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Street named for state has its own distinct flavor Sunday, Jun 15, 2008 By Aaron Sadler Stephens Washington Bureau WASHINGTON - On a day with the thick-as-muck air and unrelenting heat that make Arkansas summers intolerable, Louis Wassel set out to warn his neighbors about that other distinctly Arkansan burden, the mosquito. "Drain standing water," stated Wassel's neighborhood newsletter. "Clean up mosquito breeding sites," it notes. With the sweating and bug-swatting and all the street signs that read "Arkansas," it would have been easy to think Wassel was a neighborhood block captain in any town in the Natural State. That is, until Wassel pointed out he had never been to the state, or that he doesn't know much about Arkansas - except for the street in the nation's capital that shares its name. "I know about the Clintons, and Little Rock, but the state's really not been on any travel plans," said Wassel, who heads the 16th Street Neighborhood Association in northwest Washington. The group includes Arkansas Avenue residents. Arkansas Avenue was drawn on an official city map by 1903 and developed by the 1920s, with row houses and single-family dwellings cropping up at the end of the city's trolley line. Plans for streets named after states date to more than a century earlier, when the initial design for Washington included long, wide thoroughfares named for the original states in the union. Every state now has a street named for it somewhere in Washington, though even longtime Washingtonians would have trouble finding most of them. Pennsylvania Avenue, which passes by the White House and the U.S. Capitol, is by far the most famous. Arkansas and dozens of others are hidden away in residential areas far from the city core. The tree-lined Arkansas Avenue runs nine blocks northeast from 16th Street to Georgia Avenue. Both those streets are major north-south arteries that connect downtown Washington to suburban Maryland. It's a 915-mile drive from the southwest end of Arkansas Avenue to the northeast corner of the state. A stroll down Arkansas Avenue often makes that distance obvious: -Few residents have yards, most opting for small gardens or flower beds at the fronts of their tightly placed row houses. -Most of the cars parked on the street have anti-theft devices, a city necessity not often seen in Arkansas towns. And those cars are subject to a litany of government parking restrictions, though neighborhood residents say parking on Arkansas Avenue isn't nearly the headache it is in other parts of the city. -Many windows and doors have bars across them, a relic of the 1980s and early '90s when "people just gave up on the city," Wassel said. Other differences: Arkansas is 81 percent white, according to Census Bureau estimates. Wassel said his neighborhood is 40 percent white, 40 percent black and 20 percent Hispanic or Asian. The median house price in Arkansas is about $72,000. On Arkansas Avenue, home values range from $300,000 to $600,000. And only in Washington does Arkansas share a border with Iowa and Georgia. Added one resident: "Unfortunately, the street is often confused with Kansas." The street - about 3 1/2 miles north of the White House and National Mall - abuts Rock Creek Park, a nearly 2,000-acre recreational area that covers parts of the District of Columbia and Maryland. Neighborhood residents - teachers, graphic designers, computer programmers among them - are fond of the street's location. "We're a nice midpoint between downtown D.C. and the suburbs," said Katie Mathy, a south Florida native who has lived on Arkansas Avenue for just over a year. "It's right across the street from Rock Creek Park and provides a really beautiful setting. It's very much a quiet, neighborhoody block, very residential." Mathy, like Wassel, has never been to Arkansas, though her parents often talk about retiring to the state, she said. Reginald Ball, whose mother has lived at the corner of 16th Street and Arkansas for four decades, said he's not been to Arkansas either, though he knows a few people in Pine Bluff. His first thought about the state is always, "Razorbacks," he said. "I've never been there," Ball said. "When I think Arkansas, I think midwest America." However, there's not always been a disconnect between the state and the residents of its namesake street. An Arkansas native spearheaded the community association that was a predecessor to Wassel's group. Hugh Keiser, who was born in Lonoke County, was the president of the Arkansas Avenue Community Association in the 1930s and '40s. Keiser operated a stationery company in Washington when he wasn't active in lobbying the city's government for better sewers and drainage on the flood-prone street, according to historical documents. Keiser's group, so fed up with the city's inaction to fix a sewer problem, even produced a "battle flag," according to a 1953 article in the Washington Post. The article described the flag as being "done in mud brown and sewer pipe gray" and prominently featuring "two bright green worms" laying on mud. Fortunately, the infrastructure problems of six decades ago do not persist, Wassel said. That's probably why his newsletters feature articles about mosquito bites and block parties. Keiser's group also distributed a newsletter which stopped circulation in 1962. It was called the Arkansas Traveler. "For the most part, people look after each other here," Wassel said of present-day Arkansas Avenue. "There's great pride in the neighborhood and a sense of community." A specialist in urban revitalization, Wassel said Arkansas Avenue has seen three "generations" of resident since its development. The first group to live in the area was generally white middle class, followed by a majority black population in the 1960s and thereafter. About 10 years ago, a more diverse group of mostly younger people started to move to the neighborhood. The newest residents returned to the city after crime and rampant drug dealing forced most people to the suburbs two decades ago, Wassel said. Cars had been abandoned on the street and houses were boarded up and left to rot. "People wanted to kind of get back to the city as the center of work and culture," said Wassel, who sees similarities among the three "generations," "They just wanted a good quality neighborhood, and this offers that. It's the core workers, the fabric of the city." A neighborhood park with a swimming pool and basketball court is on the street, just down a hill from a high school constructed in 1923. A building that housed the city's old trolley system is now a maintenance barn for Washington's fleet of public buses. A car repair shop, a cleaning supplies warehouse and an Ethiopian church are the only nonresidential buildings on the street. The most unique feature of the street, noted repeatedly in local publications in the past, is a two-block stretch of rowhouses designed with a modernist flavor by a noted Washington architect. The rowhouses designed by Joseph Abel and constructed from 1939 to 1941 feature long, open second-floor porches and trellises that run across the length of the houses. All of them 2,000 square feet, they are now appraised at $450,000 or higher, according to District of Columbia property tax records. The modern architecture drew Mathy to the street, she said. It's the lure of the neighborhood, though, that will make her and others stay, Wassel said. And on the street, just like the state, residents have a sense of belonging. "When people come to this neighborhood, they want some place to call home," he said. |
