all. You figure out what you need to do. You do your own research, you testify before City Council, or you get yourself on various boards and commissions, help write reports. It’s a do-it-yourself enterprise, and I’ve always felt that if you didn’t do it yourself, how could you talk meaningfully about anything? So I have a fairly skeptical and cynical view about people who talk about things they haven’t done. So that’s why, in a sense, I take on some of the people at Brookings, or some of the people who are formulating policy downtown, and say, “What have you done? Tell me how you know these things work? I can tell you, I know.”
ROSENFELD: Aside from Ellen Wilson, what would you say are the most satisfying projects you’ve been involved in?
WOLF: Well, all the zoning cases we had, but beyond that, we created Historic Preservation in this city. Capitol Hill was a prime mover in that. CHRS was a prime mover, but I’ve been a member of other organizations in the city that have moved on that score. First of all, I was a trustee when I was pretty young at the Committee of 100 on the Federal City, which is the old-line planning organization that was actually founded by FDR’s uncle, Uncle Delano, back in the early 20s, and they were really a precursor to the American Planning Association. Washington was laid out, not only by L’Enfant, but it was created, in many respects, by a bunch of Eastern elitists. People who were involved … This was the capital of the United States, so it had a certain cachet, where people of varying social prominence, but interested in how this city would be as the capital of the United States would look, with its parks and other things. There had been many notable people involved in this city, in laying it out and creating an environment which is attractive and appeals to me! During the New Deal, Fred Delano, FDR’s uncle, would call him up and say, “Franklin, I want this, or I want that.” That’s the way things were done! It was done that way; that has all come to an end, which is maybe proper. It probably is proper that people should have, at a lower, more democratic level, a way of exercising their thoughts about it, and that’s what I’ve done. I don’t have access to FDR or Lyndon Johnson or George Bush or anybody! And I certainly don’t have much access to especially the black politicians who took over this city after Home Rule.
ROSENFELD: Marion Barry?
WOLF: Marion Barry. We had to dig, by going to the streets in connection with the Freeway issue, which carried on after Peter Glickert killed this freeway in front of our house. But there was the Three Sisters Bridge, the North-Central Freeway, and so forth. I was involved in that—through the Committee of 100. Dealing with the Architect of the Capitol, dealing with creating Historic Preservation out of what was Don’t Tear It Down.
It really started somewhat on the Hill here with the Mary’s Blue Room situation. All of us were out there pushing baby carriages and walking our kids around the block in connection with that. I think there was a lot of foresight involved that you could see coming down the pike. That there were all sorts of bad things that could happen. We were in an historic district without there being any teeth in it until we got a local statute enacted. That local statute was enacted in 1978. The key vote was Marion Barry’s vote. He was running for mayor against much better, formidable opponents—Walter Washington and Sterling Tucker. He was the key vote on the Council, getting it through.
ROSENFELD: Who lobbied him?
WOLF: We all did. He was an at-large member. He was not representing a ward at that time. He was a very political, ambitious guy. Marion Barry would say or do anything to get to where he wanted to get!
ROSENFELD: So was it presented as “Ward 6 wants this”?
WOLF: Not Ward 6. There were groups throughout the city, and he wanted the white vote.
ROSENFELD: So it was perceived as a white issue.
WOLF: You always perceived it as a white issue. Later on, when he tried to do it in by burying it—I remember asking one of his city administrators, Tom Downs, I said “Tom, why is this thing so badly handled? Is it because Marion just thinks of it’s a white thing?” He said “Yeah.” (laughs)
ROSENFELD: It certainly has become part of the fabric of the city now.
WOLF: Yeah.
ROSENFELD: And certainly of Capitol Hill.
WOLF: Well, it’s been the most important planning tool to preserve the inner city row-house neighborhoods, and that’s all over the city. But we were the first ones, we were the first historic district after Georgetown, and we’re much larger than Georgetown. Georgetown was established by Act of Congress in 1952.
ROSENFELD: And we were 1978.
WOLF: No, we were 1975 or ’76, but we had no teeth until we got a local preservation law which was very—I mean it’s the best law in the country. It was drafted up by David Bonderman, who was the counsel at that time to Don’t Tear It Down, which later became the present DCPL and later became much more … It lost its edge, and I wasn’t a member of DCPL for a long time, because I felt they were just simply too cooperative with developers, and probably still are, but it’s kind of come back a little bit.
ROSENFELD: What does that stand for? DC Preservation League?
WOLF: DC Preservation League. Kind of an innoc[uous] … Don’t you think it’s lost its edge from Don’t Tear It Down to DCPL? Anyway, so I knew all the people who started it. The first thing they did was to preserve the Old Post Office, and the Willard Hotel. Those were the two things.
