Showtime on 9th Street: The Gayety Theater

Ninth Street NW, the blocks just north of Pennsylvania Avenue: today they're lined with rows of the same nondescript office buildings you see everywhere else downtown. And then there's that hulking FBI building on the west side. But it wasn't always like this. A hundred years ago this was where the action was. "Ninth Street was the Broadway of Washington," a former fight promoter named Goldie Ahearn recalled years later in The Washington Post: "Everything that ever happened in this city happened there. When you came to town you had to strut up and down Ninth Street or you hadn't lived." And in the heart of this mini Times Square was the fabulous Gayety Theater, where the girls were always kicking their legs up and the comedians gunning for endless, easy laughs.

The Gayety Theatre, from a postcard in the author's collection.

The Gayety, located at 513 9th Street, NW, was designed by noted theater architect William H. McElfatrick (1854-1922) and completed in 1907 at a cost of about $130,000. Although the building's frontage on 9th Street was only the size of a typical storefront, it masked a sprawling complex that extended back to 8th Street, where a large auditorium was located. The stage was 65 feet wide and 34 feet deep.

The Church of the Covenant on Connecticut Avenue

Churches are one of the biggest challenges for historic preservation; they are such unique structures and so poorly suited to be anything but what they are. What happens when a congregation outgrows its building and wants to move on? In some cases old churches downtown have been preserved because they were taken over by other religious groups. Several downtown landmarks have survived that way, including the Washington Hebrew Synagogue, which was built in 1898 near 8th and I Streets NW and became the Greater New Hope Baptist Church in 1955, and the Adas Israel Synagogue, built in 1907 at 6th and I, which was turned over to the Turner Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1951 before being converted back to a synagogue in 2004. However, such reuse doesn't always pan out.

One of the city's greatest losses in historic religious structures was the old National Presbyterian Church, originally called the Church of the Covenant, which used to rise from the southeast corner of Connecticut Avenue and N Street NW. The building, which James M. Goode has called a "dignified masterpiece in gray granite," was completed in 1889 and torn down in 1966, to be replaced by a nondescript office building.

Postcard view from a photo by Jack Rottier. Used with permission.