Across D.C., Mourning One Terrible Monday

Above: Photo of firefighters putting out a flare-up on Eastern Market's roof by Preston Keres/The Washington Post. Below right, photo of paintings rescued from the Georgetown public library's Peabody Room by Michel du Cille/The Washington Post.

AS VIEWED FROM TUNNICLIFF'S TAVERN last night, the scene on 7th Street SE was gloomy. Those on the sidewalk patio had a front-row seat for one of the concluding acts of a horrible Monday, which saw two landmark structures across town from each other go up in smoke.

Across from Tunnicliff's, bystanders watched as work crews started to erect fences around the burned out and still-smoking shell of Eastern Market, which had been in continuous operation from 1873 until Monday's early morning fire. When those fences will come down and the once-vibrant market will reopen, nobody knows for sure. One of the city's great public spaces, the heart of a neighborhood, is now off-limits.

If the fire at the iconic Capitol Hill structure wasn't shocking enough, Monday's second fire, an afternoon blaze, might be even more painful. As viewed from Free Ride's Arlington bureau, smoke billowed up from the roof of Georgetown's public library — home to irreplaceable artifacts, records, books, maps and paintings from the historic neighborhood's past.

By 6:30 p.m. Monday, the northwest corner of the library was still in flames, its roof largely collapsed in on the second floor. This writer joined the many bystanders who had come by after work to survey the destruction. It was as if we were witnessing a death in progress.

For those standing on R Street NW and Wisconsin Avenue, there was little that could be done except watch and capture the scene in photographs. One woman looked up at the ruined mess in worried disbelief, shaking her head slowly at various moments, her arms clutched against her chest, her eyes welling up. As firefighters sprayed down the roof from Truck 14's long ladder, a tired comrade on R Street sat down, looking out aimlessly while drinking a Gatorade. Firefighters are used to fighting fires. But not two three-alarm blazes in the span of 12 hours.

With the flames doused, city leaders now face a critical question: what's next? Fortunately, Eastern Market — pictured at left in a 1964 archival photo — has enjoyed considerable support from the neighborhood that surrounds it. It has been said repeatedly that the market is the "heart and soul" of Capitol Hill. After Monday's blaze, though, the last of D.C.'s original markets is cut off from its adoring patrons. Its vendors are homeless. Will the market go the way of the Northern Liberty Market, the Center Market, the O Street Market, the Municipal Fish Market?

This writer's family, which settled in Foggy Bottom during the Civil War and lived in the neighborhood until the 1970s, frequented Western Market at K and 20th streets NW for decades. But the market "slowly died out" in the years following World War II, this writer's 88-year-old great aunt told us this morning. The neighborhood changed, with office buildings and George Washington University edging out residents and ebbing the customer base for the market, which was similar to Eastern Market, but smaller. Today, most people don't even know there was a Western Market.

Will Eastern Market suffer the same fate? The immediate prediction from community and city leaders is an emphatic "no." They will not stand for Eastern Market to sit abandoned like the shell of the O Street Market. Planning has already begun on ways to provide a temporary home for Eastern Market's indoor and outdoor vendors.

Bringing back Eastern Market will be a test for the neighborhood and the city. As The Post's Philip Kennicott writes:

Rebuilding Eastern Market will be particularly difficult because it was a social space. It reeked of a century of sour milk and fish and fried food. The danger is that it will be closed so long that the vendors leave and the crowds dry up and with a new grocery store opening just down Pennsylvania Avenue, suburban habits of car shopping will supplant the local habit of walking home with too many bags cutting into the flesh of your fingers.

The temptation to ruin it will be strong. It could be cleaner, filled with new vendors, managed more corporately to supply a more predictable stream of yuppie foodstuffs. The test for the neighborhood, and for the city, will be to resist anything that changes the social character of the building as it was on any given Saturday afternoon. The challenge will be to rebuild where it was, as it was, and what it felt like.

Although Eastern Market could still retain the flavor of its storied history, the past won't get a second chance at the Georgetown library.

The Post's Michelle Boorstein writes of the library's precious historic holdings:

Although firefighters were able to extract about two dozen artifacts and spread plastic tarp over some sections inside the library, they still were unable yesterday evening to enter all parts of the building. The retrieved items will be turned over to restoration experts to see what can be saved.

Monday's fires left the city with losses both tangible and intangible: two historic buildings and a connection to the past through atmosphere and artifacts. And that's the kind of cost that can't be totaled up and sent to an insurance adjuster.

» "Eastern Market, Corner Store and Cornerstone" [WaPo]
» "Fire Claims Library, and Pieces of the Past" [WaPo]

Archival photo of Eastern Market by Wally McNamee/The Washington Post; photo of some of the rescued paintings from the Peabody Room by John Kelly/The Washington Post

Posted By Michael Grass at 12:44 PM on May 1, 2007 Tagged in Architecture , Eastern Market , Free Ride , Georgetown , News , Out & About , The District , Top Stories

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