Ivy City, Washington, D.C.

Ivy City is a small neighborhood in Northeast Washington, D.C.. It is primarily an industrial neighborhood, dominated by warehouses and a train storage/maintenance yard for Amtrak. The area has undergone some revitalization with the influx of a few dance clubs and the gentrification moving across the Northeast quadrant. However Ivy City still remains among the poorest parts of the city.

Geography

Ivy City is on a triangular strip of land in the central part of the Northeast quadrant, bounded by New York Avenue to the northwest, West Virginia Avenue to the east, and Mt. Olivet Road to the south. The neighborhood is unusual in that it is also surrounded on all sides by significant landmarks: Gallaudet University (across Mt. Olivet Rd.), Mt. Olivet Cemetery (across West Virginia Ave.), and AMTRAK's Ivy City yard (across New York Ave.).

Politically, Ivy City is in Ward 5.

History

Ivy City is outside of the boundaries of the original Pierre L'Enfant plan for Washington, D.C.

In 1831, however, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad received approval of a plan to build its Washington Branch. As part of the construction, the railroad company built its last roundhouse (the current AMTRAK yard) one mile outside the city limit. The railroad then worked with land speculators to develop the tract immediately adjacent to the roundhouse as "Ivy City", a Washington suburb to house B&O employees and give a formal mailing address to the roundhouse.

Ivy City became part of the city of Washington with the passage of the Organic Act of 1878, which extended the city to occupy all of the District of Columbia.

Over the years, as railroads became one of the few industries to consistently give jobs to African Americans, Ivy City became an increasingly black section of town. In 1911, the firmly segregated city authorized the construction of the neighborhood's first colored school, Alexander Crummell Elementary School, at the heart of Ivy City. The school quickly became a symbol of civic pride in the neighborhood and a major community anchor.

Ivy City, being a major hub of activity on the B&O Railroad, had an uncanny knack for mirroring the railroad's cycles of economic success. This tendency proved unfortunate after World War II, when U.S. rail travel suffered terrible declines due to the rise of the commercial airline industry and the Interstate Highway System. In 1963, B&O was bought by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad; the two were combined in the Chessie System in 1973. Three years after that, the Ivy City yard was acquired by the newly created Amtrak, which leased it to commuter rail services.

Although Amtrak has brought some stability to the industrial tenor of the neighborhood, Ivy City had suffered immensely from the railroad industry's decades-long downturn. Moreover, even after Amtrak took over the train yard, Washington entered a period of poor city management and economic blight, which was particularly hard on low-income neighborhoods. Those who could afford to leave Ivy City did; its population decreased by a third in the 1990s.

Ivy City remains home to many of the poorest residents of the District and is largely occupied by old warehouses, abandoned and decrepit homes, and large expanses of parking lots, and crime. The city's current trend toward gentrification has only just begun to touch some parts of Ivy City [ Schwartzman, Paul. [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/09/AR2005070900711.html "Renewal Takes Root in D.C.'s Blighted Ivy City : Real Estate Investors Betting on Neighborhood,"] "Washingington Post"Sunday, July 10, 2005. Accessed May 16, 2007.] .

Recent Developments

A D.C. City Council bill relocated strip clubs displaced by D.C.'s baseball team the Nationals' new stadium to Ivy City [ [http://www.nbc4.com/politics/13287709/detail.html "Council Member Fights Strip Club Relocation Bill,"] "NBC.com" Wednesday, May 9, 2007. Accessed May 16, 2007.] . The City Council has since decided to give Ivy City $3.6 million in road improvement for the neighborhood to soften the impact of this move. [ Neibauer, Michael. [http://www.examiner.com/a-730677~Potential_neighbors_to_relocated_clubs_to_get__3_6M_in_road_improvements.html?cid=rel-v1 "Potential neighbors to relocated clubs to get $3.6M in road improvements,"] "Examiner.com" Wednesday, May 16, 2007. Accessed May 16, 2007.] .

References