Tivoli Theater (Photo by Matthew Brian Hersh)

Columbia Heights in Northwest Washington, DC is replete with everything you’d expect from a bustling urban center: hipsters and shops, nightspots and restaurants. Howard University is just off to the east; the Orange and Green lines of the DC Metro stop right there at 16th Street as people come to and from work; on a nice day, a massive plaza lined with restaurants and cafes attracts visitors, residents, shoppers, or just people who want to hang out by the fountain.

Here’s the predictable part: it wasn’t always like this. The Columbia Heights section of the city has seen unbelievable levels of development. Gentrification, renewalall loaded terms in the grander sociological schemehave brought a certain vitality there at which even long time residents gaze in awe.

And here’s the not-so-predictable part. The effort to revive the neighborhood was not the product of an outside developer preying on a vulnerable neighborhood or a prime piece of real estate. It was part of a four-decade neighborhood movement that is reincorporating the area’s history right in the middle of new development. Like so many urban neighborhoods in the late 1960s, Columbia Heights suffered in the 1968 riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sixty percent of Columbia Heights’ businesses were burned or looted in those riots, and nearly a fifth of the neighborhood’s housing stock was severely damaged. “This was a ghost town. There was nothing here, and then they began to start, parcel by parcel, getting houses rebuilt, and life was coming back,” said Thomas Dawes, the director of the affordable housing division of the Development Corporation of Columbia Heights (DCCH), a community development corporation formed in 1984 by a handful of community activists. DCCH had an urban renewal goal at that time that focused squarely on assisted rental housing.

“This was vacant land,” he said, pointing to the area known as Tivoli Square, which encompasses the historic Tivoli Theatre, the only landmark remaining at that spot from the days when the neighborhood housed high-level government workers and justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, and then later home to middle class African Americans, where Duke Ellington purchased his first house.