From Tacky to Trendy on 10th Street NW
From Tacky to Trendy on 10th St.
 The Waffle Shop is a neighborhood institution on 10th Street, featuring Chineese food and American diner cuisine. (By Dudley M. Brooks/TWP) |  |
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 20, 1997; Page A01
The block begins with a burned-out, brick-strewn lot taken over by T-shirt vendors. Across the street, tourists are refueling at the Hard Rock Cafe. Up the street are Ford's Theatre and the house where Lincoln died, which is a few steps from a $60-an-hour massage parlor.
Then there's the Waffle Shop, a beloved eggs-and-scrapple-and-lo mein institution with a $3.95 spaghetti special. And Honest Abe, a souvenir store selling U.S. Capitol toenail clippers, is next door to a half-vacant building draped with a banner promising that D.C.'s hottest nightclub is "coming soon."
Welcome to 10th Street NW, between E and F streets. It's tacky, touristy, historic and blighted — sending all the mixed messages of Washington's mixed-up downtown, struggling to reinvent itself.
The block aspires to be cool but succeeds only in being ironic. It's downtown's Rorschach test. Many possibilities present themselves, and not all of them could exist side by side in a sane universe or an organized downtown. But they do on 10th Street.
 As Yolanda Powell eats breakfast, her son Maurico, 1, catches a few winks at the Waffle Shop, whose days may be numbered. (By Dudles M. Brooks/The Washington Post) | |
The theme from "The Flintstones" cartoon wafts up the block from the battered tenor saxophone of Joseph Tate, 53, a street musician who frequently occupies the corner outside the Hard Rock Cafe. The Darwinian law of coins in the cup has taught him what tunes work on 10th Street: campy melodies that appeal to nostalgia and goofiness.
"I picked this corner because it's a hot corner in tourist season," Tate says. "For a long time, I thought it was slowly dying. I had thought in a few years it would be history."
But now Washington's downtown is poised for what city leaders and seasoned observers such as Tate predict could be a signal transformation into a regional entertainment center, with more theme restaurants as well as movie theaters and trendy stores.
And suddenly this block of 10th Street finds itself propelled from a curious byway to the vortex of the action, with office projects to the west, the proposed new opera house and the Convention Center to the north, the Mall to the south and, opening Dec. 2, the MCI Center sports and entertainment complex to the east.
"That's the hole in the doughnut of all the activity down there," says Leonard Greenberg, who is trying to develop property on the block. "That area's going to become an 18-hour-a-day location."
But there's some dissension over what the new downtown should be. Tenth Street has its charms, and not all of them will survive the makeover.
"That street has a neighborhood feel to it," says Brad Botwin, 40, a Commerce Department employee and lunch devotee of the Waffle Shop. "It's like a real city."
He considers 10th Street a refuge from the "sterile" facades and focaccio sandwich places near his office at Pennsylvania Avenue and 14th Street. He fears that the rest of downtown is becoming a theme-restaurant playland. "Most of Washington is turning into that," he said. "They're knocking down streets like where the Waffle Shop is."
It's a short block — 120 steps from one end to the other. It has red-brick sidewalks with black splotches from old chewing gum.
A day and a night on 10th Street reveal slices of the conflicted soul of downtown Washington — in the notorious box seat at Ford's where Lincoln was shot; under the guitars on the wall at the Hard Rock; in line for the T-shirt that reads, "Future President, Washington D.C."; upstairs at the massage parlor.
Days begin at 5:30 a.m. at the Waffle Shop.
The patrons are a mix of blue-collar workers, office employees and artists, hankering for waffles and grits. They say it's one of the last diners in the city, rough and retro-chic. Tourists are scarce.
"These are my customers, who come every week, like family," says Hai Ngo, 50, the owner for the last 10 years. He's from Vietnam, but the restaurant features Chinese food, as well as American diner cuisine and breakfast all day.
"It's kind of like a Cheers for food," Botwin says.
Nobody knows exactly how long the Waffle Shop has existed on 10th Street. The swivel stools at the curved counters are identical to the ones exhibited at the National Museum of American History from the 1960 civil rights sit-in at the Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C.
But the Waffle Shop's days may be numbered. The lease is up in December, and Ngo's attorney is negotiating with Greenberg, the landlord, who also owns adjacent buildings, up to the corner of 10th and F streets.
Echoing city planners, Greenberg says the best use for such a property would be a single large tenant — a bookstore, a theme restaurant, a high-profile clothing store.
By late morning, tour buses begin to line up along the curb. It's the off-season, so the crowds are thinner, but each year roughly a million tourists visit the block, according to National Park Service rangers at Ford's Theatre.
"We're all trying to get right with Mr. Lincoln," says Michael R. Maione, 51, the infectiously manic historian at Ford's.