ROSENFELD: When you moved here in the early 60s, did you think that—well, first of all, I guess you didn’t think you’d be here in 2007. But that it would have become a neighborhood of multi-million dollar houses, multi-million dollar strollers being pushed around (laughs).
WOLF: Never. I was talking to Ray Gooch the other night. I don’t know whether you remember Ray, but he was a lawyer. He’d worked in the Congress for the Small Business Committee; then he and another guy established a law firm, Gooch and … Davis and Gooch, and then they went downtown for a while. Ray was talking to me the other night about the fact that “I never thought I’d ever see these million dollar houses.” And they’re fairly common. They’re not one-of-a-kind.
No, I never … who’s to know how things are? But the fact is that through people having a perception of what’s important, and how they want their neighborhood to be, have built a neighborhood of great, not prominence, they’ve created a neighborhood that people want to be in. Now, is that because it’s of the architecture? No. It isn’t. Most of the houses are fairly modest up here. It’s because there’s a spirit of community.
The whole thing with the Eastern Market. I remember when it was saved. You know Larry Hodgson, don’t you? His father Jim was president of the Restoration Society in the early 60s. He [Jim] was very active in saving Eastern Market. Later on we did a few things to try to gussie it up. The city had this thing, and they considered it basically a white elephant. They didn’t want it, they didn’t pay any attention to it. I was on the first Eastern Market Commission. There was a lot of dissension over the way in which it should be refurbished. Finally it ended up—I think properly so, although I wasn’t with it the first time around, they’d pretty much leave it alone, and just keep it, but the place was dirty, has been a fire hazard for years. It had all kinds of problems in it, and I won’t go through the manifold problems, but Sharon Ambrose really did the community a huge service in enacting, getting the Eastern Market legislation enacted in establishing this EMCAC group, the Eastern Market [Community] Advisory Committee, which has developed a sense of its own self and really has gotten its teeth into this thing. Brian Furness, who had been president of CHRS, a foreign service officer, (is now retired and they moved to New Orleans). He was very closely working with Sharon on that. There are many things that happened that I have not been a part of.
The most significant thing that happened to Eastern Market, two … three. It was saved. Then the Eastern Market legislation, and the third thing was the fire, which in my opinion was kind of a blessing, because what it did was to focus the community’s attention. Everybody got “Ooh, we can’t let this thing go!” And finally the EMCAC really got its teeth into the refurbishment and what’s going to come out of it is all the things that needed to be corrected, that really wouldn’t have been handled very well with the merchants in there, are now going to be handled much, much better. It will come out being safe, sanitary—people will like it much better, the merchants will like it much better. In all respects, it’s going to be—retain the essential ingredients of being the old market that it was, but updated in various significant ways, of course, that you won’t even see when you’re in there. That’s all happened. The city would never spend that kind of money. These people are enamored with baseball parks and other crap! I can’t believe it. I can’t believe how limited, what limited vision most of our politicians have. I give Sharon a lot of credit. I didn’t agree with her on a number of things she backed; she knew it, so she wouldn’t let me near any of these things. She did an amazing job for the Hill after we had, what’s his name, the guy who finally ran [for City Council] At Large, Harold Brazil. I can’t tell you the number of things that Sharon helped prevent or to encourage, that have benefited Capitol Hill.
ROSENFELD: How has the ANC [Advisory Neighborhood Commission] process helped or not?
WOLF: It’s been very uneven. First of all, the ANCs have varied in how aggressive they will be in what they will do. Don’t forget, we have two major ANCs on the Hill, 6A and 6B. Right now I would say that 6A is a more impressive operation, more involved in their neighborhood, and more assertive about preserving and protecting neighborhood interests than 6B is. That was not always the case.
ROSENFELD: In terms of battles won, since Home Rule…
WOLF: I don’t think the ANCs … The ANCs have never played a role like us. You will never, hardly ever see our Hill ANCs being represented at a hearing, being represented on a board or commission. Basically, they don’t spend any money on things that the Restoration Society spends a lot of money each year on various initiatives. We now have an initiative, for example, which is going to be coming out shortly, involving traffic issues and the Eleventh Street Bridge initiative of the DC government, which we think has gone off the tracks. We have a contract with a transportation consulting firm in Vermont to give us a professional opinion about this. We have … it’s our initiative for the Eastern, along with CHAMPS, our initiative with respect to the Eastern Market Metro plaza. Now we’re having a new look at it. I would say that, I think it was our initiatives, through Brian Furness and Nancy Metzger, that resulted in the pretty good development over at the old Bryan School. It took a lot of working with the developer to achieve what was achieved over there. And later on, Brian worked very hard in connection with some of the bad public housing problems over—they were outside the historic district near the Safeway—I forget what it’s called over there. There’s some new—they tore down some old public housing and made some mixed income housing. Brian was primarily responsible for that happening. You never see or hear of an ANC taking those kinds of initiatives. We put on programs, we try to put on programs that will be of interest to the community through the Preservation Cafes. We had two programs this year, one with Michelle Rhee [DC public school Chancellor] over at Maury Elementary, and the other with [DC Police] Chief, she’s now a Chief, Grooms, just last week, about the crime situation, which basically, has almost gotten out of control. Now we have a better crime situation up here than we’ve had, but we’ve had a lot—we had a big step-up in crime!
