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Today, many of D.C.’s alleys today host the city’s boho chic. Cady’s Alley in Georgetown features trendy shopping and dining. Eva Cassidy recorded her iconic live album at nearby Blues Alley Jazz. In Blagden Alley in Northwest D.C., you can get an artisan coffee at La Colombe Coffee Roasters or peruse the murals of the outdoor DC Alley Museum.
When Wilbur J. Carr arrived in Washington as a State Department clerk in 1892, however, the alleys of D.C. were home to many of the city’s poorest residents. Before automobiles or even electric streetcars, workers in the District had to live within walking distance of their employers – typically the federal government or, for some laborers, the people who worked for the federal government. So they crowded close together, even as affordable housing facing the streets ran short.
I’ve been curious to know how much Carr as a young clerk came into contact with people he would have considered of a different race or social class from himself – from the social and political elites of Washington to the laboring class, White and Black, including immigrants. Looking for the laborers led me to the alleys.
Observing Observations of Diversity in Turn-of-the-Century D.C.
As the federal government grew after the Civil War, space in the row houses on the streets became prohibitively expensive for most laborers. Even government clerks like Carr were stretched. That first year, Carr earned $1000, while proprietors of boarding houses in Northwest D.C. often charged $25 to $35 per month for a room with board. A single man like Carr could manage, but a clerk with a family to support would struggle. A housekeeper or delivery person would be shut out financially, even leaving discrimination aside.
In the decades after the Civil War, the alleys became the stopgap solution. By 1897, 18,333 people lived in the alleys of D.C. Of those, 16,189 were black and 2,144 were White. Many White residents were immigrants or the children of immigrants.
D.C. alleys are different than those of many cities. Not simply through-ways for garage access and service vehicles, Pierre Charles L’Enfant designed the District with alleyways that might serve as sort of interior courtyards for the street houses, with space for gardens, washing, and community. As the District swelled in population in the late nineteenth century, however, owners and later speculators built two-story dwellings of wood and brick for rent to the working class. The resulting alleys – many of them H- or I-shaped on a map – became insular communities, sometimes housing hundreds of people.
A Society within a Society, for Good and Ill
Getting to know the alley communities hasn’t been easy for scholars, and it wasn’t very easy for outsiders at the time, either. Many street residents didn’t even know the alleys on their blocks existed – and the alley residents often liked it that way. In his fascinating 1982 study Alley Life in Washington, James Borchert broke new ground in understanding how alleys functioned as communities for their residents, who often met hostility and discrimination in the outside world. Examining family structure, community life, childhood, work and income, and religion, Borchert described a culture that in many cases worked well for continuing the social structures that had long sustained its residents.
The prevailing narrative about the alleys in media and government reports in Carr’s time had a decidedly different perspective. Fin de siècle and Progressive Era reformers focused on the disease and “shiftlessness” that they saw in the alleys they visited as volunteers for charitable and civic reform societies.
According to contemporaneous government statistics, alley life sometimes (though not always) carried more danger of dying from disease than street residence. In 1909 the Board of Health in 1909 reported that, although alley residents had sometimes fared better than early reports suggested, the death rates in 1908 were significantly worse for alley residents than for street residents. Overall that year, the death rate for White alley residents was 17.30 compared to a death rate for White street residents of 14.64. Black alley residents had a 31.86 mortality rate, compared to 25.65 for street residents.
Mortality rates could vary significantly by disease and by race. Whites living in alleys actually had a much lower rate of death from tuberculosis in 1908 than street residents, 62 per 100,000 compared to 125 in street residents, but Black alley residents suffered a terrible rate of 640 per 100,000 from tuberculosis, compared to 383 for street residents. Alley residence also increased infant mortality: Alley children under 2 were much more likely than children in street residences to die of diarrheal diseases: For White children, the rate was 247 children per 100,000 in the alleys compared to 64 per 100,000 in street residences. For Black children, the rates were 309 deaths per 100,000 in the alleys compared to 157 in the streets.
Carr and the Alley Reformers
Like many street residents of his time, Carr may have known little about alley communities when he moved to D.C. But he did have many alley-dwelling neighbors. In 1897, Carr married Mary Eugenia Crane, the daughter of a local merchant. After his marriage, Carr moved from his lodgings at 1622 Q Street to live with his wife (who went by “Mamie”) and her sister and widowed mother at 11th and M Street NW. That block included a throughway alley called Durr’s Court. In 1897, twenty-nine people, all of them Black, lived in Durr’s Court.
Moreover, just one block east of the Carr/Crane home, north of M Street between 9th and 10th Streets NW, Blagden Alley had 335 Black and 20 White residents, one of the largest alley communities in D.C. When Carr moved to his new home, it’s likely that he knew nothing about that community. The photo above depicts Blagden Alley in a 1912 publication by the “Monday Evening Club,” a volunteer reform organization.
Reformers sometimes professed concern for the welfare of alley residents while ascribing many of the hazards of alley life to the residents’ character. For example, Charles Weller, who spent time as a tenant in the alleys to report on their condition and inhabitants, published a book, Neglected Neighbors, in 1908, which included a section headed “Sufficient Power but No Inducements to Improve.” Describing the Sammons household, where one of Mrs. Sammons’ eleven surviving children lay dying of tuberculosis, Weller wrote,
The usual fact is typified in this family that is less inability than undeveloped standards of life that keep people living on the low places of alley life. There are possible workers and earning power sufficient in the Sammons household to maintain them decently upon an outside street. The cheap alley rents and low standards of living, simply mean a larger margin for drink for idleness and for vicious waste of power. Their present home even is much better in equipment than in management.
Weller noted tasteful colored pictures of Christ in front of Pontius Pilate and of Da Vinci’s last supper, then warned street dwellers that the Sammons family took in laundry and even “two beautiful little white children” for day care from White street residents.
In his study, Borchert found that alley landlords often refused to make repairs (sometimes objecting that the complaining party was a subtenant), and raised rents when repairs were made. Owners, few of whom lived nearby, made substantial profits on the alley dwellings. Borchert found that landlord profits on alley dwellings were at least double the profits for street dwellings.
Jacob Riis and the Other Half of D.C.
Some reformers’ objections and exhortations were more complex, or at least conflicted. Jacob Riis, the Danish immigrant and photojournalist whose book How the Other Half Lives stimulated efforts to reform slums in New York, was invited in 1903 to investigate the alleys of D.C. and make a report to Congress. On December 15, Riis addressed the annual meeting of the Associated Charities of Washington, D.C. After discussing infant mortality rates for Black alley residents (which, although high, appear to have been exaggerated or misunderstood), Riis said:
Then why can you not go straight ahead and get rid of your slums? First of all, you should acquire the right to deal with the man who insists upon murdering his tenants’ babies, because that is what it amounts to. You will be met right through at every step with the old conservative regard for property rights. They are not to be touched. They are sacred in some way or other. You can meet that sort of argument every time upon the basis of the health returns that are at your command, with the simple statement, it is murder. Before such a showing as that (the death-rate of colored infants) there are not property rights that are sacred. The declaration speaks of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It does not say a word about the right of anybody to kill his neighbor with a bad house any more than he has a right to kill him in the street with an axe.