Ninth Street as a Honky Tonk Rialto

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You can hear the musical stylings of the Cowboy Poet when my band, Etufe, performs at Dietle’s Tavern in Rockville on March 3rd at 9 p.m.

Their Tinhorn Paradise

Around 1910, Ninth Street between K Street and Pennsylvania was an Alpine crag-scape of flashing
tin and light- bulb signs, swags of sheet metal and sightless caryatids guarding a wealth of
nickelodeons, penny arcades and peepshows. For less than a quarter, swells could gulp down
pailfuls of ale and whiskey and swagger around Ninth like the Sheik of Araby or Beau Geste. Of
course, Prohibition drew the arras across the open swilling of drink, but many of the pleasure
domes merely fine-tuned the entertainment.

From the tiny Mount Vernon Theatre to the Gayety and Moore’s Garden Theatre and the Criterion,
where Johnny Weissmuller gallivanted across the flickering screen as Tarzan the Ape Man—no mean feat for an Olympic breaststroke champion fun of an affordable variety was the order of the day. Even in the depths of the depression, Jimmy Lake, the “Mayor of Ninth Street,” made sure that no customer left his establishments any less than a real pal. During World War II, dazzled GIs and “Gobs” patriotically downed tin ducks in the shooting, galleries and grabbed up kewpie dolls for their dates after skeeball triumphs.

As the Fifties rolled into the uncertain Sixties, the horse troughs once dedicated by Stilson Hutchins, a founder of the Post (and the Washington Humane Society), got yanked unceremoniously out of the
blue-slat curbing. Soon came an endless procession of demolitions: electrical shops; burger stands; girlie booths; and such stalwart sites as Lake’s, the Shubert (Gayety) Theatre and the replacement Gayety (once Moore’s Garden and frequently visited by Blaze Starr and Sally Rand among other ‘exotic’ acts). Parking lots replaced these august enterprises, and the neighborhood slumbered.

My Photographic Capsule of Memory

At age 17 I vaguely realized the black-and-white frames that I shot along Ninth Street, Tenth Street, New York Avenue and Eye Street were more than snapshots. The old guy in the Panama hat, horn rims, ballooning white shirt and khaki pants in the foreground of one iconic shot had likely just left Central Book Shop, which for many decades was the spot to browse through huge stacks of Life, National Geographic, Esquire and Playboy to one’s heart’s delight. The dust flew once you blew it off the top of the heaps. Between the worn brick and zinc facades of former confectionery factory, Greek cafe and radio repair shop, the eye danced across blackened side bearing walls. Across these ran a menagerie of lost advertising symbols—the Durham Bull for cigarette smokers, Lady Columbia, a heroine of early auto batteries, Doctor Waters’ soda elixirs—right at Mount Vernon Place, when “nice” homes lined the north side of the square.

My shutter snapped endlessly capturing vignettes of a time before my time. A sunken figure, a former merchant seaman, clutching an oil-stained paper bag while leaning against the iron hoop fence outside his rooming house. Another Charles Addams-style house, its flapping shades connoting possible unpleasant odors emanating from vacated cubicles inside. And the “all-seeing hand” of a fortune
teller’s crude hand- painted sign at 1006 Eye, next to the Capital Hotel and the Greyhound Bus
Package Express location, outside which a gaunt figure lies in deep slumber.

There was, of course, a secret muse which showed itself at the end of the Eisenhower era with a vengeance. As a music historian, Mark Opsasnick has noted in his seminal work Capitol Rock that tiny and somewhat dangerous bars sprang up around the “skid row” periphery. Link Wray, his brothers Vernon and Doug and their cohort Shorty on bass held court at Vinny’s at 11th and H, where on more than one occasion people or objects flew through the front plate window. The Boondocks at Ninth
and K, opposite Central Library, soothed the homesick emotions of Tennessee, Arkansas and Carolina country boys who craved the wail of cowboy pedal steel. And for “class” acts, none were higher up the low ladder than Dolly’s, which sometimes featured performers in drag; and the renowned Rocket Room, whose headliners included Billy Stewart, with his incredible scatting voice, and Ronnie Dove (“Kiss Away” may have been his hottest hit, in 1966).

All of this did a double disappearing act. First in 1980, for the then-newly rubbled concrete D.C.
Convention Facil- ity. That was dynamited (with Eye and Tenth remaining sealed off) 22 years later.
Now, with the greenlighting of the vast, multi-use but seemingly sterile City Center, the whole zone down to H and Ninth is a mammoth hole filled with emerging stalagmites of foundation, air shafts and stairwells. Fascinating, but not the same way  that the honky-tonk 20th-century playground had been.


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