By showtime at Songbyrd Music House, the venue was empty. Despite this, the performers at , a monthly sign-up-based drag showcase at Songbyrd, seemed to be in good spirits, waiting for a few dozen spectators to drift in before they started nearly an hour late.

DC Drag Lab is one of only three regularly scheduled open sign-up drag shows in D.C., the others being Screen Test (hosted on Wednesday nights at Shakers, on hiatus until November) and Slay Them (hosted on first Fridays at Red Bear Brewery). At open sign-up shows, any performer can contact the host and perform, regardless of their experience level. Host Brooke N. Hymen posted the sign up in July.

“I started producing DC’s Drag Lab because we were missing an open stage, non-competition format drag show in the city. Open stages are where I really got my start and was able to work on my craft and try out new numbers, so it felt important to bring that platform back for newer artists,” Brooke said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Outside the walls of Songbyrd, a 220-capacity venue in Union Market, these new performers have a much tougher time booking performances without connections and a history of shows. Here, though, they have up to five minutes to perform whatever they so choose: usually a mix of lip sync, dance, and comedy numbers. All the while, each performer sashays into the audience to collect cash tips to fund their drag.

Inclusivity is the basis of an open stage show, and this month’s Drag Lab cast made a point of letting the audience know that these values don’t stop at the stage door. During numbers, queens supported one another by filming for social media and cheering with all their might. The performers of Drag Lab, many of whom are rarely able to show their skills, took the stage with a passion for both performance and their community.

Jazz What and Vettick What traveled to DC from suburban Maryland to perform, and relied on the community that they built with one another to propel them into drag performance.

“I started doing drag almost two years ago already, in November 2022,” Jazz What said. They started performing on their partner Vettick What’s birthday, at Vettick’s encouragement. “They were the one who pushed me and told me ‘Hey. Are you going to talk? Or are you going to do something about it?’” Jazz said. At Drag Lab, they wore a leather outfit and performed a comedic routine beginning with Queen’s “I Want to Break Free” and ending with a dance break. They were followed by Vettick What, who, adorned in white face paint, covered themself in fake blood as they danced to Paramore’s “Misery Business.”

“I came to life… like a week after my birthday.” Vettick said. Though their initial birth was as the feminine drag queen Betty What, they changed their name to Vettick What in December 2023 to represent their desire to gender-bend in performances.

“The best thing about open stages like tonight is that you can let go, and you can do anything you want… It went great! And all of the performers were so great to be watching,” they said.

As the two headed to their car at the end of the night, they were stopped by multiple audience members that they knew, exchanging hugs.

Jazz and Vettick were not the only ones in the room encouraging each other. Though groups entered the audience separately, it became clear by the end of the night that many already knew one another. Ballroom performer Bombshell Monroe climbed onto the stage halfway through the night to celebrate her birthday and the performance of her drag daughter (a younger performer that she is mentoring) Jade Monroe. Silver Ware, the host of T4T 2000, a monthly transgender social hour at Trade Bar, was invited to the stage as a surprise guest host to cheers from the crowd. By the time the show ended just after 1:00 a.m., groups that entered the audience together had separated and blended together into a small sea of queer faces.

The cast of this month’s Drag Lab included hosts Brooke N. Hymen and Andromeda and featured performances by Anya Olympia, Miss Gorgeous Michael, Archer Back, Jazz What, Vettick What, Donnicka Reddy Alexander, Jade Monroe, and Dream.

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The owner of the Carolina Q barbecue truck, Rosa Maria Toto, told 91���� that it was a new truck her and her husband had just purchased. They were driving it for the very first time today. They had been in downtown D.C. with the food truck earlier in the day with their dog in tow.

“We were just going back to my house to clean, I was driving,” Toto said. “Next thing, I see fire. We got out of the truck onto the street with our dog. It all happened so fast.”

Flames engulfed the front of the truck, burning off the windshield and part of the roof.

There were no injuries in the fire. Firefighters and police arrived on the scene soon after and blocked off New York Avenue from oncoming traffic.

Charles Pumilia, a roadside assistance worker, arrived at the scene with a temporary car for the Totos and filled it with gasoline for them.

“That truck’s never been on the road yet. It seems like the engine blew out,” Pumilia said. “The family was just trying to drive home.”

