HOUSING COMPLEX: Preservation Reservations: The Board That Oversees Old Buildings Has a Young New Leader–Which Makes Veteran Preservationists Nervous

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Excerpt:

Posted by Lydia DePillis on Jun. 24, 2010 at 10:48 am

Standing across the street from an old, boarded-up house on Martin Luther King Avenue SE, Catherine Buell looks disapproving. “It’s almost like a smack in the face for the neighborhood,” she says, surveying the neglect. At ease under the blazing midday sun in a gauzy white top and pearl earrings, Buell­—a Patton, Boggs attorney who moved to Anacostia in 2005—then picks her way across a debris-strewn parking lot into the historic district she’s made her home.



A graduate of Spelman College and Georgetown Law, Buell, 30, grew up in Silver Spring, not Anacostia. But she fell in love with a little house on Pleasant Street SE and soon found a community in the form of the half-social, half-civic Historic Anacostia Block Association.

In 2008, the group discovered a broken-down neighborhood’s El Dorado: the Historic Homeowner Grant program, a fund that releases up to $35,000 to owners of historic houses for renovations. Sixty-seven people applied and got funding, prompting a spate of upgrades across the once dignified locale. As a lawyer, Buell helped her neighbors work through the tax issues. And she served as an informal liaison between the neighborhood and the city’s Historic Preservation Office—which she found uniquely impressive.

Photos of Historic Anacostia

(courtesy of And Now, Anacostia)

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