This post is decades in the making. Since high school, I have been interested in a particular part of my childhood that neighbors discussed uneasily, or apologetically, if at all. The big park up the hill from my house in the comfortable DC neighborhood of Tenleytown—where parents ran their dogs, kids went to middle school, and Fugazi played their last show—had been a Black neighborhood.
Growing up, most people around me simply did not know. But among those who did know, they didn't seem to know much. I could ask the local history group, or read a study for a historic district, and consult some chapters in a self-published book. All of these depended on amateur research from the 1970s and 80s. In fact, high school students had done more work on the community than trained historians. By the time I graduated college, I had received a clear impression that serious people viewed this erasure as just another bad thing that had happened to Black people in the United States. At best, the clearance seemed destined to be an awkward passage in books about the delightful leafiness of our Nation's Capital.
I wasn't so sure. On the hills where I had only ever seen scrubby grass had stood rows of houses. The houses had been homes. The homes had been the settings for the lives and institutions that were as worthy as any to have their stories told. More fundamentally, there was no clarity over what had led to the community's destruction. Was it an obsolete village slipping into blight, as officials always said? Or was it a poor community trammeled by real estate developers? Who had really been calling the shots at the National Capital Planning Commission? But more than anything, I wanted people to know the name of this community:
The residents called their neighborhood Reno.
Rick Olmsted's Washington
The more I researched the community, the sense that there was a bigger story only grew. The ordinary struggles of Reno's residents seemed to intersect with some of the most important struggles in American history—and not just at the level of abstraction, but through government, institutions, and even individuals. This gut feeling became a certainty one Saturday morning in 2016, as I read meeting transcripts where planners discussed erasing the neighborhood in dry, condescending terms. The documents said that on a cold day in January 1928, a man named Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. drove out to Reno and decided which of Reno's homes should be seized by the Federal Government and cleared.