Toto said that their new truck needed to get inspected before they could begin using it to sell food. They had planned on taking it to get inspected today.

Workers at the school bus lot at the intersection of Kendall Street, next to where the incident occurred, watched from the sidewalk as emergency service workers put out the fire.

“First I saw smoke in the air and then I smelled a bunch of gasoline,” said a worker at the school bus lot. “I walked over to New York Avenue and saw a truck in flames.”

According to DC Fire and Emergency Services public information officer, Vito Maggiolo, the fire was extinguished with the help of just one unit. 

“Luckily there were no injuries. It was a routine, single vehicle fire that was contained,” Maggiolo said. “It was a meat and potatoes kind of fire that we’re used to dealing with daily.”

As a stretch of New York Avenue was blocked off, drivers approaching the fire were directed right on Kendall Street NE. This caused a traffic jam, with many cars being stuck on Okie Street NE next to the DC City Winery. Once emergency services contained the fire, the right lane of New York Avenue was reopened for traffic to get by.

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Now, as businesses, restaurants, and apartment complexes expand their growing shadow over its crumbling red brick walls, Ivy City residents want to turn the old school into a community center.

Competing Proposals

In 2015, Mayor Muriel Bowser launched the city’s first , an event that encouraged local developers to pitch ideas for economic development projects. The District had seen a surge of development in recent years and the project served as a way to distribute positive growth around the city.

In Ivy City, residents capitalized on the opportunity and submitted a proposal to develop a community gathering space in the Crummell School and its surrounding land.  Two proposals pushed their way to the forefront — one by local advocacy group Empower DC and Ivy City Partners.

Empower DC has worked in Ivy City for the last several years, working with many of the neighborhood’s young people to put forward its proposal, said Parisa Norouzi, the organization’s executive director. “There’s no rec center, there’s no place for the kids to play,” Norouzi said. “It’s been a centerpiece of what this neighborhood has been asking for.”

Empower DC’s proposal focused on public amenities. It included a computer lab, daycare, library kiosk, greenspace, a basketball court and other amenities and reserved 67,500 square feet for retail and office spaces.

The Ivy City Partners proposal opted for more residential and retail space. Still, though, it included a community center and greenspace. The consortium of developers and the local Ivy City business, ProFish, spearheaded the design, which would place ProFish’s processing plant underground.

Greg Casten, the owner of ProFish, said the Ivy City Partners proposal would not cost the city. Partners would front  the money to turn the school into a community center, which was originally estimated to cost $14 million, Casten said.

“I think we had the best proposal, by far,” Casten said. “I think it also brought a gateway between a residential neighborhood and a commercial neighborhood, and I think that it really answered all the issues and gave the control of the school and the property around it back to the city so they could decide with the community what was best activation of that site.”

Casten said the neighborhood began transforming from an industrial-centric area to a residential one after the Hecht Warehouse, a massive warehouse in Ivy City, reopened as an apartment complex in 2016.

“Once the city did that, I think they really decided that they didn’t want this to be industrial, they wanted it to be residential with an industrial feel and some makerspace,” Casten said. Developing the Partners proposal would “make the transformation work.”

Adding more greenspace, he said, is something he’s willing to discuss. Bowser agreed. In a press release published by the mayor’s office, Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development Brian Kenner lauded the “high level of engagement” from the greater D.C. community when announcing the winning proposals for the Crummell School and another project.

“We are excited about both development plans that will bring much needed jobs, housing, retail, dining and public space to the hearts of both of these communities,” Kenner said in the release.  

No Place to Play

Despite the outcome, Empower DC says it will continue to fight for its proposal. , the newly elected commissioner for ANC 5D01, is also joining in the fight. Both parties say the need for greenspace and a space for children to play is essential for the growth of the community.

Linehan, a football coach at McKinley Tech High School moved to Ivy City about three years ago and put up a basketball hoop outside his home. He said he knows how important it is for children to have a place to play and encourages neighborhood residents to use it.

“It was nice … seeing kids playing on the street and that strong sense of community,” Linehan said. “Kids definitely need a place where they can blow off some steam and have some physical activity.”

Linehan’s hoop the closest thing the community has to a basketball court. The only other open communal space is a small park a couple blocks from the school. But the park is also a drainage field and is often flooded. According to Norouzi, it’s also become a haven for drug use, so a lot of the area children avoid it.

