Doing the Hootchie Kootchie in No-Man's-Land

Looking north across the Highway Bridge (now the 14th St. Bridge) with Harry's Blue Bird BBQ under the arrow.
Hoover Airport is in the foreground and the former Jackson City would have been just to the right. Photo from
the Library of Congress.

 

One can imagine the ghostly white haired southern gentleman pacing his colonnaded portico fretting over the disorder below on the once idyllic Arlington plantation. Robert E Lee owned much of the land stretching from the mansion in Arlington cemetery to the foot of the current 14^th Street Bridge. His plantation was the epitome of southern orderliness with the Lee family managing vast mercantile operations dependent upon the forced labor of slaves. Everything and everyone had their place on his plantation.

By the 1920s the area had gone through massive changes after Union soldiers occupied the land and permanently wrested it from the orderliness of the Lee family. As the ghost of Lee paced his portico, he would have seen a perpetually burning dump with a small group of dwellers eking out a living operating moonshine stills just to the west of the current Pentagon; two airports for dirigibles and airplanes respectively, the runways of which pilots precariously navigated the burning dump and Military Road traffic that bisected them; and a small cluster of manufactures around the current site of Crystal City. Most of Lee’s original land was taken up by the Agricultural Experimentation Farm run by the US government.

Perhaps this specter of the old order would have been most disturbed by a tumble down joint 300 yards from the Highway Bridge (now the 14^th Street Bridge) on the current site of the Pentagon power plant along the lagoon next to Interstate 395.  If Lee’s ghost could make out the Blue Bird from his portico, he would have seen blinking neon lights making the parking lot with many licentious activities just visible in the night. If he could have seen the inside, he would know this was not a place for southern gentlemen. This little jazz joint was a battle in the longer war over whether Arlington was going to be southern or cosmopolitan, a place of orderly bureaucracy or chaotic corruption, and, finally, how the county would assert its territorial rights against a federal government it had been in rebellion against 70 years prior.

But let’s take a step back and start from the beginning.  This area of the county was no stranger to vice and served as the playground for Washingtonians from the mid-1800s into the early part of the twentieth century.  Just on the other side of the current Interstate 395 from the Blue Bird was Jackson City, which was group of buildings founded amid much optimism that a new city would rise on that spot before it degenerated into a place of gambling, booze, and other activities. It was perfect for an illegal playground because it was only a short ride by streetcar over the 14^th Street Bridge (then called the Long Bridge and later the Highway Bridge).  Corruption, indifference, and bureaucracy allowed Jackson City to deteriorate into a murderous lawless place because it sat in a place that belonged to no one. Virginia, DC and the Federal Government disclaimed ownership citing an opaque clause in the retrocession agreement giving the land back to Virginia from the original borders of Washington, DC. Vice thrived here until a conservative vigilante force aligned with the burgeoning prohibition movement burned most of Jackson City to the ground.  However, it limped along for years before the railroad bought the land and razed the rest of the buildings. During the early twentieth century, the area had a series of names, Relee (a play on R.E. Lee), East Arlington, and South Washington, all of which confirmed it was an area in a state of dispossessed geographic limbo. During the teens and twenties, a waterfront amusement park operated just to the north of the former Jackson City site before going under with the land going to investors to build the Washington-Hoover Airport.

There was a purgatorial air to the landscape as the variety of abandoned buildings, repurposed for new uses, intermingled with the airport, and surrounded by industries such as oil storage and brick manufacturing. The smoldering dump, experimental farm, and the dirigible port enclosed the area, which became the home of castaways and the playground of vice-seekers. This must have felt like home to the gamblers, pimps, and other marginalized people living in the limbo of the underworld. The lawlessness was inviting to the lawless.

During the early 1900s the Washington Post often imagined the gullible government clerk with his savings in his pocket hopping the train to Jackson City dazzled by the notion of winning the jackpot only to lose everything and dejectedly walking back across bridge unable to afford the train fare. Undoubtedly this tradition played a factor in the location of the Blue Bird as a place to give Washingtonians a good time while methodically separating them from their money.  As late as 1922, a remnant of Jackson City called The Miami (aka The Easy Way) still operated on the site perhaps housed in one of the old buildings.  

The vexing problem for law enforcement officials was the area was a true no man’s land. When DC retroceded the Virginia portion of Washington, the document put the DC border at the high water mark of the Potomac. In the 1800s, Potomac flooding reached the current foot of Columbia Pike and probably covered most of what is now the Pentagon parking lot. However, when building the Washington-Hoover Airport, the owners trucked in dirt that pushed the high water mark closer to the banks of the Potomac. Adding to the confusion, the Federal Government owned Arlington Cemetery and an experimental farm, which covered a large part of the surrounding land to the north.

It seems likely another barrier to law enforcement, was that nobody really cared about the area. Up the hill near the current Air Force Memorial was Hell’s Bottom, which was a prominent gambling den that had degenerated into a squatters’ slum.  Nearby was the perpetually smoldering dump that was home to the county’s dispossessed that lived an isolated fetid existence. Along the water, there were people living on disused barges and armed thugs operating moonshine stills hidden in the underbrush.  In the twenties, along the walls of the cemetery, young people had “petting parties”, shocking the sensibilities of this proper southern town and raising the ire of the local Klan. If Washingtonians were feeling randy, they would head for this area that was becoming known as a “no man’s land” by the Washington Post in the 20s.  Geographic limbo granted freedom to Washingtonians to engage in illicit activities between the lines of bureaucratic authority.

One notorious person operating in the area was George Horning who opened a pawn shop across Route 1 from the airport in what was probably a disused building from the waterfront park. Horning ran a “blind” in DC, but based his operations in this no-man’s-land so he could skirt the regulations on pawn businesses. His scam was to invite people in need of a loan to his DC office and give them a ride to his Arlington office to complete the transaction.  At least one newspaper speculated that Horning may have had connections with the criminal underworld. The revelation that you could operate in a legal limbo here may have led to the opening of the Bluebird.  (The Washington herald., June 26, 1918, Page 9).

The Blue Bird was opened by Harry Riganis by 1929 and an ad described it as being opposite the bathhouse for Arlington Beach. Harry Riganis was a Greek immigrant with deep ties to the Greek community centered around 7^th and 9^th Streets on Pennsylvania Ave, but spreading over to Capitol Hill and the SW Waterfront. His circle of associates included restaurant owners, gamblers, and ethnic gang members from the SW Waterfront. Before he opened the Bluebird, Riganis worked as a clerk, a waiter, and a deli owner. In 1930, the year after the Blue Bird opened, he declared himself unemployed in the census while his wife worked as an accountant. At first he lived on 6^th St. in a neighborhood where Russians and Poles mixed with migrants from North Carolina. Sometime in this period, Riganis became prosperous enough to move to Georgia Ave in Takoma Park. By 1940, he also owned a restaurant on Pennsylvania Ave. and was an executive with the Greek owned Richfield Dairy.  During World War Two he was arrested for running a racket with food ration tickers. Clearly Riganis was prosperous and well connected.

The Greek immigrant community in DC was significant in a city that, until recently, was not known for its immigrant communities. The lack of any Italian community to speak of meant DC was not a mafia town; however it teemed with much freelance organized crime. Prominent underworld figures, some with ties to organized crime in Philadelphia and New York, controlled large swaths of the vice industries. However, there was considerable space for upstarts to form their own gambling, bootlegging, or other unsavory industry without having to answer to mafia powers.  A few Greek families associated with the Southwest waterfront of DC banded together to help each other launch businesses, purchase real estate, and, perhaps, run rackets.  With names like Mamakos, Kavakos, and Soffos, they joined other ethnic whites to form gangs like the Waterfront Bunch in the rough and tumble Southwest DC.  They came up in a SW waterfront neighborhood, known for the rough strip of bars called Sailors’ Row along 7^th St., where Navy Yard workers and sailors trawled for booze and prostitutes.

