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.

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.

The Ku Klux Klan and the Redneck Mafia in the twenties

The Ballston Klan No. 6 gathered on their field

The Ku Klux Klan probably arrived in Northern Virginia in 1921, but the organization didn’t rise into prominence until March 1922 when four hundred members marched from Chain Bridge to Falls Church passing through Clarendon, Ballston, Cherrydale, and Rosslyn. The marchers carried signs saying “We are for upholding the law”. According to one report, Northern Virginia had about 60,000 KKK members in the twenties, which may have been as much as two-thirds of the state membership, with the largest regional chapter being the Ballston Klan No. 6. The Ballston chapter held regular parades with its own marching band, sponsored a youth baseball team, and owned a field for cross burnings and other ceremonies at the current site of Ballston Mall. Of course this was the second coming of the Klan, which had risen from the ashes of the Civil War in the south avenge perceived wrongs such as equal rights to blacks. The first KKK was a terrorist organization enforcing racial codes in the rural south, but the second KKK was an urban fraternal organization obsessed with preserving its own brand of Americanism. The new KKK worked to minimize the influence of the newer white ethnics of Catholic and Jewish faiths while continuing to fret about blacks attempting to gain equality. Beyond this, the Klan worked for moral causes, threatening bootleggers, gamblers, and home wreckers.

Virginia passed liquor prohibition in 1916, one year before Washington DC, and four years before the federal law. The Klan aligned with the Anti-Saloon League and the Women’s Temperance Union to pass the law and worked to enforce it when they perceived local law enforcement as too lax. The division over prohibition created splits in the community between “wets” and “drys” that translated into the Democratic Party. In many parts of Virginia, this split caused an internal civil war among Democrats, but in Northern Virginia, the Klan seemed to ally more readily with the Republicans. Locally, the Democrats were more liberal and included more ethnic whites whereas the Republicans tended to be conservative Protestants, which more closely aligned with the Klansmen.

By 1922 the Klan had gained significant membership in Northern Virginia, which Goblins (the title for recruiters) brought in by a practiced script and salesmen practices. The strategy that helped the Klan thrive was to split the initiation fee among many stakeholders and the Goblins making a similar living to any well-paid salesmen. One Goblin in DC sued the Klan for $15,000 owed to him for his recruiting activities, which gives us a sense of the amount of money the Goblins earned. However, the problem with broad incentivized recruiting is an organization may get large numbers, but it will inevitably recruit undesirable members. By the early twenties, the Klan had become a large organization made up of a broad array of people that included men involved for fraternal reasons as well as thugs joining for less noble reasons.

In many cases, Klan members tried to use their connections as a cover for crimes or would overtly invoke the KKK name to intimidate blacks, Jews, or Catholics. For example, on September 1922, a man named Frank Fields went to the home of a young black girl and claimed he was a member of the KKK before he attacked her. The article was not clear on the nature of the attack, but implied it was a sexual assault. What preceeded the attack is also unclear; it may have been simply drunkenness, thuggery, intimidation, or revenge. Frank Fields was involved in bootlegging and had been arrested for shooting at another man on North Pitt St. near King St. in Alexandria. As was customary for the Klan when a member was put in the spotlight, the KKK wrote a letter to Frank Ball, the Commonwealth Attorney, denying Fields membership in the Klan. However, it is hard to believe Frank Fields wasn’t a member because his brother, Howard, was running for Sheriff at the time against AC Clements with the vociferous backing for the KKK. Howard Fields and Clements would have a decade long rivalry rooted in prohibition in which Klan and other drys perceived Clements as being weak on gambling and prohibition, but Fields, at least superficially, supported prohibition.

They also accused Frank Ball of being intentionally laggard on prosecuting gambling, but Ball struck back saying the Klansmen were cowards because they make unsubstantiated charges. Ball was a liberal on segregation and would go to have a distinguished political career and ultimately represent Arlington in the desegregation of the schools. Ball summoned the Klan to appear in front of a grand jury to show proof of their charge, but when the Klan members gave testimony; the grand jury could find no proof that county officials were culpable. However, the Klan regularly sent members and associates out to case gin joints or gambling rackets and in one case this amateur detective work paid off because police busted a gambling ring at the Hilltop Country Club in Arlington. Police raided the country club and found gamblers including the lookout George Mater from Bladensburg – a known thug and bootlegger.

