Do you know the story of how the land for Fort Reno Park and Alice Deal Junior High School (now Deal Middle School) was allocated? The land originally housed the Reno community, a majority-Black section of Ward 3. But in the 1930s, D.C. used eminent domain to forcibly remove almost 400 families living in the area to make way for the development, ultimately changing the racial makeup of that area of Ward 3 for years to come.
There are multiple stories such as this across D.C.’s history that affect the makeup of the city to this day. According to data from the 2020 U.S. Census, the D.C. metropolitan area is the 13th most segregated in the country. And a new exhibit at the Cleveland Park Library in Ward 3 aims to examine the policies that created this problem.
Undesign the Redline is an interactive exhibit that examines the racially segregated history of upper Northwest’s land development, explains the larger history of redlining across Ward 3, and explores the policies enacted to deny residents of color—with a particular focus on Black residents—access to homeownership in the area.
Undesign the Redline offers a comprehensive look at the policies that created structural racism in the region, and the show’s curators aim to set the stage for new conversations about how to “undesign” these systems.
The exhibit features five sections: two explain the general history and application of redlining; and one explores the government policies that led to redlining and the social movements that sprung to combat it; another section tells the story of redlining in Ward 3 with a focus on specific locations and stories of displacement in the area; the final section explores how to reframe the story of housing in the ward to make it more inclusive.
Bill Jensen, one of the curators and tour guides for the exhibit, says he’s seen firsthand how Undesign the Redline is generating important conversations. “The best thing about group tours is the possibility of processing after,” Jensen tells City Paper. “That is sort of the essence of the exhibit.”
The curators believe this exhibit will provide an opportunity for people across D.C. to learn more about the fraught history of racial segregation and how it has shaped many of the city’s neighborhoods. The exhibit explores how Black families were displaced and excluded by the urban planning process in areas such as Broad Branch Road, Fort Reno Park, Macedonia Baptist Church, Barry Farm, and St. Columba’s Episcopal Church.
Since 2015, the design studio Designing the WE has brought Undesign the Redline to multiple cities, with the hopes of interrogating the history of redlining in localities across the U.S. Designing the WE’s team, led by co-founder Braden Crooks, works to bring the project to life by customizing the content for each city. The studio says that its design often stays the same between cities, but the research it conducts to find and present stories of housing discrimination are unique to the local histories of each area.
The D.C. exhibit was brought to Ward 3 by a collective of places of worship in the area. The project was first conceived by parishioners of St. Columba’s Episcopal Church, who saw the exhibit while on display in Columbia, Maryland. They collaborated with the Adas Israel Congregation, Chevy Chase Presbyterian Church, Temple Micah, and Temple Sinai to help plan and execute the exhibit. Designing the WE says that this is the first time the exhibit has been initiated by faith leaders.
Elizabeth Vaden organized a trip to Undesign the Redline with her fellow parishioners at St. Columba’s Episcopal Church when it was on display in Columbia. Vaden hopes the exhibit will help transform the future of Ward 3.
“I was keenly aware that the area where I live in the upper Northwest is on the verge of a lot of change,” Vaden says. “There are a lot of potential development projects happening. There’s the mayor’s housing equity report … And I thought, we need a conversation like this in upper Northwest to prime ourselves for thinking about the choices we’re going to make as a community.”
Providing a safe space for dialogue is at the core of the exhibit’s mission. “The hope is that this provides an opportunity to allow people to learn and to explore what has happened in their own space and then what our response needs to be,” Vaden says.
The Cleveland Park Library will also host a series of programs to accompany the exhibit that take an intersectional approach to generating discussions about the past, present, and future of housing equity in D.C. The programming schedule includes a talk with visual artist Paula Mans, a conversation about redlining hosted by local high school students, a walking tour of Bloomingdale, and a screening of the documentary Barry Farm: Community, Land, & Justice in Washington D.C.
“The beauty of this exhibit is that it tells these local stories in a very straightforward, factual manner … and the thing about a person’s story is that it’s their story,” Jensen says. “You can’t dispute that.”