Though he did a stint as the ubiquitous DC job generically called “clerk”, Riganis spent most of his time working in restaurants. He married a woman named Georgia, who was from the Mamakos family. The Mamakos were famous for their son Steve, a prominent local boxer, who had famously learned his trade in the Southwest waterfront gangs. Steve’s brother Bill “the Greek” was a small-time local hood engaging in various trades such as housebreaking and larceny.  In 1938 he was indicted as part of a ring stealing office furniture.

The Mamakos family connected Riganis to the Kavakos family through marriage. The Kavakos would later run Club Kavakos in the 40s and 50s at 8^th and H St, NE. The club was a top drawer of entertainers and of local gamblers looking to blow off steam.  However, it was a place of vice too. In 1951 people were arrested for dealing marijuana out of an adjacent apartment after arranging the deal in the club. During the 1952 Senate hearings on DC police corruption, investigators felt compelled to subpoena the club’s phone records for potential wire fraud. The committee also entertained an anonymous tip claiming that teenage boys were being lured into a druggie jazz lifestyle on Sunday afternoons when teenagers gathered at the club.

Riganis opened the Blue Bird in 1929 with the Bill Mamakos as floor manager, Const Adams as the manager, and members of the Kavakos family rounding out his inner circle. On top of that he hired some small time thugs to work as bartenders and bouncers. Many of these men would cut their teeth running nightclubs, and rackets, at the Blue Bird as they made the transition from the streets to respectability.  Almost immediately, the Blue Bird sought “young girls” for “curb service”.  We can infer from later police raids that these waitresses engaged in surreptitious liquor sales and prostitution. One Arlington resident told the Washington Post in 1985, that he remembered people buying bootleg liquor at the Blue Bird during Prohibition.

The confounding question about the Blue Bird is why authorities allowed it to operate for so long. When the Blue Bird opened, the end of prohibition was five years away and Arlington still had a robust “dry” movement that railed against other illicit establishments, but it’s hard to find any references to any legal action taken against it until after prohibition ended. Indeed authorities burned down a massive still in the swampy dump a mile or so to the northwest (Post 2/7/33) and regularly took action against bootleg operations along the river nearby.  Perhaps the land’s ambiguous jurisdiction allowed it to operate in a legal limbo. Perhaps it was protected by one of the larger gambling rings known to pay off local authorities. The larger gambling rings were known to have some operations in Arlington and the Blue Bird may have been another piece of a larger empire.

Arlington County saw fit to collect taxes on the property and the board heard requests from property owners, including the Blue Bird, for improved water service in the thirties. The question is, why did the county police demur from enforcing the law on the Blue Bird so readily when clearly the county consider it within their taxable jurisdiction? Was it simply bureaucracy that prevented police action or was something more sinister at work? During this period gambling control in the district shifted from Sam Beard to Abe Pilsco (aka “Jewboy” Dietz) and later to Emmitt Warring. All three operations paid significant protection money to DC police. Were they doing the same in Arlington? Or was the Blue Bird under the wing of Sam Beard’s empire, but fell out of favor when Pilsco took over. To speculate further, Jimmy LaFontaine, who owned a notorious gambling den in Maryland, opened his first place, the Ivy Club, in Jackson City.  His operation began its decline in 1934. Around this time, Lyman M. Kelley, chair of the Arlington board, was removed from office for bribes. Was the county government simply too corrupt to act?

Riganis did his best to obfuscate the legal situation once prohibition ended by paying taxes and getting the necessary liquor permits in Virginia, but essentially abided by the more advantageous DC liquor laws. This meant patrons could get hard liquor and could stay open all night.  The record is silent on whether he got the necessary permits from DC too.

Given this, it’s interesting that the Blue Bird’s serious legal problems and media coverage began in 1935, shortly after Prohibition ended. On the night of March 20, 1935, a DC taxicab driver named Calvin R Ely, got into an altercation with Nick German (nee Germanokos), a bouncer at the Blue Bird. Ely ended up dead from a “cerebral hemorrhage caused by external violence.” It seems that German was never charged.  Two months later, the county would appoint a prominent citizen as the “special officer” for the Blue Bird, to monitor the establishment on behalf of the county.

Meanwhile the question of jurisdiction came to head between DC, Arlington, and the US Park Service. Fatal car accidents due to speeding; the murder of a young female government clerk; an assault on a makeshift houseboat along the river; and continuing problems with bootleg liquor in the area brought the stakeholders to the table. The matter was a practical one of who answers the call when someone needed help from the police or fire departments. For example, a woman frantically called Arlington, Alexandria, DC, and the Park Police as a bloody brawl was in progress in the parking lot of the Blue Bird with each police department demurring.  The woman was able to tell Alexandria police that a soldier was being severely beaten before she was dragged from the telephone booth. Beyond this practical matter of public safety, the issue went deeper because it was settling a historically ambiguous agreement that had political, tax, and autonomy implications for a jurisdiction that had seceded from the United States only 70 years prior.

After the disreputable prominence of the Blue Bird rose, the citizens of Arlington began to speak out against the establishment. The head of the DC Women’s Christian Temperance Union, a remnant of the old Prohibition movement, cited the Blue Bird as an example of “notorious” places “that should be investigated, and, if possible, closed.” Zula Dietrich, writing in Zula Remembers recalled the Blue Bird as  a “roadhouse of great renown and reputed wickedness” with “mysterious blue lights” filtering “into the darkness”,  her good Christian parents  would put the car “in high gear” to avoid witnessing the sinfulness.

So what exactly was going on in the Blue Bird that shocked the moral senses of upstanding Arlingtonians?

The arrival of the Blue Bird represented a deeper shift for Arlington County. Sure gambling, boozing, and other decidedly un-conservative activities took place in this area, but these were done within the racial confines of the old south – blacks and whites boozing and carrying on with their own kind. Here was a ramshackle nightclub on Robert E Lee’s doorstep offering the urbane notion of blacks and whites interacting. There is some evidence that the Blue Bird was not segregated and the sheer grittiness combined with an African-American band must have shocked Virginia officials. Here you could find pulsating jazz, illicit booze, loose women, blinking neon lights, gambling, and many untoward things lost to history.  Mothers lock up your daughters.

The primary patrons of the Blue Bird were the gambling underworld of DC and the myriad of their marks and suckers. It was people specializing in separating other people from their money and people naive enough to risk losing their money in gambling.

A typical patron would be Jerry Swisher, who was arrested at the Blue Bird in 1939 after slashing Samuel Audia with a razor leaving Audia in need of 41 stitches. Swisher was a notorious member of the Northwest DC gambling underworld. Living on 9^th St, his haunts were the bawdy houses and pool halls around Northwest DC, where he hustled for a living. Swisher ran with men in the hustling underworld, and the Blue Bird was probably one of their stops in the hustling circuit. HIs case would be tied up in the jurisdictional fights over the Blue Bird and included the court examining old maps to determine exactly where the border with DC laid. However, the trial would be disrupted as Audia, probably adhering to the code of silence of the underworld, denied that Swisher cut him despite witnesses claiming otherwise. Swisher would go free as a bargaining chip in the boundary dispute, but would meet his end at the end of a knife blade after stepping outside a tavern with another 9th St hood named James Rigsbee.