ROSENFELD: That reminds me of something I wanted to go back to. You were talking about the Highs [dairy chain] being looted. Did it ever reopen?
WOLF: No.
ROSENFELD: Never did?
WOLF: People’s [pharmacy chain] closed too.
ROSENFELD: So those two important neighborhood places were gone forever.
WOLF: The riots had the effect, on the Hill, and all over the city, downtown, of really causing marginal businesses to just shut their doors and go out.
ROSENFELD: Although those two were chains, but they probably had …
WOLF: Along H Street, [the riots] just destroyed H Street [Northeast]. For years and years and years and years, and it’s only just now getting some traction. But, you know, the Barracks Row Main Street program; that was an initiative that came out of people here in this community. The CHRS played no role in that except with respect to supporting it when we were asked to write letters. Or in expanding the Historic District below the Freeway so that the original concept of Eighth St. going from—is an old-timey retail operation. It would go down from Pennsylvania Ave. all the way to M Street.
ROSENFELD: Going down to the water?
WOLF: I think that’s helped to insulate us from some of the worst excesses of what’s going on, on M Street. Just take a drive down there, and you will be appalled at what’s happening. I mean, at one time the AWI, the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative, at least in Southeast, was supposed to connect up Southeast once again with Capitol Hill. Well, in no fashion is anything that’s gone on down there, look like the rest of Capitol Hill. And they’ve done virtually no planning down there. The only planned part of what’s going on down there is in the Navy Yard, which has been transferred to private developers. The only reason why they have anything of any note in terms of architecture down there, and planning, is because it’s historic. It’s got to go through what’s called a “106” process. Our city government, basically, for the most part, is interested in development. At times, when the city was on its knees and could not get anybody to come in here and invest, of course they were giving away the store. And they keep giving away the store in my opinion. The essential ingredients of what a city is all about, in terms of making a city that’s attractive to residents—library, schools, parks, and so forth—have just been very low priority. I will give [DC Mayor] Fenty high marks for grabbing on to the schools issue. I mean, he’s basically blown up the school system, trying to remake it from the ground up, and I think most people who’ve looked at the schools in a realistic way think that that’s probably the way to go. But at the same time, as I’ve said, there’s no concept of neighborhoods and families being part of the matrix.
ROSENFELD: Before we close [both laugh], is there any neighborhood activity that you did when you were younger; father of younger children, that is no longer available, that you would wish was still here?
WOLF: It’s hard to say “I wish it were …” It was what it was when it happened. I mean, our kids were in Girl Scouts, if you can imagine that, because that’s something …
ROSENFELD: Oh, my daughter was a Girl Scout.
WOLF: That’s something that almost comes out of ancient history. Edee Hogan—the Hogans just moved to Southwest, but they had kids up here. They had Mrs. Michaelbust who was the scout leader.
ROSENFELD: Say that again?
WOLF: Michaelbust.
ROSENFELD: Spelled the way it sounds?
WOLF: Yeah. She was a funny lady. But we had this little tiny Girl Scout troop. It was so meager, and so localized, that you could almost—you could look back on it and you say, “It was just something that happened.”
ROSENFELD: Where did they meet?
WOLF: I don’t know. Where did we meet? People’s houses or something. I don’t remember. These days, everything—there’s so much money around—and everything is very organized, and very—you know, you have an executive director, you’re an executive director there. It wasn’t like that, so I suppose in the sense—you know, I’ve always said, all these people are spending $800,000 to a million dollars for a house—they come here and say “I paid all this money! I’m busy working and making all this money so I can afford to live here! I want these things done for me!” Well, that’s a different attitude than we had, because there’s nobody there to do anything for you. I sort of say to people, “Well, how do you think it all came to be? Did Peter Pan sprinkle fairy dust on here or something?” [It] just didn’t happen, if you don’t put your shoulder to the wheel, it’s not going to happen, it’s not going to be. I suppose—Bob Krughoff said to me the other day—we started talking about it; he said “Well, I guess we were all embattled.” I said, “Yeah, that’s right.” You get sort of partly paranoid, partly if you don’t do it for yourself, nobody else is going to do it for you—kind of thing. You do grow up. I mean, it’s kind of a maturation process. I have to tell you one other thing that I’m proud of. We instituted permit parking. That happened through Doug Schneider, who was the Director of DDOT in the [Mayor] Walter Washington administration. He was an iconoclastic guy; just a great public servant. I remember, we sat in this living room, with he and his little peripatetic group of people, and they said, “Look, we want to do this. We want to decriminalize minor traffic violations.” And that’s how they got this hearing examiner set up. “And we want to have—we’re thinking of permit parking.” Because I think—I forget where somebody had started it …
ROSENFELD: When you say “we” are you talking about the Restoration Society?
