Though I've documented more than 150 buildings that have been demolished in Near Southeast since I first started photographing the area (initially in fall 2000 and then for real beginning in January 2003) I had taken enough brief drives through the neighborhood in the late 1990s to know that there were a few other long-standing sites that I didn't manage to capture before they were gone. This has bugged me for years, not only because I hate having missed them for my own archive but because I felt like they were an important part of what made up the old Near Southeast.

So it was with a fair amount of wonderment that I spent time over the past week pouring through images from the National Park Service's HABS, HAER and HALS archive of photos, available online thanks to the Library of Congress. The collection contains photos taken above New Jersey, Virginia, and Potomac avenues from helicopter height in 1992, and while I had seen some of these before, I had never downloaded the massive .TIFF images that allowed zooming in to such a degree that buildings and streetscapes became clearly visible.

Needless to say, I went to work.

Buildings I had longed to see documented in public domain photographs*, most of which were demolished in 1999 and 2000, now reappeared, albeit from overhead, in black-and-white and what and sometimes only in grainy depictions. But there they were: Tracks, the nightclub at First and M. The four Capper apartment buildings on Seventh Street and Virginia Avenue. The massive Building 159 at the Southeast Federal Center (seen above). The Washington Star warehouse just south of the freeway that I had driven past hundreds of times but never photographed.

But I found a lot of other "lost" buildings as well, ones that I didn't remember and that probably weren't much to look at at the time, but that help to give a clearer view of what the neighborhood truly looked like just before its first "growth spurt" in 1999-2001 with the arrival of NAVSEA at the Navy Yard. The big finds were the seven or so old rowhouses just north of the (sparkling new) Navy Yard Metro station entrance on New Jersey Avenue, along with another 10 or so along L and Second Streets on what is now the Capitol Hill Tower/Courtyard block. (The Little Red Building did not stand alone since the dawn of time.) The car repair garage and other gritty low-rise buildings that stood where the 1100 New Jersey Avenue office building now is. And so on.

I gathered the images on a new page, with lots of narration of what they show, along with in some cases early photos of mine that captured a few of the buildings before they disappeared. I'm really thrilled that these pictures finally provide the bridge I've wanted for so long between what Near Southeast looked like for many years and what I captured when I first started nosing around.

In future Rearview Mirror posts I'll be talking more about many of these sites, so I didn't go into great detail on the histories of the buildings themselves, but I'm really happy that now there will be images to accompany the stories. I doubt most people will be as excited by these shots as I have been, but I still really recommend taking a few minutes to go through them.

But, of course, I'm yanking your chain, since this Post article is dated Dec. 16, 1965.

The group, the "Community Commitee Group," planned to visit the regional offices of Safeway, Giant, and Kroger to present the case that the residents of the area bounded by 8th, Virginia, M, and New Jersey had only two corner groceries, with the closest supermarket being at Seventh and G, SE, which was too far for the "aged who live in the Carrollsburg Dwellings project at Fourth and M." Also, because many of the residents in the area qualified for food stamps, they needed to be able to shop at a full supermarket, where the stamps would stretch farther.

The group "also hopes to interest a chain drug store and a combination dry cleaning-shoe repair shop to locate next to the proposed supermarket." Their suggested locations? "The west side of New Jersey Avenue between K and L Streets to replace some condemned buildings [ahem], the Washington Navy Yard parking lot on 2nd Street between M and I Streets [ahem], and the Lennox School annex at 4th and M Streets [ahem]."

In the meantime, while you're mourning the fact that no progress has been made in the brief 45 years since this article was published, you can think about another big development that Near Southeast missed out on: In the early 1990s the Federal Bureau of Prisons was looking for a location for a new 1,000-bed federal detention center, and one of the spots it considered was on the north side of I Street between South Capitol and New Jersey, the spot that's now home to the Axiom and Jefferson apartment buildings. And McDonald's. And Splash. (The other possible locations were in Northeast, but after battles with the National Capital Planning Commission and thanks to some pretty staunch opposition by city officials and residents, the Justice Department scrapped the plans in 1993.)

And this gives me an excuse to link to my own Historic Photos page, which includes some of the photos that Madison Marquette posted along with others of the neighborhood from about 1918 to 1992. (There's also my Historic Maps page, for plats showing the neighborhood for various years between 1903 and 1921, if you want more wayback goodness.)

There are a lot more cool historic Near Southeast images out there, but unfortunately some libraries and historical societies tend to be quite strict about reproducing photos from their archives (often requiring payment even for use of low-res images that already exist online), so rather than those photos getting seen by people who are truly interested, they languish in file cabinets or little-used online databases. It's a shame, because I could have a lot of fun with them, but the attendant bureaucracy has pretty well stifled my interest in pursuing them any farther or even linking to them. Plus I'm too honorable to just steal the thumbnails and post them anyway, which I could certainly do. (And you can be very sure that my photos will never end up with these levels of restrictions.)

