Qualla: Adams Morgan

Adams Morgan: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cristiano Tomás, CC BY-SA 4.0. The name does not refer to a person. There was no Mr. Adams-Morgan. The neighborhood is named for two elementary schools - the all-Black Thomas P. Morgan School and the all-white John Quincy Adams School - that desegregated and merged in 1955 in the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling in Bolling v. Sharpe. A community council formed in 1958 to make the integration work by drawing a single neighborhood boundary around the catchment areas of both former schools, cutting straight through four older Washington enclaves: Washington Heights, Lanier Heights, Kalorama Triangle, and Meridian Hill. They called the combined territory Adams Morgan. The hyphen was eventually dropped. The neighborhood became something the city had not really had before: a place that was integrated by design, with the design literally encoded in its name.

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Image: Cristiano Tomás | CC BY-SA 4.0

Adams Morgan: Before the Schools Merged

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Before there were schools to merge, there were country estates. When Congress created the District of Columbia in 1791, the land north of the planned city core belonged to two large landowners, Robert Peter and Anthony Holmead. As Washington grew through the nineteenth century, t...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Adams Morgan: Riots and the Late Hours

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Fitzgerald, CC BY 3.0. The first decade after the 1955 desegregation was one of relative stability. Then came 1968. The riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. devastated the commercial corridors of 14th and U Streets just south of Adams Morgan, and the white flight that had beg...

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Image: Peter Fitzgerald | CC BY 3.0

Adams Morgan: Gateway for the Americas

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AgnosticPreachersKid, CC BY-SA 3.0. Since the 1960s Adams Morgan, along with its neighbors Mount Pleasant and Columbia Heights, has been Washington's gateway community for immigrants from Latin America. Salvadorans displaced by the civil war of the 1980s settled here. Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Nicaraguans came af...

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Image: AgnosticPreachersKid | CC BY-SA 3.0

Adams Morgan: The Jumbo Slice Question

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Fitzgerald, CC BY 3.0. Adams Morgan is where the jumbo slice was popularized - an oversized New York-style pizza slice, typically about 18 inches long, sold from a handful of competing pizzerias along 18th Street for the after-bar crowd. Two of the original operators - Pizza Mart and Pizza Movers - bec...

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Image: Peter Fitzgerald | CC BY 3.0