Coming soon: A sit-down cafe! (Lydia DePillis)
Last week, we started a series of walking tours with folks in the know in their neighborhoods. Who else would be interesting? Let me know.
When Duane Gautier first came to Anacostia from his native New York City, to intern for a congressman in 1961, the neighborhood was thriving: Most every shopfront filled, and owner-occupied.
When he returned in the early 1980s to work for Pepco, that healthy bloom had wilted. The riots had driven out much of the neighborhood’s economic base, and jobs were as scarce as the small businesses that once supplied them.
Since then, Gautier has been working to build back Anacostia’s economic infrastructure, starting ARCH Development Corporation in 1983 with startup funds from Pepco to train area residents in energy efficiency work (green jobs before they were fashionable). Over three decades now, the small nonprofit has devoted itself to housing, job training, and small-scale business development. Gautier’s latest project: Revamping storefronts on Martin Luther King Avenue and Good Hope Road, with grants from the Department of Housing and Community Development, which sits smack at the intersection of those two faded commercial avenues.
“If you can improve the physical appearance of a community, that in itself says, you’re on the rise,” he says, as we start a tour of the neighborhood last Saturday morning. Right next to the Anacostia Business Center on Good Hope Road is a the Honfleur Gallery, the epicenter of a colony of new galleries in the area, all started as part of a cultural development strategy to draw investment—as models, Gautier points to Soho and Chelsea in New York, which built their reputations as destinations for the arts. After a stint helping to start artists coops in Siberia in 1991, Gautier has handled harder conditions than Anacostia.
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