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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.

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