Without a rec center or outlet for the area children, Norouzi said many of them getting into trouble and being sent to the area juvenile-detention center.

A Long History

Named for Rev. Alexander Crummell, an African-American educator, abolitionist and contemporary of Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DeBois, the school was the center of one of the District’s oldest black communities.

Steven Padgett, who moved to Ivy City in 1966, graduated from six grade at Crummell in 1971. In an Empower DC video, Padgett said he could still name every teacher he had at the school and said the school helped foster a sense of community in the neighborhood.

“We all over here knew each other,” Padgett said. “We were like a close-knit family. Like one big, happy family reunion around here.”

Detrick Ealy, 42, has lived in Ivy City nearly his entire life, and said the neighborhood has changed dramatically in recent years after many of the businesses started to move in. Despite the changes, Ealy said the neighborhood remains close and the people get along well.

“It’s a melting spot,” Ealy said. “We have the integration of white, black and Hispanic, and we all get along.”

A Brief Reopening

Since closing its doors in the early 1970s, Crummell has largely been abandoned.

There was a brief period in the late 1970s when the Institute Cultural Affairs, an organization that does improvement projects worldwide, reopened the school as a community center as part of its Human Development Projects during the bicentennial. The center had a print shop and a preschool in an annex building, Norouzi said.

Shortly after the ICA left, the annex caught fire and the main building was looted, Norouzi said.

“The whole thing kind of fell apart,” Norouzi said.

The fight for a community center isn’t the first battle waged over the Crummell School in recent years. In 2012, then-Mayor Vincent Gray announced a plan to turn the lot into a for 65 buses that traveled between D.C. and  New York City. Empower DC and Ivy City residents fought back, sparking the movement and filing a lawsuit.

Ivy City won the fight after a judge granted an injunction, preventing the depot from operating. Still, the city paved every inch of the lot, aside from the school building itself, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2012. The District eventually abandoned the bus depot idea.

Looking Forward

As one of the District’s oldest neighborhoods , the need for a community center becomes even more pronounced, Norouzi said. New retail, high-end restaurants and apartments are moving in, supporting a long-occuring fear that continued development might drive current residents out.

“Ivy City has been one of those last affordable places in the city,” Norouzi said. “Now with this area becoming more expensive, there’s not a lot of places left for people to go.”

Ivy City has recently been billed as an “up-and-coming” neighborhood for young adults, Norouzi said, with the arrival of new businesses in the area, like  New Columbia Distillers and Atlas Brew Works.

“That’s something that you really see clashing,” Norouzi said. “All these places for adults, and there’s still nothing for the kids. This is a neighborhood with a lot of kids.”

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Lowe’s New Columbia Distillers set a boozy trend in Ivy City after the distillery opened in 2011. Today there are four distilleries, a brewery, a cidery and a winery within a few blocks of each other.

“We were the first new business in quite a long time,” Lowe said about opening up shop in the neighborhood. “We think it was a good move on our part. Ivy City is beginning to move up.”

Ivy City retains its industrial feel despite its burgeoning nightlife scene. A web of railroad tracks leading into Union Station occupies the north side of New York Avenue, a main artery in Northeast Washington. More than a hundred school buses sit in a bus depot on the south side of the avenue, and several auto body shops are dispersed throughout the neighborhood.

The Hecht Warehouse is the industrial jewel of Ivy City. Glass blocks and glazed bricks line the perimeter of the six-story warehouse, which takes up an entire city block. On weekend nights the glowing glass crown molding that adorns the corner of the warehouse’s roof acts as a guiding light to yuppies who head east for a night of bar and distillery hopping.

The warehouse was built in 1937 in the Art Moderne style, which grew out of the Art Deco movement that preceded it in the 1920s, said Martin Moeller, senior curator at the National Building Museum and longtime District resident.

“Art Deco kind of morphed into this distinct form of Art Moderne, which tended to be simpler, less ornamented, but often would use industrial materials that were still often elegant and exuberant. The Hecht Company Warehouse is a perfect example of that,” Moeller said.

The building served as the warehouse for Hecht’s, a once-popular mid-Atlantic department store chain. For much of the 20th century, the Hecht Company and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad were economic engines for Ivy City’s working class residents, many of whom live in row homes a couple blocks south of the warehouse.

