When the red-and-gray streetcar dings its way down H Street NE carrying its first passengers Saturday, it will roll past a newish Giant supermarket, the site of a coming Whole Foods and a former church selling mango-lime chicken and mashed peas.
“It could very well be the joke of the decade. But you don’t know,” Cummings said. “The joke is still working, because it’s clearing the block up. In the end, it’s going to turn into something special and interesting.”
But when passengers head toward the poorer, eastern end of the line, they will find no comparable renaissance along Benning Road, where some are hostile to streetcars and dismiss them as a “party train” better suited for H Street bar patrons.
“This really doesn’t seem like it’s going to benefit the blacks in this neighborhood,” said Olene Claggett, a longtime resident of Langston Dwellings, a sprawling public housing project built in the 1930s. “All this money for building the trolley, and we don’t even have jobs. Is it bringing in jobs? No. Is it bringing in people? Yes. People from other places.”
The officials who seized on the idea of bringing streetcars back to Washington never intended to build a "jolly trolley" or some other nostalgic amusement.
City officials wanted to build one of the most ambitious streetcar networks in the country: 20, 40 or even — in the view of one former top city official, Allen Y. Lew — 60 miles of track crisscrossing the District.
“None of us would be interested in the streetcar system if it was just purely a Disney ride,” Lew said in a 2014 interview as he was pressing his case for going big. Lew was a key force in building the city’s convention center and a waterfront ballpark for the Washington Nationals.
Development in the United States had been driven by rail, Lew said, from the streets around Grand Central Terminal in Midtown Manhattan to communities around the Washington region’s Metro stations.
“In the growth of this country, every city or town that the train stopped in created another commercial hub,” Lew said. “Metro, on a smaller scale, created these neighborhoods — little towns that grew out from it. The streetcar is on a different scale. But it grows corridors.”
“We really, truly, truly believe the streetcar system is an economic development initiative,” Lew said. “It’s not just a transit thing.”
But the ambitions to build a big, bold streetcar network — or even a modest one on schedule — succumbed to a mix of inexperience, wishful thinking and bureaucratic bumbling over multiple administrations, according to interviews with key participants and internal project documents. Planning and oversight were weak, and spending soared.
Attempts to jump-start a streetcar construction blitz by building a line in the struggling Anacostia area fell short, running through more than $20 million before the 0.8-mile line was mothballed.
Officials piggybacked the H Street/Benning Road streetcar project onto a street-and-sidewalk renovation, importing some plans from Portland, Ore., to speed things up and taking other design shortcuts that hobbled the line even before its opening.
Some sections of track require the streetcars to run well below advertised speeds. The District says “modern streetcars operate at average speeds of 25 to 35 mph in mixed traffic on city streets.” But operators have been given a speed limit of just a fraction of those totals in some areas.
The rail also was squeezed in too tightly against cars parked on H Street, prompting regular run-ins with vehicles and delays.
Construction, begun in 2007, dragged on, and costs eventually skyrocketed. After the initial tracks went in, the city hired a contractor, Dean-Facchina, to finish building the line.
Costs for that contract have more than doubled, to $102.6 million, in part because of a ballooning tab for a maintenance facility. Officials also agreed to pay extra to speed up work as it tried, but failed, to meet a series of political deadlines.
In smaller ways, too, spending became extravagant. The city’s Transportation Department agreed to buy 25 miniature model streetcars from its Oregon-based streetcar manufacturer — for $600 apiece, contracting documents show. Two city officials wouldn’t say why the models were purchased or where they all went.
The administration of Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) promised to open the H Street/Benning Road line in 2013 and then, when that didn’t happen, before the mayor left office. As that window, too, was closing, Lew, who was overseeing Gray’s streetcar push, became irate.
Transportation officials were arguing strenuously that they were ready to launch the line by the end of 2014. But a separate city safety office disagreed.
Calling a meeting in his Wilson Building office just before New Year’s, with moving boxes stacked nearby, Lew went on an expletive-laced tirade slamming the assembled officials for getting mired in dysfunction and not showing the needed leadership.
“He used a lot of vulgar words, f-words and this and that,” one participant recalled, discussing the meeting on the condition of anonymity. “He was yelling. He was furious things were not working out.”
Lew declined this week to be interviewed. Through a spokesman, he said he did not dispute the tenor of the meeting.
Now, after more than a year of fixes and work on safety documentation, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), Gray's successor and the fourth mayor with a direct hand in the system, will preside over the launch of Washington's second streetcar era.
Bowser’s administration has taken credit for saving what her transportation chief, Leif Dormsjo, called the “failed” streetcar program. Bowser has pledged to extend the line east across the Anacostia River to the Benning Road Metro station, where advocates say it will spur development in an underserved area, and west to Georgetown, for a total of about seven miles.
But the streetcar line the city has today will be carrying baggage along with its new passengers. Some residents on the eastern end of the line say they won’t ride it.
“We’re considered the lower class down here,” said Ester Hardesty, a retired communications specialist who worked in the Pentagon and heads the Langston Dwellings residents association.
Development along H Street NE was driven by many factors, including proximity to Union Station and Capitol Hill’s soaring real estate prices, as well as years of effort by officials and business owners. But Hardesty has seen no similar improvement in her Benning Road neighborhood, just the shuttering of Spingarn High School and the erection of a big white “eyesore” of a tent as a temporary streetcar maintenance building.
“I’ve seen some changes on H Street, but I still don’t go down H Street to do anything, because I don’t eat Ethiopian food, I don’t eat sushi and all that stuff,” Hardesty said.
She does buy groceries, clothes and other staples at Walmart, which is on H Street not far beyond the streetcar’s western terminus. But schlepping her purchases back to the streetcar stop, which sits atop a bridge behind Union Station, makes no sense to her given the Metrobuses that run up and down H Street.
“I can’t carry all that stuff back up the hill. I can’t do it,” said Hardesty, 67. “It was just a waste of government money” better spent on community centers and hiring better outreach workers for kids, she said.
The streetcar appears designed “for more affluent people . . . to get them off the bus,” Hardesty said. “I don’t care if they’re black or white, but it wasn’t put there for us.”
Steven Cummings said H Street was the right place to try out streetcars.
The area’s roughness and sagging buildings offered space for experimentation and a sometimes painful metamorphosis, he said. It had been hit hard by riots after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and by years of drugs, crime and poverty that followed.
“Where else in the city could you take five years of tearing up a street?” Cummings said.
It has not been a gentle rebirth.
Business owners faced years of excruciating construction hassles that put off customers, and many sold out or went under. “The streetcar was sort of a Trojan horse to change the street,” Cummings said. He sees no malicious intent but does see the stark consequences.
His photographs offer a kind of backdoor history of that transition.
Cummings, 50, was born in Okinawa, Japan, and grew up on Army bases defined by their sense of order. When he moved to the District in 1990, he was hungry to capture the “beauty in the chaos.”
He handed copies of his photos to his subjects, some of whom had never had a proper portrait taken and held on to them for their obituaries.
He photographed an H Street wig saleswoman, camouflaged by well-coiffed mannequin heads, before her shop shut down. And he found a nattily dressed older couple resting at a trash-strewn bus stop. Through the scuffed glass was the old Murry’s grocery store, future site of “ultra-luxury” housing and a Whole Foods, just a block from a new streetcar stop.
“There was no way I could have visualized this,” Cummings said. As the streetcars become a fixture in future years and people figure out their place in the city, a lot of good can’t help but emerge, he said. “Look what failure got us. It got us a Whole Foods and a Giant. Even failure was a win.”