Meanwhile in Alexandria in late 1922, the Klan had enough with bootleggers and gamblers, so they hung placards across the city so residents would wake on Monday morning to a warning, "We are here because certain conditions demand out presence. We know within the city of Alexandria the bootlegging traffic is increasing to alarming proportions. The authorities are apparently unable to cope with this deplorable situation."  The signs alerted residents that the Klan would be collecting evidence on bootleggers and gamblers to turn over to police. The newspaper noted that many Alexandrians snickered at the signs not believing the KKK had the strength or reach to put a dent in the thriving illicit industries. However, the Klan paid for a Private Investigator to mingle with bootleggers and pinpoint the speakeasies. In 1923, the Private Investigator held a party with a bunch of his new bootlegger friends, but it was sting for police to arrive and arrest them. That same month, police raided two speakeasies, the Majestic Lunchroom on King St, arresting Peyton Ballenger, and the Black Cat on South Union, arresting Leroy Beach based on evidence gathered by Klansmen.

Despite this crusade on behalf of the drys, the local KKK officials grew increasingly worried about the public perception of them as a violent organization. In March 1923, they felt the need to tell county authorities that they would help prosecute “people who make threats in the name of the KKK” and reminding them that “any communication of our order, is written on official stationary and signed by some officer of the organization.” Clearly the organization was doing well in publicity, but at the street level many perceived the organization as a group of thugs. While street level violence undoubtedly occurred under the banner of the KKK, the Northern Virginia chapters engaged in intimidation too subtle for newspapers to pick up. For example, the Ballston Klan would organize parades through the county in cars laden with food and clothing for the needy. Conveniently, many of these needy folks were Catholic, blacks, and Jews that the organization railed against in their rallies. Imagine the terror of being a black family visited by a parade of Klansmen dropping off food and clothing. While the act gained positive press, it was clearly intended to frighten foes without the messiness of violence.

Klan distributing baskets

The strength of the KKK grew into Election Day 1923 when they successfully elected Howard Fields for Sheriff. Fields had served before, but AC Clements had defeated him in the prior election. Fields alleged that Clements had beaten him organizing bootleggers and gamblers, which Clements denied. It is pretty clear that Fields was a member of the Klan because the chair of his election committee was Howard Bitting who would go on to be the leader of the Ballston Klan in the thirties. Clements was allied with Frank Ball and was Catholic, which was the ultimate disqualifier for public office in the eyes of the Klan. Fields was a true believer and allegedly promised to bring a second heaven to Arlington, but he regularly pulled strings for fellow Klansmen such as EE Naylor, whom he helped get out of a ticket for an expired auto tag. The Klan was so excited to have one of theirs leading law enforcement in the county that they had an impromptu parade across the county including 75 cars with the two leads boasting 8-feet tall crosses lit up.

Strangely, a few days later a group of men dressed in KKK regalia passed a saw to two inmates in the Arlington jail so they could cut the bars and escape. One escapee was Earl Blundon who was a lifelong criminal involved in burglary, bootlegging, and other crimes. Arlington police searched for him, getting so many tips from fellow bootleggers that police wondered if he had made enemies with other Arlington criminals. Perhaps Blundon had become allied with another group of bootleggers and the other criminals wanted him out of the picture.

In the case of Frank Fields and Earl Blundon, the two threads that tie them together are bootlegging and the Klan. Could the Klan (or a faction within it) been involved in illegal activities? The evidence is thin, but persistent as we will see. In other parts of the country, local Klan chapters would The involvement of the Klan in bootlegging It was never clear whether the KKK really aided in the escape, but they may have had motivation in a desire the ultimately embarrass the outgoing Sheriff Clements. However, this was the first instance of a coming trend in the KKK being tied to bootleggers. In Western North Carolina, Klan membership meant protection for bootlegging activities and ensured rival blacks or Catholics would be exposed. In 1923, a minister in Mississippi complained that any bootlegger with $10 could join. Just as many people discovered during prohibition, the money in bootlegging was too good even for prohibition supporters.