The Hecht Warehouse became vacant in 2006 after Macy’s bought out Hecht’s department stores. Moeller said Ivy City has long been a neglected area of Washington, especially after Hecht’s closed.

“Staring into the New York Avenue corridor was always pretty grim back in the day before things started to get rediscovered,” Moeller said.

Douglas Development Corp., headed by “” Douglas Jemal, bought the vacant Hecht Warehouse in 2011. Jemal and Douglas Development Corp. have found a niche in Washington by converting industrial buildings into hip locales geared towards millenials. In Shaw, Douglas repurposed an old Wonder Bread factory into a , and in Brookland the corporation turned a warehouse into upscale apartments called .

Jemal has come under scrutiny for some of his financial practices like when he was convicted of in 2007. He avoided prison for the crime in part because hundreds of Washington community members vouched for his character in court.

Initially, Douglas Development Corp. didn’t have any plans for the future of the former Hecht warehouse said Paul Millstein, Vice President of Douglas Development.

“When Douglas purchased the Hecht’s warehouse he had no idea that it would be an industrial themed apartment building,” Millstein said. “The only thing that he knew was that he loved the property.”

Hecht Warehouse is now a 335 unit apartment building with a rooftop lounge, a full-service gym, daily continental breakfast and a shuttle to the Rhode Island Avenue Metro stop. One-bedroom apartments at Hecht go for as much as $2,700 a month and two-bedrooms can go for $3,500. On the ground floor there is an Nike store, a T.J. Maxx, and a few bars and restaurants.

A neighborhood in transition

One Eight Distilling opened in Ivy City in 2015, the second distillery to arrive in the neighborhood after New Columbia. Cara Webster, marketing coordinator at One Eight, said Ivy City is undergoing a rapid transformation.

“The neighborhood is being gentrified pretty severely. The neighbors around us are part of the community, but I wonder how long they’ll be here,” Webster said.

Some community members are embracing the change. Sherman Crestwell is a native of Southeast Washington and stays in the men’s homeless shelter facing Hecht on Fenwick Street. Crestwell said the Hecht Warehouse redevelopment has helped diversify the neighborhood.

“It changed as far as ethnicity,” Crestwell said while pointing out Gravitas, an Ivy City restaurant that features a 15-course tasting menu. “A different culture of people are coming through here. It’s bringing people together in a positive way.”

Sai Davis, an Ivy City resident and custodian at a mosque in the neighborhood, also said the area is up-and-coming. Davis peered up at Hecht Warehouse from the stoop of the mosque, which is housed in a row home on Gallaudet Street. He doesn’t frequent the distilleries because he’s a teetotaler, but Davis said the redevelopment of the warehouse hasn’t yet affected the cost of living in Ivy City.

“Except for the bars, it’s a better appearance,” Davis said. “And it’s still cheap [to live] around here.”

The median asking price for homes in is $615,000 at $350 per square foot, according to realtor.com. The corresponding figures in , where Douglas redeveloped the Wonder Bread factory, are $742,000 and $667 per square foot.

New City

Douglas Development continues to buy property in this section of Northeast.

Just down the road from Hecht Warehouse is , a highly anticipated new development that is about a year away from partial completion.

Millstein said Douglas Development wanted to help revive Ivy City.

“This wasn’t a great area before Jemal purchased Hecht,” Millstein said. “It was known for crime and prostitution. He hoped to change this community.”

The site will include 422 apartments, 18 townhomes, 550,000 square feet of retail space, 156 hotel rooms and 2,900 parking spaces.

“We are about a little under a year away,” Millstein said. “New City will take at least 10 years to be fully finished and reach its full potential.”

New City is the latest wave of development bringing retail to this corridor which is known for its industrial vibe.

The developer is also planning a 130,000-square-foot grocery store, a separate 100,000-square-foot retailer, a five-story hotel, a host of restaurants and a movie theater.

National Building Museum curator Martin Moeller hopes any new development along New York Avenue will respect the area’s history, but also be cutting edge architecturally.

“I think we can have both. The corridor itself I really hope that we could look at it more as a boulevard and develop it as such,” Moeller said. “I would love to see development on the north side over the tracks. We could even build a new metro station right by those tracks and actually create a new node around there.”

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