page_title: Southwest (Washington, D.C.)
section_title: Before 1950
hierarchical_section_title: Southwest (Washington, D.C.) / History / Before 1950
caption_attribution_description: English: Image taken by me for Wikipedia
context_page_description: Southwest is the southwestern quadrant of Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States, and is located south of the National Mall and west of South Capitol Street. It is the smallest quadrant of the city, and contains a small number of named neighborhoods and districts, including Bellevue, Southwest Federal Center, the Southwest Waterfront, Buzzard Point, and the military installation known as Joint Base Anacostia–Bolling.
context_section_description: Southwest is part of Pierre L'Enfant's original city plans and includes some of the oldest buildings in the city, including the Wheat Row block of townhouses, built in 1793, and Fort McNair, which was established in 1791 as "the U.S. Arsenal at Greenleaf Point."
  Before 1847, much of the Virginia portion of the District of Columbia, including the town of Alexandria, was included in Southwest.
  After the Civil War, the Southwest Waterfront became a neighborhood for the poorer classes of Washingtonians. The neighborhood was divided in half by Fourth Street SW, then known as 4​¹⁄₂ Street; Scotch, Irish, German, and eastern European immigrants lived west of 4​¹⁄₂ Street, while freed blacks lived to the east. Each half was centered on religious establishments: St. Dominic's Catholic Church and Talmud Torah Congregation on the west, and Friendship Baptist Church on the east. (Also, each half of the neighborhood was the childhood home of a future American musical star — the first home of Al Jolson, whose father was the cantor of Talmud Torah Congregation, after his family emigrated from what is now Lithuania was on 4​¹⁄₂ Street, and Marvin Gaye was born in a tenement on First Street.)
  Waterfront developed into a quite contradictory area: it had a thriving commercial district with grocery stores, shops, a movie theater, as well as a few large and elaborate houses (mostly owned by wealthy blacks). However, most of the neighborhood was a very poor shantytown of tenements, shacks, and even tents. These places, some of them in the shadow of the Capitol Building, were frequent subjects of photographs highlighting the stark contrast.
caption: 12th St. tunnel under I-395 in Southwest Washington