In terms of what went on inside the Blue Bird, we can get a clear snapshot from a few sources.  First, the famous jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton praised the Blue Bird in 1939:

There are a few good roadhouses in suburban Maryland which happily aren’t bothered by curfew laws, although the music isn’t so hot with hill-billy bands being popular. Harry’s Blue Bird Barbecue, in nearby Virginia, has a good 6-piece jam group with an ace Negro tenor man. This spot usually has the best sessions. It’s an all-night rough and tumble joint, selling beer only because of state liquor laws. (http://www.doctorjazz.co.uk/page10c.html, retrieved 2/13/14) Prof. Alan Wallace sends the following article from Down Beat, dated March 1939, Vol. 6, No. 3, page 1, column 7.

 The “ace tenor” Jelly Roll Morton referred to was probably band leader Alonzo Snowden. The band also featured a singer named Maurita Gordon, known as the “Singing Coed” because she became a popular local singer while attending Howard University. Gordon would go on to have a career singing and playing piano in DC nightclubs.  This top-flight jazz was unusual in Northern Virginia where music tended to be popular dance tunes or “hillbilly” music (what we would call now old-timey or early bluegrass).  Bands tended to have a guitar, bass, banjo, piano, and a fiddle and the audience would do set dances like the square dance. The jazz at the Blue Bird, probably played exclusively by black musicians for an integrated audience, would have been exotic and risqué in the more rigidly racially stratified Virginia.  Some of the songs they performed were “The Umbrella Man” and “Sweet Sue” according to a copyright violation suit in 1939.

In addition to the hot jazz, undercover police witnessed a “vulgar floor show” featuring women doing the “hootchie kootchie” dance.  The police also claimed that women approached them and told them that “any number of girls can be furnished for a party” at a cost of $5 per girl plus $1 for a taxi to take them to a secluded place, which was probably up the road at the Agricultural Research Farm.  These same officers witnessed slot machines where they lost “much money” and got “back a little”. For liquor, the officers saw bartenders go to the orchestra pit and pull liquor bearing a DC tax stamp to serve at 50 cents a shot. At the time, restaurants could only serve wine and lower alcohol beer, but could not serve liquor. It seems investigators made sure they thoroughly enjoyed all aspects of the Blue Bird in order to complete their surveillance.

In 1937, VA ABC agents and Arlington police raided the Blue Bird for the first time. They charged dozens of people, primarily from DC, with various charges including resisting arrest, prostitution, and serving illegal booze. Ultimately a judge ordered the Blue Bird to close at 2am in accordance with Virginia law, which was nod towards the Blue Bird being in Arlington’s jurisdiction.

In August 1938, Riganis counter-sued the county after the county demanded he obtain licenses for his cigarette sales and his juke box. Riganis sued to have the Blue Bird placed in the jurisdiction of DC.  The lawsuit caused the county to order police to stay away from the establishment until the lawsuit was resolved. In May 1939, the county police received another call about a fight at 5:45 am, but they refused to respond. The woman caller then tried the DC police and then the US Park Police, but they each refused to respond. Finally, Virginia State Police responded to break up the fight.

The Blue Bird would continue on growing ever more notorious as it operated in legal limbo. In 1940, the county, the state, DC, and the federal government reached an agreement giving the land to Arlington.

Finally, in January, 1941, county, state, and federal agents raided the Blue Bird at 3 in the morning. Police arrested 30 people, which was then the largest mass arrest in county history. In addition to the 30 people arrested, police confiscated 22 slot machines, 5 pistols, and 58 cases of beer, 40 gallons of wine, and a gallon of liquor, all of which were improperly taxed.  It’s likely the booze bore DC tax stamps and was stronger than what was allowed in Virginia.

Despite all the illicit activities at the Blue Bird, it was the improperly taxed liquor that finally brought down the restaurant. An Arlington judge ordered it padlocked and everything in the building confiscated.  The Blue Bird owners were fast and loose with their ambiguous jurisdiction and paid selective taxes, recognized selective laws, and enjoyed their limbo, but a judge closed it down for taxes.

The owners paid some taxes dutifully to Arlington and Virginia, but it purchased booze in DC because of the more advantageous liquor laws. Once the jurisdictional dispute was settled, it wasn’t the knife fights, the prostitutes, or the gambling that did in the Blue Bird. Ultimately, it came down to liquor taxes and just as so many organized crime rings past, present, and future, it takes violations of tax laws to finally break it up.

For a few months in 1941, before the land became part of the Pentagon grounds, a restaurant called the Gateway Roadside Restaurant operated in place of the Blue Bird. The Gateway appeared to operate within the laws of Virginia and ran into no legal trouble.

The legacy of the Blue Bird on Arlington County and the DC area is hard to judge now seven decades later. The Greek families that ran the Blue Bird would go on to become prominent restaurateurs and real estate investors in DC. Many of the staff of the Blue Bird continued to run in the criminal underworld and many found themselves arrested for a variety of petty crimes connected to gambling, rackets, burglary, and larceny.  The loss of the Blue Bird represented the beginning of a transition towards a less lawless county into a more orderly suburban county. 

Eventually the disorder of this land of Lee would give way to the Pentagon, Arlington Cemetery, and the bustling area we now know. It’s hard to look at the area now and imagine all the jazz, booze, and illicit fun people had.

Dutch

The Spectacle and the Badge

Photo courtesy of Shorpy.com

 

Spring had just arrived in Cherrydale the day before, but the chill in the air still suggested winter to the crowds gathering along Lee Highway on March 22, 1922.  The biting air didn’t stop the crowd of 600 including 20 or so reporters and at least one “movie man” to feel the electricity of anticipation. Around 10:30, the lights appeared on the hill above the hamlet and the crowd began to cry “They’re here! They’re here!”

On the crest of the hill the crowd saw the rambling stream of forty-six cars filled with 250 people puttering along Lee Highway with a Ford with DC plates at the lead. The cars had gathered at the Chain Bridge and made their way towards Cherrydale.  Onlookers had not turned out at this late hour to see the usual civic or patriotic parade and the lead car carrying a “huge fiery cross” told them tonight would be different. As the cars pulled into the center of town, the white robed contingent piled out of the vehicles to walk by foot holding signs that said “We were here yesterday, we are here today and we will be here forever” and “Our officers are sworn to do their duty”.

This was the Ku Klux Klan’s first major march in the DC area and everything about the evening was chosen carefully for a spectacle of white protestant institutional power to everyone gathered.  This would begin the Klan’s nadir of power as tens of thousands of men and women in DC and the close-in suburbs would flock to the organization. In Arlington alone, the Klan would claim, later in 1922, that “practically every male voter in good standing is a member”.  This was boastful swagger, but the fact that the claim could be made with a straight face proves the unnerving reality that Arlington was a Klan town.

As the parade pulled into Cherrydale, the men alighted from the cars and one of the photographers in the crowd snapped a photograph of one of the cars in the parade. It is probably a Buick with a DC plate and a Maryland plate. The number 590 on the DC plate tells us that the driver was someone of prominence since the lower number plates were reserved for important people in the community.

Above the driver side of the car was a small badge that read “Motor Corps H.D.L M.D.”, which signified the driver was a member of the Home Defense League in Maryland.  DC Commissioners formed the Home Defense League during World War I to serve as back up for the chronically under-manned and under-equipped DC police force during the strains for war. After the war, the Home Defense League continued as a citizen force made up of “public-spirited and patriotic men” that enforced traffic regulations and serve the police in times of crisis. During the war, most fraternal organizations formed units including many African Americans. Prominent auto dealers in DC worked to form the Motor Corps within the Home Defense League to serve as a rapid response group for police.

On January 25, 1919 a story appeared in the Washington Post declaring a “supposed maniac” had attacked three women in the city. Two women were shot and one was strangled during a daylong rampage by an unnamed man. The police force went into full alert and called out the Home Defense League for assistance. Evidently, the Home Defense League did not come through during the crisis and a month later, police held a reorganization meeting. Coming out of this meeting was a new Home Defense League that had dropped the “dead wood” from the organization. 

