Clinical Rawlsian@the_megalopolis My grandfather was the son of Jewish immigrants and grew up in Southwest DC in the 1920s and 1930s. He always said that when he was a kid, Georgetown was considered one of the worst neighborhoods in the city. The housing stock was incredibly old and decrepit and the Potomac River was lined with a paper mill and a fat rendering plant that made the whole area stink constantly.
@the_megalopolis By the 1960s, the factories had shut down. The Kennedys and people of their ilk started buying up the old decrepit houses and restoring them. Very quickly, Georgetown went from being an industrial area full of slums. Nobody wanted to live in to being a historic neighborhood and one of the trendiest and most sought after zip codes in the city. Not counting renovations and restorations, the built environment hardly changed at all.
@the_megalopolis Today, the paper mill is an office building called The Paper Mill and the old fat rendering plan is, IIRC, a movie theater that shows a lot of indie and arthouse films.
But if the Kennedy's hadn't taken it interest in the early 60s, there's a strong likelihood the entire neighborhood would have been demolished to make way for an urban freeway.
@the_megalopolis Incidentally, the house and the neighborhood in which my grandfather grew up were later destroyed as part of a 1960s era "urban renewal" project in Southwest DC. By then, almost the entire family had decamped for the DC suburbs.
charm city slicker@MadMadMadMadRN my papaw left highlandtown and bought a rowhouse in Dundalk in 1958 when they tore out the 26 streetcar to sparrows point
@the_megalopolis To me, one of the saddest parts of Barry Levinson's semi-autobiographical movie Avalon is when the extended family begins to dissolve after they leave the rowhome neighborhood where they all have lived in close proximity to each other and move to the farflung suburbs. I always thought from the way Levinson depicted this that the family moved to somewhere really far away from the city. I recently learned it was actually Arbutus.