Sorry I Asked

My father spent the first half of his childhood in Woodley Park, where his parents had a gracious semidetached house from the turn of the last century. It was across the street from the zoo, and one of Dad's fondest memories was spending summer nights on the sleeping porch, listening to the lions roar.


Later they moved out to Chevy Chase, trading a bigger house for a bigger yard. I once asked why.

“You want the truth?” Dad said. It was because black people had moved across the Calvert Street Bridge from Adams Morgan, which apparently signaled the end of civilization – at least to my grandparents. Ironically, Woodley Park remains to this day one of the whitest neighborhoods in Washington.

Here’s another irony, this one from the other side of the family. As my great-grandmother risked her life hiding Jews in occupied France, her daughter’s young family was settling into a restricted community in the “land of the free.”


This might never have occurred to me had I not met an elderly woman at a New Year’s party. She asked Dan and me where we lived, and it turned out that Parkfairfax had been her first home when she moved to the area in the ’40s. With housing incredibly scarce, her husband had come down from New York ahead of time to find a place. Parkfairfax, then new, was considered very desirable, but they informed him that they didn’t rent to Jews. Only after pleading his wife’s pregnancy and begging did he secure a lease.

As I mulled this over in the days after, I remembered the neighborhood handbook that I occasionally flipped through when I was young. Along with prohibitions on keeping livestock was a ban on renting or selling to “a Negro or member of the African race.” By the ’70s it was a shocking thing to see.

I called my mother, told her the story, and asked if our neighborhood had ever had a religious restriction.

“Oh, probably,” she said, quickly adding: “But it was never enforced.”

When she was growing up, there were exactly three Jewish families. They lived in the next block, all in a row, curiously. I don’t know what the count was a generation later, but there was only one black family the whole time I lived there, and I don’t think much has changed. Not that I’m casting stones. Parkfairfax may have dropped its restrictions, but it’s still Honky Hills.