Arlington Klan attending a funeral in the Bon Air neighborhood

In September 1924 the involvement of the Klan in bootlegging became more evident. That day three Alexandrians, CM (or TM in some articles) Hughes of 719 Gibbon St., Ward Stuart of 513 S. Washington St., and Andrew Pettit 717 Duke St., set out to DC with a truck intending to load it up with fruit jars of illegal booze. As they returned over the Highway Bridge (now the Key Bridge), they stopped to get soft drink at a store just on the Arlington side when police noticed their payload and tried to arrest them. One of the deputies jumped on the floorboards to stop the truck, but Hughes thrust a pistol in his face. Luckily the deputy was able to push the gun away before it fired. Then Ward Stuart pulled his sidearm and held officers at bay until they could speed away. Alexandria police arrested the trio later that day and Arlington police came to get them. On his way to the station, Hughes accused the deputies of roughing him up as they interrogated him trying to learn the location of the liquor he smuggled. Arlington deputies claimed that Hughes was beaten out of self-defense because he continued to resist after his arrest. Ward Stuart asserted that the incident started on a country road in Arlington when police started shooting at them and the trio didn’t know who they were.

Other members of the Alexandria Klan were involved in illegal activities such as Ernest Crump who, prior to prohibition, ran a saloon primarily serving blacks. Police busted him in 1904 and 1906 for running illegal gambling and liquor operations. When Crump died in 1925, both the Alexandria and Arlington Klan came out to hold a ceremony for him. People like Crump, Ward Stuart, and CM Hughes either lived dual lives as hardcore prohibitionists and bootleggers or the Klan permitted bootlegging among members only. It would be impossible for the Klan to be unaware of the activities of a bootlegger like Ward Stuart who was known as a tough bootlegger who worked his racket with his brother Richard. He lived on South Washington St. nominally working in jobs such as mechanic and painter, but earning most of his living through crime. As police closed in to arrest him after the incident in Arlington, he awoke from a slumber and drew his pistol before he realized it was the police. His brother, Richard, spent time in prison for hijacking at gunpoint a black man’s car full of whiskey along Route 1, perhaps enforcing the bootlegging turf of the Klan

Obviously, the evidence is slim that the Klan in Northern Virginia engaged in bootlegging, but given the organization’s history of doing it in other areas plus the events I’ve written about point towards the possibility. By the late twenties, internal splits and corruption would cripple the KKK and the national membership would go from the millions in the mid-twenties to the thousands a decade late. In Arlington, the Klan formed in the twenties would continue until at least until 1944 sponsoring a youth baseball team and meeting every Thursday at 8pm at the Ballston Firemen’s Hall. Of course, the KKK would emerge again in the 1960s, but as a fringe organization of extremely violent anti-civil rights whites.

Bull Run Dance Hall

Bull Run Dance Hall (also known as Bull Run Park) was located near the Bull Run bridge on Rte. 28 – just inside Fairfax County. Irving Jackson Breedan (or IJ) ran the dance hall on his property adjacent to the Manassas Battlefield site. IJ was born in 1898 and spent time as a machinist at the navy yard, driving an ice truck in DC, and finally a grocer. He and his wife Jennie worked their way up the financial ladder and became large landowners around the Bull Run area and ended up selling their land for a small fortune. In the forties they built some houses along Rte. 28, three miles north of Yorkshire Village and later built 15 homes between West and Battle St. extended.

However, before the family hit it big in land speculation, IJ ran the rough and tumble Bull Run Dance Hall probably located here.   The dance hall was active from the late twenties until the late forties featuring local musical acts and a lively crowd. During Prohibition, the parking lot was a source for bootleg liquor and Sheriff EP Kirby and his deputies often worked undercover and busted bootleggers and buyers as they made the deal. In 1929, they busted a car load of revelers from Good Hope Rd. SE buying from Harvey Shelton, 29, of F St, NW. In 1932, as part of a crackdown on liquor, Kirby and his men raided the dance hall a number of times and arrested tons of people for drinking.

In May 1930, IJ’s brother Nicholas Marron Breeden found himself in serious trouble with the law. Nicholas played banjo in the house band, but he lived in DC. He was giving a young waitress named Myrtle Carter a ride home to East Capitol St. in DC and somewhere around Pender Drive he assaulted her. However, Nicholas was married to woman named Louise. After the assault Nicholas dropped Myrtle at the Key Bridge and sped away to his place on N St. Shortly after, police arrested Nicholas and brought him to Fairfax to face his charges. That night, he joined another inmate in prying bricks from the jailhouse wall and escaped. Two days later, police found him laying in a hayfield in Prince William County.

