Qualla: Anacostia

Anacostia: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Fitzgerald, CC BY-SA 3.0. Frederick Douglass spent the last seventeen years of his life in a house on a hilltop in Anacostia, surveying the Capitol dome across the river from his front porch. He moved there in 1878, after Reconstruction had failed and the country was sliding back into the violence of Redemption. The neighborhood directly below his house, Uniontown, would not let him buy a home within its segregated streets. So he bought Cedar Hill - higher ground, better views, and just outside Uniontown's covenant restrictions. The house is now a National Historic Site, and Douglass is still claimed by Anacostia as its Sage. The neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River are the part of Washington most metropolitan residents reflexively flinch from. They are also the part with the longest continuous Black history, the highest concentration of public parkland, and a particular kind of view of the federal city most visitors never see.

Read more: Anacostia on Qualla

Image: Peter Fitzgerald | CC BY-SA 3.0

Anacostia: The Nacochtank's River

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Fitzgerald, CC BY-SA 3.0. The river that gives the neighborhood its name carries the memory of the Nacochtank people, who lived in a small settlement on its banks before European colonization. The English called them Anacostan; over time the name shifted to Anacostia. Most of what is now East of the River...

Read more: Anacostia on Qualla

Image: Peter Fitzgerald | CC BY-SA 3.0

Anacostia: Uniontown and the Sage

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Fitzgerald, CC BY-SA 3.0. Uniontown was platted in the 1850s on the south side of the river to give workers at the Washington Navy Yard cheaper housing close to their jobs. The deeds prohibited sale to Black residents, which is why Frederick Douglass bought outside the development boundary at Cedar Hill i...

Read more: Anacostia on Qualla

Image: Peter Fitzgerald | CC BY-SA 3.0

Anacostia: How a White Neighborhood Became Black

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Fitzgerald, CC BY-SA 3.0. After World War II, Anacostia changed faster than perhaps any neighborhood in any major American city. In 1950 the population was nearly 90 percent white. By 1970 it was over 90 percent Black. Three forces drove the change. First, the 1950 desegregation of D.C. public schools - t...

Read more: Anacostia on Qualla

Image: Peter Fitzgerald | CC BY-SA 3.0

Anacostia: The Famous, the Notorious, the Local

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Christopher Sayan, CC BY-SA 3.0. Marvin Gaye grew up in Deanwood, a neighborhood in Northeast D.C., attending Cardozo High School before he moved north to Motown. He returned often, including to record demos and visit family. Ezra Pound, the poet, was confined at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Anacostia from 1945 to...

Read more: Anacostia on Qualla

Image: Christopher Sayan | CC BY-SA 3.0

Anacostia: The Big Chair and What's Coming

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wikipedian1234, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Big Chair is exactly what it sounds like: a 19-foot, four-and-a-half-ton mahogany chair built in 1959 as a marketing piece for Curtis Brothers Furniture on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue. Curtis Brothers is long gone. The chair is still there, replaced with an aluminum cast in...

Read more: Anacostia on Qualla

Image: Wikipedian1234 | CC BY-SA 3.0