WOLF: Yeah, but who’s the Restoration Society? Just a bunch of people! OK? That’s another thing. There’s this notion of somehow, people putting on their bed sheets, like the Klan, and sitting down somewhere in a basement, and thinking about all this sort of mysterious, give a proper handshake kind of thing. That’s nonsense; it’s all just a bunch of people who get together, and say, “We have to form a club to have an organizational letterhead on our [stationery] and do these things and we have to make some money if we’re …”
ROSENFELD: To be a nonprofit.
WOLF: You have to do that. It’s just people, just people doing it.
ROSENFELD: So you’re talking to Doug Schneider …
WOLF: To Doug Schneider, and he wants to do this, and I say, “OK, Doug.” So we got a bill in the Council to do this. Well, the Corporation Counsel—now called the Attorney General’s Office—came down with a ruling that it was unconstitutional to do this.
END OF TAPE 2/SIDE 2
TAPE 3/SIDE 1
WOLF: … was starting the same thing. So we got a legal opinion from Covington and Burling saying it was constitutional to do this. So that over … we had the Corporation Counsel saying it, and Covington and Burling saying the opposite thing—guess whose opinion got weight? Anyway, so they went back, and this guy Lou Robbins, who wrote most of this stuff (he’s now dead) … Lou came back and said, “OK, you can do it under the Clean Air Act.” So we said, “Well, that’s not good enough because we want, legally speaking, the full nine yards of police power.” So the Georgetown—so it was enacted into law. And the Georgetown Business Association, and I think, [unintelligible] students’ group, sued in Superior Court. And so Doug called me and he said “ Dick, we got sued.” And I said, “Doug, you got your own lawyer there!” He said “I want a real lawyer” [laughs] So we went back to Bill Allen and Covington and Burling and said “Look, we got sued. We need legal counsel here.” He had a young associate to work on this, and we won the case in Superior Court, and they decided—the local losers decided, not to appeal. So Bill Allen came to us and said, “Look, my friend who is the County Attorney in Arlington County (that’s where Bill Allen lived) has a case in the Court of Appeals in Virginia involving this same issue. If you would be willing to be …” (we called ourselves the Parking Coalition, so we had a bunch of civic groups from around the city involved in it)—so Bill said, “If you would become an amicus here,” he said, “I have a friend, a former member of the firm who’s over at the Solicitor’s office in the Justice Department, and they might entertain us as being amicus. So my friend who is the County Attorney, would appeal an adverse opinion from the Virginia Supreme Court, which said it was a denial of equal protection.” Well, you know, the Virginia Supreme Court at that time, didn’t know equal protection … The first time they ever invoked equal protection argument, because equal protection was part of the Fourteenth Amendment, and of course Virginia was not interested in the Fourteenth Amendment!
ROSENFELD: What year was this?
WOLF: This was back in, probably 1978, ’79. Oh, it was while Walter Washington was [mayor]… probably in the mid-70s, late 70s. ’77. We said “OK, we’ll be amicus.” So we had paid out-of-court costs, I mean out of pocket costs to raise some money for that purpose. I think the whole thing cost us $15,000. But we didn’t pay any lawyers’ fees. They donated those. So we appeared as amicus. It was our brief that the court, the Supreme Court adopted. It’s called “Arlington County vs. somebody.” Within one year we got a Supreme Court decision, an eight to one decision, called Proccurium, which meant that was based on the submission of briefs, and not any oral argument, approving permit parking for the nation, basically! That grew out of Doug Schneider calling me and saying “We ought to have permit parking here” and this is what we did. It’s illustrative of the fact that if we had problems, we tried to solve them ourselves, and we were smart enough to know there are ways to do these things. People you know to help make the courts and the administrative agencies work for you! I think that … and we’re still trying to do that. You know, I’m getting tired; I’ve been doing this for over 40 years. [both laugh]
ROSENFELD: Well, on that note, we’ll end at this point.
END OF INTERVIEW on TAPE 3/SIDE 1
Ruth Ann Overbeck Capitol Hill History Project
Dick Wolf Interview, November 7, 2007

page 19

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