In June 1919, the director of the Home Defense League called members to action after an anarchist bombed the home of Attorney General Palmer in DC. The notice in the paper asked members to report suspicious persons and

All statements and literature that is in any way un-American should be forwarded to police headquarters, giving names and addresses of persons handling same.

The “dead wood” purged during the reorganization had freed the Home Defense League to take on the role of enforces of the conservative order. During this time, many white Protestants joined conservative organizations fighting to preserve the social order against blacks demanding civil rights, immigrants fighting for a new political order, and radicals working to win a fairer economy. Many of these organizations were dominated by important Protestant small businessmen that sought an idyllic orderly society with their caste on top.

In July 1919, whites in DC formed mobs along Pennsylvania Ave. as news spread that a black man had been questioned by police for sexually assaulting a white woman, but police released him after finding no evidence. The whites marched into Southwest DC and began days of rioting quelled only by rain and cavalry. Unlike many race riots of 1919, DC blacks fought back and formed bands of armed men confronting mobs of whites with violence.  The Home Defense League actively participated in the riots and was implicated in at least two murders.  A black rioter had no doubt which side they were on when he gunned down two Home Defense League members in a gunfight at 9^th and M, NW.

Shortly after the riots, the Home Defense League strengthened their organization by forming a Motor Corps led by prominent auto dealers in the city. The Motor Corps pledged to be ready at a moment’s notice to provide assistance to the police. Led by W Pearce Rayner, a local businessman and anti-socialist crusader, the Motor Corps became the backbone of law and order in the city.

These conservative organizations found their real strength in the suburbs, where vigilantism came in the form of a real war on the disorder of liquor, philandering, gambling, and other vices. The strip of land along the Potomac from Rosslyn south to Alexandria housed small hamlets built around vice and a large swath of marshy land perfect for bootleg liquor stills. Jackson City sat on the end of the Long Bridge where the new shiny Long Bridge Park sits and was a sanctuary of sin. Built with so much promise as a tribute to Andrew Jackson, the community became the District’s gambling hub and the owners had visions of a Monte Carlo on the Potomac. Conservative citizens formed a vigilante band and razed Jackson City to the ground. The vice simply picked up and moved to the African American slum called Hells Bottom located roughly at the base of the Air Force memorial.  Police raided the area regularly and found illicit liquor production on barges along the Potomac and a booming gambling industry amid the garbage dumps and slum. This strip of vice spread up to Rosslyn where a few gambling and drinking establishments hugged the Aqueduct bridge operating openly through legal manipulation and graft.

These vigilantes were not just concerned with vice; they also worked to ensure that African Americans stayed in their place in the social order and showed a willingness to turn to violence if needed. In 1897 a crowd took a young black man out of his jail cell in Alexandria and carried him to the intersection of Lee St. and Cameron where they cheered as a group hanged him by a lamppost.  The lynching shocked the community and led to a better protection of African American prisoners. Nonetheless, for decades to follow, law enforcement officials faced vigilante mobs threatening lynching. As late as 1917, officials had to hide smuggle out a black prisoner from a jail in Ft. Myer Heights as a mob gathered outside.

All of this led to this day in March and the Klan proudly flaunted its numerical strength as well as institutional power in the form of a Home Defense League badge.  The Klan arrived in Cherrydale long enough to pose with an American flag and signs reading “We are for law and order” and “We were here yesterday. We are here today. We will be here forever.” The signs suggested the permanency of white protestant power while sending a warning to the “wets” that prohibition would be enforced by the Klan. 

From there the parade took a snaking route through population centers in Ballston and Clarendon with the Klan stopping briefly in each place to display their signs. The stops in these places were for recruiting purposes because this was where the base of the Klan would have lived. Unlike the later Klan of the sixties, the twenties Klan consisted of well-placed small businessmen and tradesmen who were pillars of their community.

After this stop in friendly territory, the parade then took a purposeful route into the territory of the Klan’s enemies.  The parade turned onto Key Boulevard and through the heart of the small African American quarter of Rosslyn. This would be a tense moment in the parade as the Klansmen stopped briefly for reasons left unexplained in newspaper accounts.  Community members turned out in the streets to heckle the marchers and violence seemed a distinct possibility in the cool March night. The 1919 riots showed African Americans in the DC area that blacks could stand up against vigilante violence and gave the community a sense of pride as they faced such intimidation.  In some cases, the black community in Northern Virginia organized armed bands to protect against lynching. In McLean in 1895, blacks armed with shotguns stood down a white lynch mob outside the constable’s house as a young African American suspect cowered inside.  The Klansmen and the black residents of Rosslyn confronted each other with this history boiling inside.

Just as the friction between the two groups seemed headed to physical confrontation, the parade lurched forward towards its terminus at Dead Man’s Hollow. The Klansmen turned back to Lee Highway passing Dead Man’s Hollow, which was a notorious hideout of highwaymen and killers located roughly at the base of the Key Bridge Marriott’s parking garage. Here the ruffians from Rosslyn would dump bodies and roll cash-rich farmers as they left the markets of Washington.  Did the local thugs watch the parade warily from their roosts and did the Klansmen gaze into the woods hoping no gunshots rang out?  The spot frightened locals after dark, so even the numerically superior Klan marched cautiously past the hollow.

The parade was a brief moment in the struggle against disorder by conservatives in the DC area.  As the Klan rocketed towards power, it appeared their vision of America could be a real possibility. Internal strife and corruption would split the Klan and Arlington would be no exception.  However, their legacy would endure in both the positive and the negative. On the one hand racism and intolerance would persevere right up to the days of the Nazi Party in Arlington, but  the Klan’s demands for a clean county government would also nourish the movement that brought Arlington a more open government.  

Hard Riding Virginia Duo 1972

Hot Rods

Flat and Scruggs

Annandale Grill

Circa 50s.  It is the center left of the picture with all the cars out front.

Bikers 1965-1967



Pagans in Newark 1967 (Lil Jesus far right)



Biker at Marlboro Raceway

Bikers, cops, and others at Marlboro Raceway

Whitey's in 1970s

An Old Gang Card

From Facebook

The Tullers: The communist cell in Alexandria and the Murders that Shocked Washington

On October 17, 1972, Charles Tuller turned in his resignation from his middle management job at the Department of Commerce. He would go on a leave of absence until the resignation became official on November 4. Tuller cited his diabetes and recent double hernia surgery as his reasons for stepping down. Colleagues had noted he looked like “death warmed over” so it didn’t come as a shock. Tuller was dedicated and worked hard at his job delivering government aid to minority businesses and many coworkers knew him as thoughtful and considerate. On the other hand, he had acquired odd views and had become obsessed with communist revolutionaries. Tuller’s coworkers and supervisors didn’t realize that the resignation was the catalyst that put in motion a carefully choreographed sequence of events.

On October 21, Charles’ son Bryce went on a three day pass from Ft. Bragg and would go AWOL when he didn’t return. Another son, Jonathan, called in sick from his lineman job at Vepco complaining of flu symptoms. William Graham, a family friend and former classmate of Bryce at TC Williams, went AWOL from his truck repair job at Ft. Benning. The four men gathered at Charles Tuller’s apartment at 3807 Executive Avenue in Alexandria, but they were short one man that backed out at the last minute when he realized they were serious about their plot to start a revolution in the United States. The Tullers had just moved into the apartment, which was in a building full of transient Washingtonians.

