An old French “wives’ tale” describes an expectant woman’s result from gazing upon a rabbit: The child had a hare lip or protruding front teeth! In my French-Irish mom’s case, she viewed a spread of dusty ancient dwellings for working folk out her aerie corner room on the fourth floor of Columbia Hospital for Women.
From the moment in January 1953 when her baby son Jonathan saw the first light of day, he would forever be totally crazed with love for an esoteric Foggy Bottom as a rabbit adores his carrots. More specifically, Jon Christopher absolutely craved the richness of vernacular Victorian Foggy Bottom.
I was a budding 12-year old shutterbug, with absolutely no architectural training and with just a smattering of historical research experience. My doting dad often led me to the Library of Congress Picture Collection. There, I discovered Frances Benjamin Johnston’s iconic 1899 photographs of African-American schoolchildren at play. Within this mauve-tinted kaleidoscope of city life leapt up an incredible detail of the time. Whether in the school yard or at home, exotic cast iron basket weave fencing, topped by eagle-stamped crests, prevailed in these images. Clearly, this new metal periphery foretold the transformation of a village marching proudly into a capital of global importance.
Thus, in 2015, a kind and vigilant Mr. Gill allowed me a piece of the distant past of this storied part of town. As site supervisor for Clark Construction Group (under EastBanc Development), he honored my request as an amateur historian to pluck a sample of the 1890’s crested fence out of the choreographed chaos that methodically transforms a quaint residential plat into a 21st century multiple-use trapezoidal community.
When I move into my new senior studio in Foggy Bottom, the iron relic and I will reside scarcely one block from Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church, where my dear parents are laid to rest.