At least the great archive of historic photos that DDOT had begun to populate a few years ago is still around (though not on their new site, you kind of have to go digging for it via Google). Hopefully they'll get around to adding more shots. I've got a scanner, DDOT, let me at them!

Yeah, kind of!

Late the next day, I went out and took a set of photos throughout the 21 acres that would eventually become home to Nationals Park, knowing it was important to get a bunch of "before" photos should this stadium actually come to pass. This was in the days when my photo-taking was pretty much limited to firing my little point-and-shoot digital camera from behind the wheel while I drove around the neighborhood, having not quite yet worked up the bravery to get out on foot. (Eventually I documented all of the buildings that were demolished to make way for the ballpark, but this Sept. 22 excursion marks for me official start of what would become an all-consuming project for me over the next four years.)

It wasn't until the next week that it was all made official, that the Expos were coming to town and that the city would pursue building a new stadium in Near Southeast. And the reality of the ballpark didn't truly come to pass until that marathon city council session in February 2006 that first voted down then finally ratified the stadium lease agreement (signed by MLB the next month), followed two days later by the court ruling allowing the eminent domain seizure of the land for the ballpark to move forward. Demolitions began in May 2006, and the construction was completed on time for the official opener on March 30, 2008.

To look at not only the Sept. 22 ballpark-area photos but also a batch I took mainly around the Cappers footprint a few days earlier is to be reminded yet again of how much change has come to this area in the same amount of time that many people, say, pay off a new car. It's almost jarring to catch glimpses in these shots of the old South Capitol Street viaduct (demolished in July 2007) that in many ways was such a symbol of the old Near Southeast--how it walled the neighborhood off from Southwest, and how it helped perpetuate the area's overgrown industrial feeling, while allowing commuters to blow past it all without really having to look at it.

It's going to be a while before big-time development resumes in the area (just like everywhere else in the city/region/country), but that doesn't make the changes that have already happened to this formerly forgotten little spot a mile south of the U.S. Capitol any less striking to look at.

This was all well and good to watch buildings go up, but it hasn't really done the job of being a full archive of all of the photographs I have of the 150-plus buildings that have been demolished since 2003. So, this weekend, I did a lot of work (a *lot* of work) to redesign my online photo archive to make room for close to 700 additional old photos from all parts of the neighborhood, allowing them to now be displayed without messing up the official "paired" before-and-afters that you see on the home page and throughout the site.

Many of these images aren't prize-winners--a lot were shot haphazardly, often through a dirty windshield or into bad light, with an old-model point-and-shoot digital camera (since I didn't take the plunge and get a digital SLR until early 2006). But, with more people arriving in the "new" Near Southeast who may not really know what it looked like only a few years ago, I felt it was important to make as many of these old shots available as I could.

A large number of these newly added images were taken "mid-block", showing angles and buildings that have not been well represented up to now. And I think some of these photos will be of interest the people moving into Capitol Quarter, giving them a better chance at seeing what their lot looked like when the Capper/Carrollsburg buildings were still standing. The images of many of the old nightclubs and hangouts may also be of interest to old-timers. (And Nats fans might get a kick out of the additional photos of the area just north of the main entrance to the stadium.)

To make the archive easier to use, I've redesigned its main browsing interface, giving a couple different methods of entry to the additional photos. You can click on the map as before, which will take you right to the "paired" before and afters for all angles of an intersection; using the icon will then reveal the complete set of photos for a particular angle, including images taken further along "inside" a block. But you can now also search by year or month or date, or by a combination of dates and locations, to better hone in on what you're trying to find. So, if you want to see all photos I've posted from May 2003, it's now much easier to do. (Though, if you're looking for mid-block images, you may need to "approach" your location of interest from the intersections on both sides to be sure you're seeing all the available photos. Knowing your geography and having a good sense of direction will be a big help!)

There's probably still a bit of tweaking (I see a few of the official paired before-and-afters have gotten broken and need some back-end tweaking, and I still need to plow through 2006 and into 2007 to add more photos of the buildings that were demolished more recently), but hopefully having these photos included will be a welcome addition, if not now then as the years pass and the old Near Southeast fades from many peoples' memories.

So, spend some time wandering through it all, and see what captures your eye.

* "Although thousands of people have journeyed to the once-forgotten downtown neighborhood to watch professional basketball, hockey and other events, the three-month-old arena has not yet become the seven-day-a-week destination that team owner Abe Pollin envisioned when he built it."

* "Some neighborhood businesses are counting on Discovery because, except on game days or during concerts, the building has failed to produce the return that city leaders imagined when they hailed MCI Center as an engine for revitalization. 'It's not the pot of gold we thought at the end of the rainbow,' said Danny Callahan, an owner of the Rock sports bar across Sixth Street NW from the arena."

