Capitol View (Washington, D.C.)
| Capitol View | |
|---|---|
| Neighborhood | |
 Map of Washington, D.C., with the Capitol View neighborhood highlighted in red |
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| Coordinates: 38°53′17.2566″N 076°55′15.438″W / 38.888126833°N 76.92095500°W | |
| Country | United States |
| Territory | Washington, D.C. |
| Constructed | 1930s |
Capitol View is a neighborhood located in southeast Washington, D.C., in the United States. It is bounded by East Capitol Street to the north, Central Avenue SE to the southwest and south, and Southern Avenue SE to the southeast. Overwhelmingly poor and African American, the neighborhood was one of the most violent and drug-ridden in the 1980s and 1990s. The Capitol View neighborhood has seen several large, poorly maintained public housing projects demolished within the past decade. The government of the District of Columbia partnered with private real estate developers to construct the Capitol Gateway mixed-use development between 2000 and 2010. A second phase in the project, will include a large new Wal-mart store and other retail businesses, construction will begin in 2015.
The area that became Capitol View was largely unsettled forest and farmland into the 1930s. By 1938, however, a large number of one- and two-story single-family detached houses and small apartment buildings had been constructed in the area. The neighborhood was almost exclusively populated by African Americans. As the neighborhood coalesced, it took the name Capitol View because the United States Capitol building could be seen (albeit distantly) on its western skyline.
The character of the Capitol View neighborhood radically changed with the construction of large public housing complexes. The first of these, the East Capitol Dwellings, began construction in 1952 as a 394-unit public housing complex. By the time the complex was completed in 1955, it had expanded to 577 units and straddled both sides of East Capitol Street between 58th and 60th Street. The new housing was racially desegregated, and was one of the first public housing complexes in the city to accept both whites and blacks from its inception. The East Capitol Dwellings were the city's largest public housing development into the 2000s. But the East Capitol Dwellings were shoddily constructed, and problems with plumbing, HVAC, and poor maintenance plagued the 40-acre (0.16 km2) city-within-a-city until its demolition in 2003.
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