On October 24, Bryce and Charles went to American International Rent-a-car in Crystal City and procured a car. Charles signed as himself while Bryce signed his alias, J. Santino Wilson, a name also listed on their apartment’s lease (mysteriously, the clerk at the rental car place was adamant that Bryce’s picture did not look like the J. Santino Wilson who signed the rental agreement). Probably that evening, the plotters stole a C&P truck and uniforms from the lot at 115 S. Floyd St.

The next morning, William Graham and Charles Tuller drove their rental car towards Crystal City after leaving their brown 1967 Mercury Cougar at 20th and S. Fern St. The two Tuller sons, dressed in C&P uniforms, drove the stolen C&P truck and parked it on the corner of S. 20th and S. Clark St. next to a manhole that contained the telephone lines for the Crystal Plaza Complex. Amid the hustle of the morning rush, the two men would have been inconspicuous as they climbed into the hole and cut off the phones and alarms for entire area. However, as they worked the Assistant Residential Manager for the Crystal Plaza apartments peered down the hole out of curiosity. One of the men told him that water had “got into the splicing.”

Meanwhile, inside the Arlington Trust Company at 2001 Jefferson Davis Hwy something seemed strange when the phone lines suddenly went dead. One customer joked to the assistant manager “it’s a perfect time for a robbery.” Inside, Charles waited for his two sons and inquired at the Crystal World Travel Agency about the Alleghany Airlines schedule that day. At 10:30 AM on October 25, 1972, the Tuller sons, dressed as telephone repairmen entered the bank and told the manager they were there to repair the phone lines.

As they entered the bank, Charles followed and sat in the bank lobby unnoticed in the typical Washington dress of a shirt and tie sat. William Graham stood outside the back door near the getaway car. The two Tuller sons told the bank manager, Harry Candee, that they needed to get to the telephone box, so he escorted them to a back room. They entered the room, shut the door and told Candee it was a hold up. Candee resisted and they hit him with a blackjack. A teller, on her break in the back room, began to panic and may have screamed. As Candee continued resisting, one of the Tullers fired his gun, which mortally wounded Candee and grazed the bank teller.

At the same moment, the Cuban-born Arlington police officer Israel Gonzalez entered the bank and walked past Charles Tuller. Stories differ on why Officer Gonazalez entered the bank. He was either alerted by an employee unnerved by the dead phones or he was doing his routine check of the bank. Whatever the reason, he walked through the door as shots were fired in the back room. Gonzalez drew his gun and came into a glass hallway where he saw the Asst. Bank Manager open the door to the break room. Out of the room dashed the Tuller sons and Gonzalez fired two shots before the Tullers returned fire. When Charles Tuller saw this, he drew his gun and ordered the employees and customers on the ground. As Gonzalez and the Tuller sons exchanged fire, Charles Tuller shot him in the back causing Gonzalez to fall through glass doors leading to the back of the bank. As he lay dying from six gunshot wounds, Gonazlez managed to fire his gun and shoot Jonathan Tuller in the hand.

In a panic, the Tuller sons headed out the door towards 20th St. while Charles Tuller ran out the door leading to the apartment building. All three joined Graham on S. Clark St. and they piled into the getaway car. They left behind $160,000 in the bank vaults and a bloody scene of panicked customers and employees. With Jonathan bleeding from his wounded hand, the four men drove on S. 20th St., crossing Jefferson Davis Highway to S. Fern St. where they exchanged cars. Once they got into their other car, they headed south rushing away from the scene with their original plan in tatters. At some point they arrived in Winston-Salem where a friend of Bryce unwittingly gave them a new car. The generous girlfriend would arrive home to find her house surrounded by police hot on the trail of the bank robbers.

Charles Tuller remembered from his business travels that there was a surgeon in Houston he could trust. As the four men sped 1500 miles south west, they were in constant fear of the police. At one point, in Georgia, a state trooper passed them with his lights flashing and as he drove by, they held their loaded weapons ready to kill. Later, they stopped at a truck stop and one of the robbers, with a gun in his jacket, ran right into a police officer. There was tense moment before the officer said “excuse me.”

Five days after the robbery, the four men showed up at the Houston airport on October 30 and approached the gate of an Eastern Airlines plane boarding passengers headed for Atlanta and Syracuse. They waited until all the passengers had boarded the flight and Charles Tuller, leading the others, stormed the ramp of the plane. A ticket agent named Stanley Hubbard tried to stop Charles and they fell to the ground wrestling over his gun. Charles was able to pull the gun away and shoot Hubbard in the stomach. As Charles got up, Bryce Tuller shot Hubbard in the head. Hubbard lay dying, still holding Charles’ jacket as the four men rushed the plane. Outside, Wyatt Wilkinson refueled the plane when the engines suddenly started. Realizing the extreme danger of fuel and running jet engines, he ran into the terminal to get the plane to shut off where he found Hubbard and called an ambulance. He rushed down the ramp where he was met with gunfire and was hit three times, but survived the wounds.

The four hijackers stationed themselves throughout the plane and ordered the pilot to fly to Cuba. They told passengers to keep their hands on their heads for the entire 4 hour flight while Charles ranted over the intercom about his revolutionary leanings declaring “the revolution has started!” One African American passenger, Ron Pinckney, news director at WOL radio, had a gun pointed to his head and Charles asked him “What’s the matter black man? Are you afraid to die? Blacks who do not fight and give into the white man are slave niggers.” Charles then turned to another man and asked him what he did for a living. The man replied that he worked for IBM to which the Tuller replied “I didn’t like your looks when you got on! I should have killed you then!” The plan flew to New Orleans for refueling and went on to Cuba where the hijackers got off the plane and released the crew and passengers. The terrified hostages made it back to Miami the next afternoon. The four hijackers went into Cuban custody with no resistance.

Unfortunately, hijacking was a rather routine event in 1972, but Washingtonians would be shocked to learn that this band of radicals were locals living a typical Washington life, at least superficially. Since 1968, the US alone had 364 airliner hijackings with most of them being diverted to Cuba, but these hijackings had roots in a CIA tactic in which planes were hijacked from Cuba to the US to sow fear and confusion in the communist regime. After the CIA employed the tactic, leftists in the US began copying it as a way to gain entrance to the closest communist country. Cuban authorities considered these hijackers either CIA patsies or mentally ill, so they usually ended up in prison. The Tullers hijacking would accelerate FAA security changes already in the works leading to a comprehensive bill would pass Congress the next year. The changes brought universal screening procedures including bag inspection and scanning of passengers. As part of this comprehensive package, the CIA ended the use of hijacking as a covert action in Cuba and the US reached agreement with Cuba to prosecute or extradite hijackers. The Tuller group would be among the last hijackings on US soil and the deadliest, but a new wave would begin shortly, by radical Muslims borrowing tactics developed by leftist revolutionaries.

In addition to being among the last hijackings in the US, the Tuller band was the part of the rear guard of a fading movement. Communism was all but dead in the US and even among student radicals, communist philosophy held sway among only small militant groups. Nonetheless, the actions of the Tuller group would resuscitate quiescent fears of communist infiltration in government that were fading in Washington under a rising obsession with the deficit. By 1972, Washington was changing as conservative ideas began surpassing the New Deal, which was struggling to revive the economy. The old liberal constituencies were moving out of the mainstream of Washington as the once mighty coalition splintered. The splintered left brought out increasing frustration in the far left and this frustration bubbled into a series of violent events in the seventies. Tullers’ militant cell emerged out of nowhere in Alexandria, apparently disconnected from any other left-wing organization.

