THE KALORAMA CITIZENS ASSOCIATION will meet THURSDAY, MAY 22, at 7 P.M., at GOODWILL BAPTIST CHURCH, 1862 Kalorama Road, NW. At-large Councilmember Robert White will be our special guest speaker. We’ll also vote on changes to the KCA Constitution. There are more details in our May 2025 newsletter, which you can read here.
Our guest speaker Robert White, a Democrat, has been an at-large member of the DC City Council since 2016. Robert began his career as a law clerk in the Maryland District Court for Montgomery County. He worked in the U.S. Congress for five years, serving as Legislative Counsel to Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton. In 2014, he became the first Director of Community Outreach for the DC Office of the Attorney General. Now in his third term on the City Council, he has served as chair of the Committee on Housing since 2023. Robert is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center.
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MAY 2025: Jubilee Housing, the Kalorama Citizens Association, and Adams Morgan for Reasonable Development are nearing agreement to settle an eight-year-long lawsuit brought by KCA and AMRD to preserve public access to the existing plaza at 1800 Columbia Road, NW, and to ensure public access to a soon-to-be-built new plaza at the heart of Adams Morgan. The DC Historic Preservation Review Board in September 2024 approved Jubilee’s design for deeply affordable housing at the site. See the building and the beautiful plaza that will serve the neighborhood for years to come.
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HELP KCA DONATE BENCHES TO THE NEW”ANCESTORS PAVILION” AT WALTER PIERCE PARK: KCA wants to donate two wood-and-steel benches to the new Ancestors Pavilion at Walter Pierce Park, so that visitors can fully enjoy the newly created commemorative space.
The All Souls Unitarian Church choir helps dedicate the Ancestors Pavilion with song in September 2024. (Photo by Nancy Shia)
The Pavilion, dedicated in September 2024, features nine signs listing the names, ages, and death dates of 8,428 African American and Quaker Washingtonians buried in two 19th century cemeteries at the site. Interspersed among the names are images that tell the story of the cemeteries and the people laid to rest there.
The grassroots Walter Pierce Park Archaeology and Commemoration Project has been supported by KCA members since 2005, when concerned community members, descendants of the buried, and Howard University joined forces to protect the site. Descendants and their allies worked closely with the DC Department of Parks and Recreation and DC Department of General Services for the last several years to create the Ancestors Pavilion. See the WUSA-9 news report on the dedication of the Ancestors Pavilion here.
Because KCA plans to donate two benches, as well as cover the costs of shipping and installation, the total will be several thousand dollars. Many KCA members have already donated generously! We need just a little more! Donations of any amount will be gratefully accepted by clicking on the Join and Donate page and ticking the Walter Pierce Park Archaeology Project box.
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KCA OPPOSES CITY EFFORT TO MAKE 18TH STREET “STREATERIES” PERMANENT: The DC Department of Transportation, working with the Adams Morgan Partnership Business Improvement District, in September 2024 revamped the street cafes, known as Streateries, that have lined 18th Street since the height of the Covid Pandemic in 2020. The revamp is being called a “pilot” program, but it’s likely to permanently alter the unique streetscape which is included in the Washington Heights Historic District. In 2022, the Kalorama Citizens Association voiced its objections to making the Streateries permanent. See KCA’s comments here.
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KCA’S 2022 PLAZA COURT CASE WIN ON 18TH & COLUMBIA PLAZA: The D.C. Court of Appeals on December 22, 2022, reversed a lower court’s judgment against the Kalorama Citizens Association and Adams Morgan for Reasonable Development, in a case that seeks to preserve the Plaza at 18th Street and Columbia Road NW for community use. The three-judge panel said a trial is necessary to resolve factual questions about whether a public easement to the Plaza exists.
The case was on track for trial in 2018, but legal maneuvers by the defendant SunTrust Bank waylaid it. In 2021, SunTrust won a summary judgment in D.C. Superior Court against KCA and AMRD. That decision followed an earlier ruling in federal district court in September 2020 that the community groups lacked standing to pursue the case.