In 1931, Deputy Magarity went to the dance hall to arrest a black man named Curtis McLaughlin for shooting a black woman in Fairfax in 1930 and for PW for shooting a man in Thoroughfare, VA. However, Magarity encountered a fight going on outside between a white man and a black man. When he arrived one of the brawlers, Arvin Harris, lifted his pistol at Magarity’s head and fired twice, but the pistol misfired. Arvin then ran for his car, but Deputy Magarity grabbed him and another black man hit him on the head with a bottle. Then Sheriff Kirby arrived and helped Magarity arrest everyone. Harris would eventually get a year in jail for attempted murder.

It’s surprising to learn that the dance hall served both blacks and whites because we typically think of this era as one of strict segregation and it’s hard to imagine blacks and whites dancing to the same music. However, the idea of black music and white music (or even musical genres) was largely an invention of New York record labels during the twenties to more effectively market. Black and whites played basically the same music in rural areas that would be popular hits from the day so it would not have been strange to find blacks and whites seeing the same live music. However, it seems likely that the dance hall had segregated sections for white and black patrons dancing to the same band, but there is a chance they shared the same space, but didn’t dance together.

In 1947, Bennie Smith and Nobel Jackson had a quarrel in the dance hall because Jackson had been arguing with Bennie’s sister, Frances. Bennie tried to take Frances home, but Nobel sideswiped his car before he could finally escape. After he dropped Frances at her trailer west of Kamp Washington, he saw Nobel go in to it. Bennie got a gun and called Nobel outside and shot him dead.

Bull Run Dance Hall closed sometime in the late forties as the development of Bull Run Park and the Battlefield began.

Elton Wakefield

Here's a photo of Elton Wakefield, fiddler for the Virginia Corn Huskers. 

Happy Hour Pavilion

The Happy Hour Pavilion was a dance hall operating on Lee Highway from at least the late thirties until around 1950 located in the current Capital Rentals building at 12716 Lee Highway. The building was built in 1928, but the earliest record of it being a dance hall is during the late thirties when it was operated by Michael Mohr. Mohr (b. 1891) was a German Catholic immigrant and a highly respected citizen in Fairfax County who owned the parcel of land along Lee Highway where Happy Hour was. In 1939 he ran for Sheriff, but lost to Eppa Kirby, who would go on to form the Fairfax County Police Department. Mohr died in 1952 and is buried at St. Mary’s in Fairfax County.

The first ad of Happy Hour is from February 18, 1938 featuring Bill McLean’s High Hatters on Saturdays and Elton Wakefield’s Virginia Corn Huskers played Wednesdays. Both bands are a bit of a mystery and don’t seem to have made it beyond gigs in Fairfax County. Elton H. Wakefield was a popular band leader and fiddler in Northern Virginia at the time and played at Dixie Tea Garden in Merrifield among other engagements. Elton, living on Columbia Pike in Falls Church, was a Fairfax native, born in 1892 and during the day he worked as a machinist for the Navy. Elton died in 1964. I can’t find any information about the other members of the Virginia Corn Huskers. Bill McLean’s High Hatters are a total mystery. It appears there were a few bands based in DC around the same time sharing the name the High Hatters. One was a vaudeville act and another featured two women and a piano player.

Unlike other dance halls like Social Circle, Bull Run, and Chimney Villa, Happy Hour seemed to be the spot for the more law abiding set since it is never mentioned as a trouble spot. Perhaps Mohr’s campaign for sheriff is testament to the type of place he ran. About the craziest thing that happened there was a young woman broke her ankle while attempting the Charleston for the first time. The article from the time describes a hillbilly band playing square dances and old favorites before breaking into a spirited rendition of the Charleston. It seems moving from a square dance to the wild abandonment of the Charleston was too much for that crazy kid.

For some reason, perhaps a zoning issue, Happy Hour closed during 1943 and 1944. Mohr tried to sell the property, but then applied for rezoning as a dance hall and resumed operations in late 1944. This time period is especially odd because the dance halls were booming with so many young servicemen in the area looking for a good time. Upon reopening, Raymond Woolfenden managed the dance hall Woolfenden was in the twilight of a country music DJ career under the moniker Cousin Ray. He was inducted into the Country Radio Broadcasters in 1999.

Sometime in the late forties Happy Hour was taken over by Tom and Bob Lion. On March 25, 1949 Happy Hour featured Tom and Bob Lion and their “all-string band” The Gentlemen from Dixie. The advertisement boasts of “round dances, Paul Jones, square dances and all requests. Sadly, Happy Hour ceased operations sometime in the early fifties. During the seventies this location became an antique shop operating until 1985 when it became Capital Rentals. The building still stands at 12716 Lee Highway.