Tuller considered his group patriotic and the New York Times described him as “a handsome, aggressive, $26,000 per year bureaucrat who apparently believed the American dream could belong to everyone and worked to make it so.” However, beneath this hard working middle manager was anger at “the system” and its “oppression of blacks.” Racked with diabetes, Tuller became mentally unstable over the years and began turning to militancy as he became less satisfied with how the United States treated African-Americans. Tuller worked hard and could be charming, but could sputter with rage if “the system” held him up.

Tuller grew up comfortably in Toledo, OH, but when he was 9 his 4 year old brother was run over by a truck for which Tuller’s dad blamed him. Tuller later claimed, as his dad was on his death bed, he told Charles he would never forgive him for the death of his brother. This event shaped Charles’ life and would slowly erode his rationality. For years Charles would see a psychiatrist in New York as he dealt with his racking guilt. Despite this, Charles showed much promise in life as a man dedicated to helping others. Sometime in the early fifties, perhaps while attending college in New York City, he became involved in the civil rights movement. Living in Newark, NJ, he rose to a leadership position in the local chapter of the Congress on Racial Equity while working as a welfare case worker. Eventually he joined Attorney General Ramsey Clark’s Justice Department despite some concerns about his emerging leftist views (ironically Ramsey Clark would go on to become a Stalinist as the head of the International Action Center). Tuller would move through a few government jobs before landing in the Commerce Department where he specialized in helping minority businesses. He pursued the job with vigor, but he began to feel that his work was treating “symptoms and not the causes” of poverty and inequality.

By the late sixties he grew to hate white people and believed in standing with black and brown Americans over white Americans. A neighbor said “he was always ‘aginer’ and “against everything and everybody.” Around this time he embraced the philosophies of leftists like Mao Tse Tung and Che Guevara. Tuller probably found in Mao and Guevara a theory of empowerment for disenfranchised people and a way for them to organize to take over the power structures that oppressed them. Mao was leader of the Chinese revolution who developed a set of theories based on independence from the Soviet Union and distinctly Chinese solutions to problems. The revolution in China led to a new communist superpower that would not be subservient to the Soviet Union and would lead to global break-up of the communist movement. Mao introduced the “Three Worlds Theory”, which placed the US and Soviet Union in the first world, Europe and other developed countries as the second world, and the poorest unaligned nations as the third world. Mao believed the oppressed people of the third world would lead the Marxist revolution and, by extension, people of color were the revolutionary masses while white people were the people of privilege and counter-revolutionists.

Che Guevara admired Mao and believed he could extend his revolutionary theories to the peasants in South America. Admirers of Mao and Che in the US applied these ideas to say that white people in the US were the beneficiaries of “white privilege” and because of this they would tend to be counter-revolutionary. Thus, any good Maoist would align themselves with black and brown people because these people are the true proletariat. This simplistic view of American society led many Maoists to naïve views of poor and working class Americans which hampered their organizing. In other words, not many black folks want to overthrow capitalism and most white people are not fascists, which leads to a rapid breakdown of political theory for Maoists operating in the U.S.

Tuller didn’t embrace the American Maoists and sought an independent road. Perhaps viewing himself as a communist philosopher in his own right, Tuller never joined a communist organization because he felt they were too much in service to foreign governments. He took Mao’s nationalist independent views and applied them to the US where he hoped to recruit a revolutionary coalition of small farmers, small business owners and poor people to rise against the powers. True to the tactics of Mao and Che, he hoped, by organizing a small cadre, there would be a mobile and agile group of revolutionaries able to help local people take direct action. He considered his views to be “100% American”, patriotic and improving the lot of the people at the bottom of the heap.

Charles’ militancy and mental deterioration caused problems in his personal life. His wife, Edith, whom he married in 1949, put up with torrents of emotional abuse. If Charles needed someone to yell at, he would call Edith and tell her she was “a no good bitch”. Charles associated Edith with “the system” and had affairs with black women. He played out his frustration with whites by flaunting black girlfriends in front of coworkers and his wife challenging the sensibilities of the still very southern Washington area. When Tuller traveled to Houston on business he showed up at an office Christmas party with a black woman as his date causing uproar in this deep southern city. After the incident, his superiors had to ban him from travelling to Houston, which may have been part of his motivation for returning to the city and hijacking a plane. Tuller’s erratic behavior and infidelity forced his wife out of the house in March 1969 and their divorce became final in October 1971. Edith gave Charles custody of Bryce and Jonathan, who were attending high school at the time.

Charles remained close to his sons and was lenient with them. Their relationship, especially with Bryce, was more like friends than parental. The boys embraced their father’s leftist sympathies and joined the Students for Democratic Society chapters at Annandale High School and later TC Williams. When Bryce attended Annandale High School, he started an underground newspaper supporting leftist causes and caused a stir among students. The leftist activities of his sons caused Mr. Tuller to go to school often to defend them. He would use this time to rail against the system and threaten the principal. The Tuller house on Fontaine St. became a gathering point for a small group of radicals, which coalesced around the plot to rob a bank and start a revolution. By the late sixties, Charles Tuller’s ivy-league dress, cropped hair, and horn-rimmed glasses had evolved into long hair and a beard. At the time of the hijacking he sported a handle-bar moustache. When police searched his home they found marijuana plants growing in the back yard, parachutes stashed away, and piles of leftist propaganda.

As police learned in the days following the bank robbery, the hijackers had carefully planned the heist. Bryce Tuller sought training with the phone company as a cable splicer so he could learn which wires to cut and joined the army in February 1972 to learn to shoot a gun. Jonathan went to work at VEPCO to learn similar wiring skills. Charles Tuller robbed the First Virginia bank branch in Woodbridge of $5,822 in April in order to practice for the Crystal City holdup and to raise the funds needed for the bigger heist. Charles Tuller acquired at least one Lugar and went to Hunters’ Haven in Alexandria to buy a shotgun. The plotters regularly went camping to practice shooting their guns.

By the middle of 1972, the Tullers and their co-conspirators had settled on their plan. They were going to rob the bank in Crystal City and flee to the back woods of Canada where they could develop a leftist revolutionary commando unit. They hoped this unit could infiltrate the United States and organize a revolution. Charles Tuller believed this vanguard would incite a coalition of middle and working class Americans to rise up against capitalism.

When the plot went awry and two people lay dead, a bewildered city struggled to make sense how one of their own could go so crazy. They saw a man like many in this city who got up every morning and worked to help people with little or no thanks. Tuller was like many in the federal government, but he finally cracked. Shortly though, the media narration reverted to days of the red scare as an old familiar paranoia set into the city.

The Tullers actions brought back old red scare hysteria and briefly whipped the Washington establishment up as their old anxiety about communist infiltration of government came back to life. The columnist Victor Riesel reported that Tuller had been busted engaging in gay activities in New York and accused him of being involved in the incredibly square sounding “white bohemia”. This was a common accusation hurled at leftist activists as support for gay rights conflated with being gay. As Joe McCarthy succinctly put it, only “communists and cocksuckers” were against the anti-communist witch-hunt.

However, it would have been surprising if Tuller was gay given his devotion to the totalitarian wing of the left and his well-know dalliances with many women. The communist regimes that Tuller admired were strongly anti-gay, often considering it a mental illness or the result of capitalist excess. Neither Cuba nor China tolerated gays at this time and have been behind the US in recognizing the civil rights of gays. Perhaps Tuller encountered fellow leftist who were gay, but it would be strange for him to be devoted to Mao and supportive of gays.

As some columnists tried to stoke hysteria, others struggled to piece together an explanation for Charles Tuller and his followers. Newspapers published profiles of Tuller, but they couldn’t arrive at a rational reason for Tuller’s madness. Some tried to portray him as deviant, some blamed childhood trauma, and some placed him in the context of a wider civil rights movement, but none could make sense of the three dead men.