The farmers market on the plaza, 2016 (photo by Mary Belcher)
KCA and AMRD are represented by attorneys Amanda Fox Perry and Cynthia Pols. Both have worked on the case pro bono.
Dancers on the plaza at Adams Morgan Day, 1982 (Photo by Nancy Shia)
The Plaza and bank building at 18th Street and Columbia Road opened in 1979, after then-owner Perpetual Bank promised Adams Morgan residents it wouldn’t engage in discriminatory lending practices and would build a plaza for public use in front of the proposed bank.
In January 2017, property owner SunTrust Bank (now Truist Bank) won city approval to construct a retail-and-condo building at the site. The proposed building would have subsumed nearly all of the 4,000-square-foot Plaza, leaving a 380-square-foot building entryway in its place. In June 2017, KCA and AMRD sued SunTrust after pre-construction raze permits were issued.
In August 2017, D.C. Superior Court Judge Todd E. Edelman ordered a preliminary injunction against SunTrust to keep the Plaza open for community use until legal proceedings were concluded. In January 2021, D.C. Superior Court Judge Hiram Puig-Lugo–Edelman’s successor on the case–issued a summary judgment against KCA and AMRD. The Plaza, which had been used by the public since 1979, was fenced off in March 2021 after SunTrust won that judgment.
Read the 2022 D.C. Court of Appeals ruling here. Read Judge Edelman’s 2017 ruling from the bench here.
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KCA MARKS ADAMS MORGAN’S TWO UNDERGROUND RAILROAD SITES
Mary Belcher, Sylvia Y. Cyrus of ASALH, Denis James of KCA, Underground Railroad expert Jenny Masur, and the District’s Historic Preservation Officer David Maloney at Kalorama Park in 2019. (Photo by Kent Boese)
Descendants unveil the National Underground Railroad markers at Walter Pierce Park, December 2021. (Photo by Mary Belcher)
The four Underground Railroad markers at the Calvert Street entrance to Walter Pierce Park were dedicated in December 2021 by descendants of the Colored Union Benevolent Association, which founded D.C.’s busiest Reconstruction Era Black cemetery. More than 8,428 men, women, and children were buried Mt. Pleasant Plains Cemetery between 1870 and 1890, which occupied the Walter Pierce Park site.
The signs focus on the activism of the Colored Union Benevolent Association; the cemetery’s links to the 1848 escape of 77 enslaved people on the schooner Pearl; the soldiers, sailors, and self-emancipated refugees of the Civil War buried at the site; and the Howard University archaeological survey of the site conducted by biological anthropologist Mark Mack and concerned community members from 2005 to 2013. The Walter Pierce signs were written by historians Mary Belcher and Mara Cherkasky and designed by Janice Olsen in coordination with rangers at Rock Creek Park of the National Park Service, which owns the Calvert Street entrance to the park. The grant obtained by KCA paid for three of the signs at Walter Pierce Park, and Rock Creek Park paid for the fourth. Read the Kalorama Park Underground Railroad nomination here, and a later submission to the National Register of Historic Places here. Read the Walter Pierce Park Underground Railroad nomination here.***
KCA: WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE DO
THE KALORAMA CITIZENS ASSOCIATION is an all-volunteer nonprofit organization founded in 1919 to promote the interests of the residents of Adams Morgan, DC. Meetings take place at Good Will Baptist Church at Kalorama and Columbia roads, where we host civic leaders, activists, and experts on a range of timely issues. Our activities are:- Historic Preservation: KCA is Adams Morgan’s chief advocate for historic preservation. Click on Historic Adams Morgan for details and reports.
- Parks: KCA supports the Biltmore Triangle Garden and sponsors walking tours of Kalorama and Walter Pierce Parks. Click on Parks for more.
- Neighborhood Development and Zoning: KCA works to mitigate challenges to our neighborhood’s quality of life that arise from development pressures. Click on Development & Zoning for more.
- Neighborhood agreements with liquor-serving establishments: KCA pursues voluntary agreements with liquor-license-holding establishments to ensure that the interests of residents are being served. See Business Agreements for details.