Arlington's Critical Role in American Music




Alan Lomax

 
Rosslyn was a seedy place going back to the Civil War with gritty industrial tracks interspersed with brothels, gambling houses, and bars. As the thirties brought an influx of government workers, Rosslyn began a slow transformation with the construction of garden apartments at the top of the hill overlooking the older grime. In 1940, Hot Shoppes opened a location right off the Key Bridge (roughly where Gateway Park currently sits) taking over from an infamous tavern at the edge of the Key Bridge.

Changes in Arlington brought New Dealers in the thirties and forties looking for cheap housing as demand drove up prices in DC. Two young activists and their wives named Nick Ray, his wife Jean Evans, Alan Lomax, his daughter Anna, and his wife Elizabeth rented a house at 1811 N. Oak St. at the corner of N. Oak and N. 18th St., just up the hill from the seediest part of Rosslyn. Nick Ray was a political activist, theater director, and radio producer who was working for the Works Project Administration. Ray was running the WPA’s theatre arts program that involved regular people and taught them how to tell their own story. Later, Ray would become famous for directing movies like Rebel Without A Cause. Lomax was the son of the famous folklorist, John Lomax, and had come to DC to work for Library of Congress collecting folk music. He had travelled the country discovering and recording now standard blues and country songs.

Through his work at the Library of Congress, Lomax came in contact with fellow folk singer Pete Seeger. During the winter of 1940, Seeger lived off and on at the house bouncing between Arlington, his folks’ place in Chevy Chase, and New York City. Lomax and Seeger collaborated on music and traded songs as they unwittingly began the folk music scene on the hills of Rosslyn.

On March 3, he appeared at a benefit concert for migrant workers put on by the actor Will Geer in New York. The concert was historically significant because it was the first large folk concert bringing together Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, and other legendary singers. Seeger met Woody for the first time and the two began a collaboration that would prove influential for American music. A week later Guthrie arrived at the Oak Street house to crash for a while and record for the Library of Congress on March 21, 22, and 27, 1940.

During April and May, the Oak St. house became a crash pad for a variety of folk singers like Josh White, Leadbelly, and Aunt Molly Jackson. Lomax, Seeger and Guthrie worked on the manuscript for a collection of political folks songs call Hard Hitting Songs for Alan, Woody, and Pete began a project to compile a book of political songs called Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People. They also collaborated with Nick Ray to develop a folk song program for CBS radio. Guthrie slept on the couch never removing his boots and eating his meals over the sink.

In mid-May, Seeger and Guthrie set out across the country heading for Richmond first and onto history. In July, Nick Ray and Jean Evans separated and Ray lost his job under political pressure for his alleged communist sympathies. Lomax continued his work collecting folk music from around the world and became a critical figure in American music.

The house is gone today and has been replaced by an uninteresting office building that belies the significance the location had in the development of our music.

Former Site of WARL Radio Station

For more on the radio station's significance, see this post.

The former site of Tuthill's Pool Hall in East Falls Church

Located at 6876 Lee Hwy in East Falls Church, the site is now the hard to pronounce La Cote Dor Cafe.   It's formal name was Falls Church Billiards and the place was known as a hangout for the Avengers gang.

Hunter's Lodge: Images from history

The Herndon Riot

Years ago I remember watching the local news and seeing the Fairfax County Police triumphantly unveiling their brand new riot tank, which was a state of the art armored car equipped to handle any kind of crowd disturbance. It was a classic example of a police department with too much money and too much time on its hands. My buddies and I laughed at the prospect of frenzied looting masses on the boring streets of Fairfax County. It turns out we were wrong and there was a riot in Fairfax County and it was a critical moment in the county’s relationship with its black residents.

The incident on started on a Friday afternoon in August 1974 when Felix “Catman” Rorls entered the 7-11 on Elden Street in Herndon about 4:30 PM to get some chocolate milk. Rorls had turned 26 ten days prior and was out with a group of friends. FCPD Officer John Mueller entered the 7-11 behind Rorls and demanded to see his license. The two men had been involved in a previous confrontation when Mueller busted Rorls for driving on a suspended license. When Mueller demanded to see his license Rorls replied “Why do I need a license in 7-11?” The events that followed are a little sketchy, but it seems that Mueller shoved Rorls through the glass cooler and hit him with his nightstick. Rorls proceeded to the register, bleeding profusely, and tried to pay for his milk. Mueller put his nightstick down on the counter and tried to handcuff Rorls. Rorls grabbed the nightstick and began beating Mueller, who fell down and drew his gun firing four to five shots at Rorls. Mueller wept as he and Rorls went to the hospital for treatment, but Rorls died of his wounds.

