Tour The History Exhibit at Pepco Substation

Dates and Times for this Past Event

• Saturday, May 6, 2023  10am - 11am
• Saturday, Apr 1, 2023  10am - 11am

Location

Details

An exhibit showcasing the history of Fort Reno, Reno City, and the Chesapeake House has been installed in the windows of Pepco's Harrison Substation Window Gallery. Stop by anytime and take a few minutes to learn the history of the neighborhood. In April and May, historian Neil Flanagan and oral historians Cory Shaw Jr. and Mariana Barros-Titus will take a deep-dive into the stories of Reno City and Broad Branch.

The exhibit features content researched by Jackson-Reed High School students and faculty, and showcases showcases the history of Fort Reno, including the story of Reno City, a Black community dismantled to make way for Alice Deal Middle School; a look back at the Fort Reno concert series; and the importance of Chesapeake House to the city’s punk music heritage and as a place for young people to gather and create. 

Where: Pepco Harrison Street Substation, 5210 Wisconsin Avenue NW at Ingomar Street NW

When: The exhibit is open all the time! 
Two dates are available for the facilitated tour discussion:
Saturday, April 1, 10-12 am: RSVP HERE
Saturday May 6, 10-12 am: RSVP HERE

Details About the May 6 Event: 

By the late 1960s, Washington, D.C. was grappling with the consequences of decades of segregationist policy and widespread disinvestment. Top-down social interventions caused, in the eyes of a growing number of people, more problems than they solved. One response was the concept of community development, where decisions were made at the smallest scale possible, through nonprofits, jobs programs, and hyper-local democracy. Central to this movement in DC were a summer jobs program, greater access to recreation, and organizations called Neighborhood Planning Councils. 

The now-famous Fort Reno concerts are a direct legacy of these three programs. But NPCs and their related youth programs had a much bigger legacy through the people that passed through them. Governed by elected boards of both adults and youths, the NPCs arranged recreation, provided unstructured resources, and connected neighborhoods in a fraught city. Many bands got their start in NPC programs. Neighborhood Planning Councils #2 and #3, which served Chevy Chase and Friendship Heights, even conducted some of the first historical research on the Reno community. But since they faded in DC's financial crisis of the 1990s, almost nothing has been written about these programs that for twenty years were pillars of their communities.  

Please join former NPC #2/3 staffers Tony Sarmiento, Phil Stewart, and shadow senator Paul Strauss as they discuss their careers at the beginning and the end of the NPC system. They will be joined by writer Dan Reed and historian Neil Flanagan to bring context to the organizations and the opportunities facing teenagers since their closure. We strongly encourage anyone who participated in NPC programs or worked at the councils to attend.