As the media worked to put together a narrative, government officials faced a nightmare scenario. Reporters wrote about Tuller’s work ethic and passion, but simultaneously wondered how a guy with such radical views could get a job with the government. Through conversations with all the people in Tuller’s life, it was clear that he was good at his job and could be a very charming guy, but people were also troubled by his views and temper. This put government officials in a difficult spot because if they fired him for his communist views, they risked seeing a headline about reds infiltrating government and if they accused him of mental illness, they had a high legal hurdle to leap. Given that he was doing well at his job, his supervisors did nothing, which proved to be a bad decision.

Newspapers began calling for the establishment of an Employee Security Board to root out radicals in government despite it being clear that the government was not overrun with reds. Roger Wilkins, who had recently gone to work for the editorial page of the Washington Post, hired Tuller in the Commerce Department, but he told reporters that Tuller “struck people in a mean way” and he told his successor at Commerce to watch Tuller. However, no one took any action against him during his time.

As Washington debated what the robbery and murders meant, the Tullers and Graham landed in Cuba and were immediately taken into custody. They were held in solitary confinement for months and given little food and no new clothes. Once released the Tullers were sent to labor in sugar cane fields, which they would later describe as “a living hell”. The Tullers wanted to leave after the first day, but Cuban authorities would not allow them to go. They barely subsisted for months in a rundown hotel with no running water and ate mostly rice. Later, Bryce Tuller claimed they were “starving to death” during this time. At night, in a nearby courtyard, they could hear the firing squads execute anti-Castro Cubans.

On the other hand, Graham was studying languages and history at the University of Havana by 1973. In his off time, Graham enjoyed swimming and volunteered for construction crews building apartment houses. He condemned the Tullers as the murderers of the three victims in the US and declared that he had broken with them. Charles Tuller was angry with Graham because he blamed his sloppiness for the murders in the US and Graham decided that Charles Tuller was mentally unbalanced. By 1975, Graham has left the University and had become a night foreman at a print shop, which his mother would only describe as “involuntary.”

Charles Tuller’s health turned for the worse in Cuba and he may have been hospitalized after a heart attack. On June 20, 1975, Cuban authorities gave Charles and his two sons $1,400 and some false identification papers. They put them on a series of flights leading to Miami. Amazingly the trio walked through the airport undetected and entered the United States. As they made their way back to Alexandria, they attempted to rob and Kmart in Fayetteville, NC. Bryce Tuller entered the manager’s office and showed his sawed-off shotgun under his coat. He took the cash and demanded the safe be opened. As the safe was opened a security guard distracted him and an enterprising manager grabbed a stool leg and began beating Bryce. The police arrived to find Bryce held at gunpoint with his own shotgun.

Charles and Jonathan fled the Kmart reaching Alexandria where they checked into a hotel and laid in bed with their shotguns. When they learned that Bryce was in jail, they decided it was time to turn themselves in. They went to the Washington FBI field office in the Old Post Office building and told the security guard that they wanted to see an FBI agent. They were sent to the fifth floor where they found an agent and told him calmly they were wanted for bank robbery and murder. The head of the DC field office recalled, “I had just come back from lunch and someone told me Charles Tuller and his son have just surrendered.” He went on to say “I’ve never been so surprised at anything in my life.”

As the Tullers stood before the judge, they wore the same clothes they had on the fateful day three years earlier. After a short trial the judge sentenced each of them to 100 years in prison. Shortly after his conviction, reporters interviewed Charles Tuller who said he had “no regrets” about shooting Officer Gonzalez in the back. When bank manager Harry Candee came up, he snickered calling his death “unfortunate” and saying “I guess he was doing his job the way he saw it”. In the end, Tuller considered his actions honorable and done for the greater cause of his country.

The sage of the Tullers didn’t end with their convictions. In 1984, Bryce Tuller seized an opportunity and escaped the Bland Correctional Center near Roanoke by walking past a guard and through an unlocked door. He remained on the lam for 2 days before police caught him walking along Interstate 77 near the West Virginia border exhausted from his time in the woods. In the late seventies, William Graham slipped back into the US and federal authorities got wind of it, but they couldn’t find him. Graham moved to San Francisco and had a successful career until he saw his case on America’s Most Wanted in 1993 and decided it was time to end his run from the law.

Today Graham, Bryce Tuller, and Jonathan Tuller are serving life sentences while Charles Tuller died in prison in 1988.

Blitzkrieg Bop in Bailey's Crossroads: Louie's Rock City and the Birth of Punk in DC

In June 1975, Hawaiian restaurateur Johnny Kao rented the former site of Giant Food at at 3501 S. Jefferson St. in Bailey’s Crossroads and turned it into a Las Vegas styled lounge called the Royal Hawaiian Supper Club. The club opened to much anticipation and fanfare in December 1975 with Patti Page and a comedian named Freddie Roman headlining the first week. The club was beautiful by all accounts and appealed to the over-thirty suburbanites driven from the city by crime and racial tension. In short order the club featured The Platters, Phyllis Diller, Eddie Fisher, The Smothers Brothers, Billy Eckstine, The Supremes (post Diana Ross), and Bobby Rydell. However, the article on the club’s opening night sounded some ominous warnings such as the strange location of this glitzy club in the middle of a suburban shopping mall and, worst of all, on opening night it was only three-fourths full. Patti Page expressed surprise at the club’s location and Roman joked about performing in a shopping center.

By June of 1976, the club ran into financial problems and was sold to new owner named Mike Munley. Mike Munley had been co-owner of the Bayou in the fifties with the Vincent and Tony Tramonte (in 1980 after selling the Bayou, Vincent Tramonte would start the Italian Store on Lee Highway). After he was bought out from the Bayou, Munley ran the Place Where Louie Dwells located originally at 1000 4th Street, SW in DC and later moved to 1011 Wesley Place, SW. It was a typical lounge in the Southwest waterfront area opening around 1966 featuring mediocre food and lounge jazz. Louie’s gained some brief notoriety when the local piano-man Samuel Marks collapsed at the piano and died. When Munley bought the Royal Hawaiian, he began to work to change the name of his new restaurant to the Place Where Louie Dwells.

While Munley worked on the name change, he expanded the line up with his first act being the country singer Lynn Anderson of “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” fame. In July 1976, one of the last acts to appear at the Royal Hawaiian Supper Club was the Mills Brothers during the week they would entertain the ever-square Gerald Ford at the White House. Munley also inherited a dire financial situation and checks sent to entertainers bounced, which led to a $15,000 lawsuit by singer Jack Albertson. The club featured artists such as the Amazing Kreskin, Brenda Lee, and Sarah Vaughn.

Probably driven by economics more than anything, in October, 1977, the name of the club had become Louie’s Rock Concert City, but it was commonly known as Louie’s Rock City and they began to bring in rock music in the hopes of saving the business. In November 1977 Summersault and Cactus played, a few weeks later were Dr. Feelgood and Gentle Giant, Rick Derringer, Johnny Winter. Immediately, it became the place in NOVA for the burgeoning hard rock scene hosting brand new acts like Judas Priest before they hit the big time. Even though the club focused on rock music, it was cool to the new punk music coming out of New York. In 1977, the club cancelled the legendary punk bank the Nerves when they got a look at the band members.

By 1979, the owners of Louie’s Rock City accepted punk enough to host the Ramones. At first the Ramones were supposed to play on April 2, but it appears that show was cancelled for reasons lost to history. The Ramones would play Louie’s on July 27 and the show would be a cultural marker for the DC area. Of course, this wasn’t the Ramones first appearance in the DC area. They had played the Childe Harold October 22-24, 1976; October 11, 1977 at the Bayou; October 15, 1977 opening for Iggy Pop at the Baltimore Civic Center; and the Cellar Door with the Runaways March 19, 1978.