Mueller was a 31 year old white 8 year veteran of the FCPD. The department had been racked by years of rising citizen complaints of brutality and inept policing. The police force had a rate of solving crimes well below the national average and had only reluctantly brought on a small number of minority and women officers. Female officers had filed multiple sexual harassment complaints and the five black officers complained of discrimination.

Rorls was a black man from Clifton originally and had struggled after losing his mother when he was 11 years old. He had learning disabilities and had moved between various relatives as he grew up. By 1974 he was working Smith’s Trash Service and lived in Apartment 102 in Herndon Gardens.

Shortly after the shooting, a crowd of 70-100 gathered at the 7-11 and began simmering about the Fairfax police. This crowd was quickly dispersed, but the fuse had been lit. A couple of hours later about 300 people gathered at the Dulles Park Shopping Center and began throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails. Someone threw four firebombs into the Virginia ABC liquor store causing extensive damage. Police tried to disperse the crowd, but were met with a hail of rocks and bottles. For three hours police worked frantically to put out the many small fires caused by the rioters. Somehow the officer in charge, Cpl. Leonard Smith arranged a meeting with leaders of the mob and they demanded a meeting with Fairfax Prosecutor Robert Horan. Horan recently retired and had gained a reputation for being an exceptional prosecutor, but he was also known for not pursuing police brutality cases. The crowd demanded from Horan that he prosecute Mueller and Horan promised to examine the case and make a “prosecutorial judgment.” Amazingly, the mob agreed to these terms in withdrew.

The next night a small crowd gathered at the Dulles Park Apartments, but they dispersed when the riot police withdrew. The case was probed by a grand jury, which ultimately found no basis to indict Mueller. The county settled with Rorls’ family for a scant $25,000.

The riot was a culmination of years of building frustration in the Fairfax County black community. It laid bare the neglect and racism of a county transitioning from a sleepy southern backwater to a bustling suburb. The growth of the county placed enormous economic pressures on both white and black families that had originally lived in the county. The development boom brought rising land values, increasing property taxes, and a county hell-bent on growing. Many families had the option, and many exercised it, of selling out and moving on. However, blacks had the significant barrier of being excluded from much of the new housing stock whether through formal covenants or more informal methods. During this boom, the black population grew a tiny amount, but rapidly shrank as a percentage of the overall population. In 1960, blacks in the DC suburbs occupied 24% of deteriorating housing, 54% of dilapidated housing, and only 3% of sound housing. During the early seventies Fairfax built its first public housing, which had the effect of institutionally segregating them and enticing poor blacks off of valuable land. The two public housing developments, Herndon Gardens and Dulles Park which were both located in Herndon.

Herndon at one time was a sleepy railroad town, but it had boomed along with the rest of the county and had doubled in size in a few years. Mayor Lopp and Town Manager Noe handled the tense situation very badly. Noe admitted he had paid no attention to the concerns of black residents while Lopp declared they made up an insignificant portion of the town’s population. Lopp went on the blame the county for concentrating low-income residents in his town. Following the riot, a meeting was called with black residents to air concerns and seek solutions. Problems rattled off were a 10 pm street curfew, which was usually invoked only with black residents, lack of adequate shopping, recreation, and transportation. One leader summed it up as “if you don’t have a car, you’re lost.” Another resident said he had been stopped 35 times for “routine checks” by police since he had bought his ’53 panel truck two months earlier. However, the meeting did not go well as Mayor Lopp walked out after demanding that people stop shouting. Finally county leaders met with the residents and formed an ad hoc committee to find resolutions to the problems. The Citizens Committee of Fairfax County began meeting with police representatives and a federal mediator to come to an agreement. The Committee demanded increased minority hiring, training for police, and establishment of more citizen oversight. The county agreed to fill 18 vacancies with minority members and raise the minority representation on the force to 28.2%, which was the metro DC ratio.

The county continues to grapple with these problems today as housing it of reach to many, the police force continues to battle charges of excessive force, and Herndon is still a flash point for racial tensions, but now it is aimed at Latino immigrants. As for John Mueller, he served as a police officer until retiring in 1994 as a bomb technician. He was in the coast guard reserves and helped rescue people from the Air Florida crash. He died in Vienna in 2001.