This exhibit, “250: A Neighborhood in the Nation’s Capital, is a community team effort. The three organizations behind it are:
The Committee on Racial And Social Equity (RASE) was appointed by the DC City Council Advisory Neighborhood Council 3/4G in 2021. Carl Lankowski and Renee Turner-Inman are RASE members who spearheaded this poster project. ANC 3/4G funded the graphic design and printing of the posters.
Historic Chevy Chase DC is a nonprofit community organization dedicated to historical preservation, research, and education about Chevy Chase DC, a circa 1907 community. HCCDC supported RASE’s request for technical assistance with images and neighborhood history, as well as web hosting on its website.
Chevy Chase Main Street/District Bridges provides direct technical assistance to local businesses. Main Street manager Rachel Mowry worked as the community liaison on this project to identify vendors along the Connecticut Avenue business corridor who agreed to display the posters in shop windows.
The creative team
The conception, content creation, writing/editing, photography, and gumshoe work to identify community businesses in whose windows the posters are display is the result of hundreds of volunteer hours by the creative team. They are:
- Carl Lankowski, RASE committee member and project director, and president of Historic Chevy Chase DC
- Rachel Mowry, manager of Chevy Chase Main Street, a program of District Bridges
- RASE committee member Renee Turner-Inman
- Graphics designer Lucy Pope of 202DESIGN
- Cate Atkinson, vice president of Historic Chevy Chase DC
Our consultative group for historical issues
This exhibit was enhanced by the work of a dedicated advisory panel consisting of academics and activists, including:
- Chris Myers Asch, editor, research, historian, and coauthor of Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital (2017)
- Jaimie Butler, neighborhood housing activist and a member of the Washington Interfaith Network (WIN)
- Amanda Huron, author, historian, and associate professor of interdisciplinary social sciences in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of the District of Columbia
- Richard Kahlenberg, director of Housing Policy and director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute and a professorial lecturer at George Washington University’s Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration
- Elizabeth Vaden, organizer of the interactive exhibit, “Undesign the RedLine,” about the role of structural racism in creating the 1938 redlining maps that continue to impact our communities today
Our local business partners
We invite you to look for our posters in local shop windows this Fall and Winter. Our first six participating vendors who are launching the poster project with us are:
- Happy Go! Bicycles at 5516 Connecticut Ave. NW
- The Fishery Seafood Market at 5509 Connecticut Ave. NW
- Balanced Athlete Fitness Studio at 5538 Connecticut Ave. NW
- The Parthenon at 5510 Connecticut Ave. NW,
- Core 72 at 5502 Connecticut Ave. NW
- Park Story at 3813 Livingston St. NW
In addition, the complete panoply of posters will be displayed on a banner on the construction fence around the old American City Diner property at Connecticut Avenue and Morrison Street. Any business who wishes to sign up as a vendor to display a poster should email Rachel Mowry.
The artist behind our logo image
Local artist Richard Swartz created an unforgettable image of George Pointer piloting President John Quincy Adams’s boat at the July 4, 1828, grand opening of the C&O Canal, with his 8-year-old granddaughter, Mary Ann Plummer, as his able copilot. The artwork was commissioned by Historic Chevy Chase DC to illustrate the history of the African American families who once lived on Broad Branch Road before being displaced so a white’s only school could be built on their property in 1931. The image in the artwork has been used on two historic signs in Lafayette-Pointer Park on the former homesites of the Pointer descendants and other Black families. It is also featured on the 2024 annual park pass for the National Park Service’s Great Falls Park. Swartz’s painting was gifted by HCCDC to Lafayette Elementary School and now hangs in its lobby.