I was out of town Saturday morning through Sunday evening for a wedding in North Carolina, so I missed witnessing the oddity conveyed to me (and documented in the picture below) by a neighbor known on this blog as “Mr. Ray.” He reports that at 8am on Sunday morning, two kids and an older guy began nailing red painted plywood boards over the second story windows of the NPS’s Carter Woodson House (one of three vacant buildings owned by the National Parks Service on 9th Street set to become a historic site and visitors center
by 2016). People from Shiloh Baptist Church pointed out to the workers that they were supposed to be putting up the boards over windows on Shiloh's properties instead. After the workers took down the boards from the Woodson house, parishoners started arriving en masse and commenting about working on the Sabbath; the workers eventually left.
Does this odd event mean that work by Shiloh addressing the issues raised by the Board of Condemnation and Unsanitary Buildings is imminent? It certainly doesn't seem to indicate that the properties are set to be rehabilitated in any meaningful way or with any significant investment.
8 comments:
Maybe more humorous, or ironic, about this situation is Shiloh's statements made to the public as well as the Condemnation Board about waiting to receive construction bids before rehabilitation of the buildings would begin. Surely these three were not the "construction bid" that won... but three willing gentlemen to work cheaply for Shiloh to cover up some broken windows with plywood. Maybe they are still waiting on the "supposed" bids.
This is a joke...with lots of smart people reading this blog, can anyone think of the best leverage (if any) we have to push harder on Shiloh to do something with these buildings...my only thoughts is to continue to contact the local media to hopefully embarrass them into it (if possible), or another naive idea would be to have our ANC commissioners Kevin C and Alex P to negotiate a meeting with the Shiloh Board and Jack E and/or DCRA?
I'm perplexed why this church has so much weight in our community...
Shiloh and other big local churches have influential members in and outside of our City government. Churches are far more organized than citizens whining away pointlessly. Shiloh is squarely in Alex's ANC and maybe the 2F ANC commissioners should be more involved before dragging Kevin Chappelle into the mix.
http://www.anc2f.org/blogs/2f02/
From the Washington Post today:
Church and housing haven't mixed well lately at Shiloh Baptist Church in Shaw, where church members and leaders are in a nasty battle about what to do with Shiloh's many properties. In a January letter to the Rev. Wallace Charles Smith, deacon Johnny M. Howard slammed a plan to sell land to fund repairs to a church-run community center.
"Selling real estate in this day and time, when the community is changing, is not wise," Howard wrote. "The use of the property near and around the church can directly and adversely affect the mission of the church."
So there you have it from the horses mouth. One could extrapolate from this statement and try to determine what the Churches mission actually is. I'm going to state it out there and say they don't want to be accountable to the community and have potential neighbors, in very close proximately, calling them on their perceived and "accustomed rights".
I just did a search on washingtopost.com on "Shiloh" and it looks like there will be another article this Thursday in the Extra section? Looks like this was in yesterday's paper...
Coming Thursday in the Extra
Sunday, June 24, 2007; Page C04
Neighbors who have been complaining for years about the dilapidated, vacant properties owned by Shiloh Baptist Church in the Shaw neighborhood say that the city is showing unprecedented interest in helping them resolve the problem.
thanks for the WaPo leads.
I was interviewed for the piece coming out on Thursday.
By the way, who in the world picked out that hideous day-glow red color for those plywood boards??!!
has anyone contacted the National Park Service about imposing a fine on Shiloh for trespassing and defacing a historic property? i have heard that the Woodson house can not be painted until a historic study is completed by Nehi, Inca, and Shiloh can vandalize it at will ?
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