Maione is explaining his unified theory of 10th Street — why the million tourists come, why souvenir stores are named Honest Abe, why developers envision fabulous retail-restaurant-entertainment combinations snuggled in the sanctified neighborhood of the old theater and the spare brick house.
"The great American dream is Mr. Lincoln," Maione says. "He's still with us. He's pure and good. . . . More importantly, he's just plain good business."
Maione grouses that scholars have wasted time on popular "myths," such as whether John Wilkes Booth got away, and they haven't investigated a possible Confederate conspiracy behind the assassination.
In a perfect world, Maione says, 10th Street would be a sedate, historic block.
"But that's not the real world," he says. "A city has chaos. That's the nature of the city. That's also part of the reason it's so exciting."
But chaotic 10th Street is a bit of a shock to tourists fresh from the manicured precincts of the Mall.
There's Blanket Man, who wears one in all weather and patrols the sidewalk outside the house where Lincoln died. One day he breaks into "Amazing Grace," and a group of eighth-graders on a field trip from Holy Family Catholic School in New Albany, Ind., joins him for a verse.
There's the garbage.
"Something we're not used to — I'm from Oklahoma — is the trash," says Russell Aday, 56, of Ponca City, Okla.
At his feet near the house where Lincoln died is an empty quart of Red Bull Malt Liquor and other refuse. The trunk of a slender tree is dotted with dozens of colorful wads of chewing gum.
"I think our senator from our home town [Don Nickles (R-Okla.)] will get a letter from me," Aday says.
Raising his voice above "The Hokey Pokey" blaring from a store, Aday's friend Lee Strubele, 59, says: "The commercialism surprised me. I was hoping there would be a more pristine historical presence."
But the Oklahomans avail themselves of the commerce, filling shopping bags with Hard Rock T-shirts — trophies to show off in Ponca City.
Three doors from where Lincoln died, the Royal Spa is open from 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. It advertises "Oriental massages" in the newspaper and quotes prices over the telephone of $40 for 30 minutes or $60 for an hour. There's a buzzer beside the glass door marked only with the street number, 520. Upstairs is a hallway with little rooms to the side. A smiling woman wearing a black miniskirt and a white blouse greets visitors.
But when a visitor turns out to be a reporter, she summons another woman who shows him to the stairs and says, "I don't speak English. Nobody gonna tell you anything."
The corner of 10th and E streets, opposite the Hard Rock and diagonally across from the FBI building — the epicenter of tourist activity in the neighborhood — is a vacant lot given over to T-shirt vendors.
A sports store there burned down several years ago. Adjacent on E Street are two more lots with piles of bricks and bottles. The scene suggests a war zone — one viewed by a million tourists a year.
Leasing the land to the T-shirt vendors "is just something to take the edge off the taxes," says Chris Belland, chief executive officer of the parent company of Old Town Trolley Tours of Washington, which owns the lot at 10th and E. He says the company plans to break ground there on a tourist welcome center by late next year.
As evening descends, light and life begin to drain from 10th Street. Tate packs his sax and heads to Georgetown.
But the block isn't dead, and there are signs of more life to come.
The crowds drawn to Ford's Theatre add a certain polish to 10th Street. Ford's is the only theater that is a national historic site by day and a modern playhouse by night.
"I know somewhere deep in my heart that Mr. Lincoln would approve," actor James Whitmore said one night, an hour before performing in "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten."
The seven-year-old Hard Rock pioneered the theme restaurant concept in Washington and now is counting on the MCI Center's basketball and hockey fans to beef up the night business, general manager Doranne Hughes said.
Similar thoughts run through the minds of Mike Baker and Dennis Brown, veteran Washington restaurateurs who are putting the finishing touches on Mike Baker's 10th Street Grill, their new venture, next to the house where Lincoln died.
D.C. Live is the club coming soon to the building next to Honest Abe. Tesfaye Hiwet, a partner in the club, says it will set an upscale standard — $10 cover, dress code, restricted VIP lounge — for as many as 2,200 patrons a night who will be able to listen to jazz, reggae and other types of music.
Richard Wallace and Buck the Fed aren't so sure about all this.
Early weekday evenings and Saturday afternoons, they play chess at the downstairs bar of the Lincoln House Restaurant, right next to the vacant lot.
The Lincoln House is a neighborhood joint with a low ceiling, red carpet, red upholstered seats and few tourists.
It's fine as is for regulars such as Wallace, 71, a retired writer, and Buck, 48, who works for an agency nearby but declined to give his last name.
"The neighborhood bars and restaurants are disappearing," Buck says. "Guys like us who have limited budgets, we're getting squeezed out."
The chess players are nearly alone in the Lincoln House. Across the street, a steady stream of patrons passes through the beckoning brass poles and velvet ropes outside the Hard Rock.
© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company
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