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Eastland Gardens, a little-known treasure in Northeast Washington, DC, is preserved and cherished by the generations who have called it home. Though development was initiated in 1928 by a white-owned real estate investment company, black families and individuals seeking a suburb in the city were able to purchase double lots for single-family houses and gardens. They relied on the expertise of African American builders and designers--sometimes the owners themselves--to create their dream homes. The good fortune of proximity to the Anacostia River, national parks, woods, and fields has enabled Eastland Gardens residents to enjoy garden havens around their individual homes and within the neighborhood and to lay the foundation for a service-rich community. Through their organizational zeal and activism, they have been able to reduce or eliminate the impact of city and federal changes to their nurturing enclave.
In 1833, the Select Committee for Public Walks was introduced so that ‘the provision of parks would lead to a better use of Sundays and the replacement of the debasing pleasures.’ Music was seen as an important moral influence and ‘musical cultivation ... the safest and surest method of popular culture’, and it was the eventual introduction of the bandstand which became a significant aspect of the reforming potential of public parks. However, the move from the bull baiting of ‘Merrie England’ to the ordered recreation provided by bandstands has never been fully comprehended. Likewise, the extent of changes in leisure and public entertainment and the impact of music at seaside resorts often revolved around the use of seaside bandstands, with the subsequent growth of coastal resorts. Music in public spaces, and the history and heritage of the bandstand has largely been ignored. Yet in their heyday, there were over 1,500 bandstands in the country, in public parks, on piers and seaside promenades attracting the likes of crowds of over 10,000 in the Arboretum in Lincoln, to regular weekday and weekend concerts in most of London’s parks up until the beginning of the Second World War. Little is really known about them, from their evolution as ‘orchestras’ in the early Pleasure Gardens, the music played within them, to their intricate and ornate ironwork or art deco designs and the impact of the great foundries, their worldwide influence, to the great decline post Second World War and subsequent revival in the late 1990s. This book tells the story of these pavilions made for music, and their history, decline and revival.
The public face of Washington-the gridiron of L'Enfant's avenues, the buttoned-down demeanor Sloan Wilson's archetypal "Man in the Grey Flannel Suit," the monumental buildings of the Triangle-rarely gives up the secrets of this city's rich life. But, beneath the surface there are countless stories to be told. From the early swamp days to the Civil War, the "gilded age" to the New Deal and McCarthy eras, as the center of world power to its underlying multicultural social fabric, Washington is a writer's town. While this is surprising to some, it is not news to the close observer. Alan Cheuse, in his foreword to Literary Washington, D.C. comments: "Part of this peculiar city's sense of place is that it serves as a capital for people who have no permanent sense of place. . . . War has brought us here, peace has brought us here, love has kept us here, and love or loss of love will give some of us reason to leave again. Which makes Washington, D.C. exactly like most other places in the rest of the country and the rest of the world-only more so." In fact, D.C. has been a magnet for great writers for centuries. Including novelists, poets, journalists, essayists, and politicians and patriots, finally, in Literary Washington D.C., the story of the capital of world power is finally told.