This time it was different because the punk scene in DC was coalescing around some kids for Northwest Washington, suburban Maryland and Northern Virginia. A young music promoter named Seth Hurwitz saw the Ramones were coming to Louie’s and decided to bring them down a day early for the premiere of the Ramones’ new movie “Rock and Roll High School” at the Ontario Theatre in Adams Morgan. On July 25, 1979, The Slickee Boys and Razz played to a packed crowd as the Ramones signed autographs and mingled. For many kids, this was the beginning of punk in Washington and Hurwitz would go on to own the 9:30 Club and founded the musical promotion company Live Nation. As “Rock and Roll High School” rolled fans danced in aisles to the music and cheered through best scenes. The newspaper described the crowd as a mix of punks, hippies, and lawyers ranging from “preteens to aging rockers”. The next day, the Ramones signed records at Penguin Feather at 5850 Leesburg Pike. The building has been torn down, but it was located roughly on the parking lot of the recently shuttered Borders Books in Crossroads Center.

Ramones at Onatrio Theatre

Sensing the excitement in the city, the Washington Post was on hand for the Ramones gig at Louie’s on July 27, 1979. Initially the Post dislike punk because it upset the neat order of Washington, which was neatly divided into the three strata of the city, black people, polite Washington, and hippies. Punk didn’t fit and the old curmudgeon of DC music Richard Harrington declared punk was the “music for empty spaces of the mind.” In his review of the earlier Ramones show at the Bayou, he sounded a hopeful tone that punk was a passing fad when he said that half the crowd was there “out of curiosity” and “a number left after it became apparent that a Ramones set consists of monochord songs.” It’s a bitch being a cultural arbiter when the great unwashed don’t heed your cultural orders.

In a rare moment of wisdom, the WaPo hired a decent reporter, named Joe Sasfy, to cover the new music scene. Sasfy managed to straddle his reporting between a sympathetic eye towards the new sounds, but always writing in a way that polite Washington could understand. Wisely, Harrington was allowed to go to bed at a decent hour on the night the Ramones played Louie’s and the Post sent Sasfy to capture a cultural moment for the DC area. Sasfy noted in his article the Ramones fans showed up and were surprised by Louie’s dress policy and had to sew the tears in their clothes to get in. As the soon-to-be singer for Minor Threat and later Fugazi, Ian MacKaye recalled:

I have great memories of seeing the Ramones in 1979 in Virginia, a bit further out in the suburbs at a place run by the marines. It had almost a Hawaiian theme, an old-school bar/lounge kind of place, with cocktail waitresses and stuff. There was a huge line of people waiting to get in the show, and there was a skirmish at the front of the line, and the word spread like wildfire and came down the line that there was a dress code, and you couldn't have torn jeans. But you were going to see the Ramones-everyone had torn jeans! It just rippled: Dress code, they won't let you in with torn jeans. Suddenly-it was in a little shopping mall-people made a beeline for the pharmacy and started buying needles and thread. There was a whole fucking parking lot of people sewing their jeans up trying to get in this gig.

It’s surprising that Louie’s had a dress policy given they hosted Judas Priest and other hard rock bands. This incident may have stemmed from the club owners nervousness about hosting a punk show and was implemented as a way to control the crowd. Despite this barrier, the crowd packed into Louie’s to see one of the great Ramones shows. One recent high school graduate named Henry Garfield was there. The show would transform his life and he would form a band called Black Flag and change his name to Henry Rollins. Rollins speaks often about his experience at the show saying he “never got over that gig”. Later he said,

I saw them at a small club, Louis’s Rock City, which is now a Chinese restaurant, in Falls Church, Virginia, right over the bridge from DC. It was one of those over-sold events where there’s no breathable air. I was right in front of Dee Dee. It was the first time I can remember being really star-struck. A lot of us were just coming out of arena rock. I’d seen Led Zeppelin a year and a half before. But with the Ramones there was no barricade, I could’ve leaned over and grabbed the head-stock of Dee Dee’s bass. Johnny and Joey were very tall people, so they had quite a presence up close. There was no space between the songs; they just beat you over the head with it. It’s a hot night, there’s no air, it was kind of painful, really loud, and we knew every word to every song – so you walked out of there, knowing you’d been put through something. You felt physically pummeled; it was really a full-on experience. I realized I was gonna be in this mindset for the rest of my life. I had no idea then what I was doing with my life. I had a minimum-wage job, $3.50 an hour, and a really bad apartment with a friend. So the Ramones had a very big impact on me.

These few days the Ramones spent in the DC area would change the landscape of the city and in short order it would become one of the centers of punk music in the United States. The Ramones at Louie’s would echo through the years as DC developed a unique and thriving punk and new music scene that would bring sounds and clubs the city now considers routine.

As for Louie’s Rock City, the club would go on to host memorable shows by Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry in 1981. By this mid-eighties, it became primarily known for heavy metal and hosted a regular Battle of the Bands featuring local heavy metal bands trying to break into stardom. The club closed in 1989 and became a Chinese restaurant. Today it is the Babylon Futbol Club featuring soccer, Arabic, Caribbean, and Latin music.

The Admiral Grill

Northern Virginia was a center for the development of country music and especially blue grass as I’ve mentioned before on this blog. One of the legendary moments in the expansion of blue grass beyond local hillbilly migrants came in 1957 at a local watering hole called the Admiral Grill. The Admiral Grill was located on Columbia Pike at the current site of the storage company and stood roughly where the main office/entrance currently stands. The restaurant was there from at least the mid-fifties until the mid-sixties before becoming a restaurant called Westwoods, then a furniture store and finally a storage company. Back in the late fifties and early sixties was just a simple crossroads with a few small restaurants and an airport at the current site of Skyline Towers.

In 1957, Northern Virginia was filled with musicians playing a new brand of “folk” music that was a new take on old-time mountain music. It was called a variety of things before the name blue grass stuck deriving from the name of Bill Monroe’s backing band, the Bluegrass Boys. The sound was very popular among the transplanted Virginians and Carolinians yearning for the sounds of home, but it was stuck being played in small bars and restaurants with limited appeal.

The event happened by accident on July 4, 1957 when the Buzz Busby’s Bayou Boys were heading back to DC after playing a gig on the Eastern Shore when their car crashed. The band’s banjo player, Bill Emerson, had been riding in a separate car and was determined to keep the gig that night at Admiral Grill. He called on a guitarist, Charlie Waller, mandolinist John Duffey, and bassist Larry Leahy to fill in.

The gig went so well that the group formed a band and settled on the Country Gentleman because the members were city boys rather than “mountain boys”. The band they would go on to form was different from many country or folk bands playing around DC because they were young and spent most of their lives in an urban setting.

The band would become the most important and influential bluegrass band and formed a second-generation of bluegrass musicians that would spearhead the growth and popularity, particularly in the DC area. The band took influences from many genres, moving the music beyond its strict mountain roots by exploring rock and jazz. This widened bluegrass’ audience beyond the ex-mountain people into young urban kids from blue collar bikers to college kids.

The music would find a home in the Birchmere on Four Mile Run Dr. in Arlington and the Shamrock on M Street in Georgetown where rowdy hillbillies and college kids would mingle to the changing sounds of bluegrass.

Sadly, besides this single evening of fame, almost nothing is known about the Admiral Grill. The building was unceremoniously torn down to make way for development of the storage company and Radley Acura. If you drive behind Radley, you can get a sense of what Bailey’s Crossroads was like before the current development. One building that stood at the same time as the Admiral Grill was the service garage for Radley Acura, which was a auto repair shop. Otherwise, the Admiral Grill lives on in legend only.