A Silent Reminder: The reincarnation of the Whitelaw
D.C.'s first luxury hotel for African Americans
finds new life
Reported and produced by Whitney Jones
The Whitelaw Hotel, built in 1919, is located in the cultural and economic epicenter of Washington's African American community. The U Street/Shaw neighborhood, home to the Whitelaw, predates even Harlem as a historic black hotspot. These days, the Whitelaw has found a new niche — as affordable rental housing. But it’s been quite a journey for the hotel.
A Community Gathering Place
The Whitelaw Hotel was built during the era of Jim Crow laws and segregation. The building was conceived by entrepreneur John Whitelaw Lewis and deigned by Isaiah T. Hatton.
Jim Dickerson works with Manna, the non-profit housing developer that's turned the Whitelaw into affordable apartments. He's learned a lot about the Whitelaw's history.
"They raised $325,000 in the black community," Dickerson said. "… It was black-designed, black-developed and black-owned and black-run.”
The hotel’s ballroom was a gathering place for the U Street/Shaw community. Dickerson says the interior was beautiful, with ornate white molding and a stained glass ceiling. Each glass image had a story behind it. Prominent African Americans like jazz musicians Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, educator and entrepreneur George Washington Carver and Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall all stayed at the Whitelaw Hotel.
Riots, Fires and Condemnation
With the end of legal segregation, however, the hotel’s patrons could now go to hotels once reserved only for white people. The Whitelaw lost business.
On April 4, 1968, with the announcement of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., massive riots erupted across the city. Former D.C. mayor Marion Barry was working for the Poor People’s Campaign preparing for Dr. King’s return to Washington when he heard the news.
“We obviously cried," Barry said. "We were grief-stricken by it, disappointed, angry, and we looked outside out a window ... after we got the news, and crowds were forming all up and down 14th Street."
D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray said it was a slap in the face. "The very idea of someone shooting Dr. King, who was a man of peace, someone who had done so much for so many," he said. "For someone to have done that was just incredible. It's perhaps one of the worst acts ever perpetrated on African Americans in this country and there have been many horrific things done."
U Street was one of the hardest-hit areas by the riots. More than seven hundred fires were set, nearly a thousand businesses were damaged and a dozen people were killed.
"In the days after, we surveyed the damage and saw how devastating and wide reaching this was," Gray said. "And frankly in the years after that you saw almost nothing being done to restore these areas. And for many of these areas it took twenty, thirty, forty years to actually begin to address some of what occurred during the riots.”
The Whitelaw survived the riots, but people with money emptied out the damaged city, leaving behind the poor and homeless, Barry said. The hotel declined rapidly during the following years and was condemned nearly a decade after the riots, with 351 different housing code violations.
Dickerson said the hotel, like the neighborhood around it, filled with prostitutes and drugs. The hotel caught fire three times. The third blaze in 1981 gutted the building, leaving behind the exterior walls and reducing the hotel to a shell. The city planned to tear it down, but some nearby residents who knew the building’s history fought back and won.
New Residents, New Niche
Dickerson said housing developer Manna was approached in 1990 to renovate the hotel.
"A lot of for-profits had tried to do it, and they couldn't because the neighborhood was depressed and it wasn't profitable," Dickerson said. "So as a nonprofit housing developer, Manna, we took this on and we re-developed it for a little over three million dollars.”
Experts recreated the molding and recovered the original stained glass, allowing Manna to turn the old hotel into affordable rental housing. The new Whitelaw is the first building in Washington to use low income and historic tax credits to finance its reconstruction. It also was one of the first places to be restored as part of the U Street Revitalization Project.
Dickerson said the Whitelaw’s success demonstrates that the neighborhood is coming back.
Frank Hicks is a tenant in the building now. He says he sometimes imagines some of the great musicians like Duke Ellington who came through the Whitelaw.
“If I sat on the bench that was in the yard ... I'm like hell, he might of sat here thinking of some songs or something," Hicks said. "A great one might have sat here, so hell, I'm sitting next to him.”
But despite the progress, Marion Barry said there is still a lot of work to do. He questions the revitalization project's value for longtime residents who can no longer afford to live in the up-and-coming area’s chic new condos and row houses.
"We have people who have lost all hope that something can happen to them," Barry said. "You have 2,500 people a year who return back from prison without any money or any place to stay and so the conditions are not greatly changed.”
The Whitelaw's been there through it all, as a witness to the ups and downs of the U Street/Shaw community. It now stands as a beacon of hope that the neighborhood can come back without destroying its heritage.