Forest Hills Connection || News and Life in Our DC Neighborhood
Covering Forest Hills, Van Ness, North Cleveland Park and Wakefield
by Marlene Berlin Some of DC’s history is moving to Van Ness. Part of the DC Public Library’s Washingtoniana Collection will be stored at 4340 Connecticut Avenue, in the space that housed the Interim Cleveland Park Library until last May. DCPL holds a lease on the space through July 2019. We say part, but the […]
When UDC was a vineyard: Remnants of farms remain scattered throughout the District, including a spring house that belonged to John Adlum, a contemporary of George Washington and a vintner whose lands included today’s UDC and North Cleveland Park. (Read more about Adlum here.) The Washington Post’s John Kelly spoke to the author of the […]
“Three African-American activists hurried to the Capitol on the morning of March 28th, 1926. They had heard Congress was considering a bill that would wipe out a community of 370 families in the growing suburbs west of Rock Creek Park. In the small neighborhood known as Reno, black and white residents mixed like a checkerboard.” […]
Should auld acquaintance be forgot? Not in our neighborhood. Longtime residents can mark time not only by the calendar – but also by the businesses that have come and gone. Have you been here long enough to remember Hot Shoppes? The Ice Palace? Clover Market and Marvelous Market? The shopping center at Van Ness Center? […]
If mid-century traffic planners had their way, DC would have been the land of the freeway. One 1950 plan envisioned parts of Connecticut Avenue as an express highway. It also would have placed a “dominant thoroughfare” to the east of Connecticut through Forest Hills, and an “express parkway” connecting Nebraska Avenue and Military Road. The […]
Until Ann Kessler wrote about then-Congressman and Senator Lyndon Johnson’s home on 30th Place, we had no idea his family had lived here. And they truly lived here. The image of Lady Bird Johnson as a carpooling Murch parent delights us to no end. It got us thinking about other notable neighbors from our past, […]
by Ann Kessler Around this time 75 years ago, Forest Hills got new neighbors: a congressman and his wife. That congressman would go on to serve in the Senate, then as vice president, and then as president of the United States. Lyndon Baines and Lady Bird Johnson moved into their home on 30th Place NW […]
This one’s for the DREAMers: Students from Wilson High and other area schools walked out of class on November 9th and converged on the Capitol to urge Congress to pass a standalone DREAM act before December recess. Here’s WAMU’s writeup, and we highly recommend The Wilson Beacon’s story on the event. Wilson students walk out […]
by Ann Kessler Throughout DC are several streets that run only a few blocks at a time. They don’t fit in the grid of numbered and alphabetical street names. They’re not the avenues named for the states. These are remnants of roads that were here before the city grew into the District of Columbia boundaries. […]
Mel Elfin wrote in the introduction to Forest Hills, a history of the neighborhood published in 2006 by Arcadia Press, “…the most important role of Forest Hills during the Civil War was to keep open the lines of communication between Fort Reno and Stevens.” Ann Kessler wrote in May that three sites in Forest Hills […]