* "Restaurant owners say the arena has boosted business, but not to the extent they had hoped. [...] The arena has actually hurt business on nonevent nights. The old regulars don't drop by anymore, because they never know when the area will be swamped with arena patrons, and parking prices have shot up."

At least Nationals Park got a year before the it's-not-doing-what-people-said-it-would-do slew of articles. And what a shame that the MCI Center, after that disappointing start, never amounted to anything....

Let's take break from the here and now and spend a few moments looking back at Big Moments in Nationals Park History, as reported here on JDLand. This is kind of long, but you younguns and latecomers who didn't follow it all from the beginning might find this timeline of interest.

* Sept. 21, 2004, I posted this wonderfully understated entry: "Baseball coming to Near Southeast? "District officials disclosed plans yesterday to build a publicly financed stadium costing more than $400 million on the Anacostia waterfront near South Capitol Street, amid growing signs that Major League Baseball will attempt to move the Montreal Expos to Washington." It doesn't mean that baseball in DC is a done deal, or that the Near Southeast site is a done deal, but it's a very interesting decision, and one that would have a huge impact on Near Southeast if it were to happen." I got that right.

* April 1, 2005: "As expected, the DC Sports and Entertainment Commission has chosen HOK Sport (along with Devrouax & Purnell Architects/Planners of DC) as the architects for the new Nationals baseball stadium. They promise a design that will "change the paradigm of ballparks" and will be "iconic and truly distinctive to Washington, D.C."

* May 15, 2005, a fond memory of the old-school JDLand days: "As a heads up, I'm not going to follow here on the site every twist and turn of the Nationals baseball stadium funding saga. The bickering over costs and land acquisition and whatnot leaves me totally cold. [H]ere at JDLand I'll just be concentrating on news of the design and construction."

* Aug. 5, 2005: "According to yesterday's Washington Times, officials at the DC Sports and Entertainment Commission still maintain, despite "a growing wave of pessmism among bidding groups seeking to buy the club," that the new baseball stadium will be ready for the 2008 season."

* Sept. 19, 2005: "Anyone who's lived in DC for any amount of time will be stunned to read today's Post story, "As Stadium Clock Ticks, DC Officials Bicker," detailing the difficulties of getting a design for the new baseball stadium agreed upon. Much of the trouble revolves around the desire (pushed most vehemently by Jack Evans) to have views of the Capitol Dome from as many seats at the stadium as possible."

* Oct. 18, 2005: "DC Council Chair Linda Cropp has signaled that she will block any attempts at significant alternations to the baseball stadium financing package[....] Says [Kathy] Patterson: "The District is at some risk of not being taken seriously as a government if we renege on the deal we have. That said, we negotiated a lousy deal.""

* Jan. 27, 2006: "WTOP is reporting that the city and Major League Baseball have reached agreement on negotiations over the stadium lease agreement."

* Feb. 7, 2006: Three entries (including my first-ever liveblogging) detailing the rollercoaster day in front of the DC Council that started with the stadium lease agreement being voted down before a long recess resulted in a return to approve it, with the cost cap in place.

* March 14, 2006: The stadium design is unveiled. How close are the original drawings to how it's turned out?

* March 22, 2006: "Both the Post and the Blade report that Judge Zeldon has ordered the eviction of the last remaining stadium landowner holdouts, including the gay bars on O Street owned by Robert Siegel. Siegel, plus the trash transfer station at 1st and N also covered under yesterday's order, have until April 4 to vacate."

* April 25, 2006: "Thanks to a tip from a correspondent, I can confirm that there is now demolition underway at the ballpark site, at its southernmost corner (South Capitol and P and Potomac). "

* May 3, 2006: "Everyone's now reporting that the ownership group led by DC-area developer Theodore Lerner has officially been picked as the owners of the Nationals."

* May 4, 2006, the Groundbreaking Ceremony: "The riff-raff-o-meter at the gate of the stadium groundbreaking was apparently malfunctioning, allowing me to get in and witness this morning's festivities."

And, just like that, here we are. If you want to read more (I didn't even touch the months of let's-try-private-financing, let's-do-it-at-RFK-instead, and the Garages Wrapped With Development Goodness), use my Search page, click "Baseball Stadium" in the topic box, and pick a date range to browse.

Oh, wait. This report is from April 7, 1905.

Neighbors protested about the "noxious fumes" for many years, and finally an "odorless, dust-free" station was built, opening in July 1949. That building still stands on the site today, though it hasn't been used as a trash transfer operation for some years.

(Plans from the current century call for a mixed-income 322-unit apartment building to be built on the site as part of the Capper/Carrollsburg Hope VI public housing redevelopment, but construction probably won't start before 2010. This site has also been eyed as a possible location for parking as part of the shoe-horning of MPD into the Post Plant, which may or may not still be happening in some fashion.)