Town Topics

Robert Devaney • March 27, 2012

S&R Foundation attorney Alice Haase has confirmed that Halcyon House, one of Washington’s most historic homes at 3400-3410 Prospect Street, N.W., has gone to settlement. Under contract since November 2011 to the S&R Foundation, a National Cherry Blossom Festival participant, the property was sold by the Dreyfuss estate for $11 million. 

Purchased by Edmund Dreyfuss and Blake Construction in 1966 from Georgetown University, Halcyon House has been held by the Dreyfuss family and its business concerns for almost 46 years, the longest tenure of any of the property’s deed holders, including its builder and original 1787 occupant, Benjamin Stoddert, the first Secretary of the Navy and friend of George Washington.

Sculptor John Dreyfuss, who led the renovation and reconstruction work during the 1980s and 1990s at the house and its gardens, as well as building a lower studio and hall, received an award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation for his efforts. At one time, Dreyfuss also headed up the Francis Scott Key Foundation, a non-profit which completed Francis Scott Key Park and the Star-Spangled Banner Monument on M Street, now part of the National Park System, next to Key Bridge.

S&R Foundation, which last year purchased another historic Georgetown home, Evermay, is a non-profit founded in Washington, D.C., by Dr. Sachiko Kuno and Dr. Ryuji Ueno in 2000 “to encourage and stimulate scientific research and artistic endeavors among young individuals.” The foundation plans to operate its day-to-day business from Evermay on 28th Street in Georgetown. The married couple, Ueno and Kuno, founded Sucampo Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a global biopharmaceutical company based in Bethesda. Sucampo is one of the sponsors of the National Cherry Blossom Festival.

In addition, with its Japanese-American mission, S&R Foundation is hosting its first “Annual Overtures Artist Concert Series,” which will feature seven award-winning, world-class performing artists at the Kennedy Center as part of the festival’s centennial celebration, honoring 100 years of the gift of trees from Tokyo to Washington — Wednesday, April 4 – Sunday, April 8, Tuesday, April 10, Thursday, April 12; all performances will begin at 7:30 p.m.

Georgetowner • February 7, 2012

ANC Report: Full House on DCFEMS, DCRA, Pepco, Food Trucks and Evermay.

Got all that? In an especially full and varied meeting Jan, 30, Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2E tackled a packed line-up:

**Fire & EMS**

Chief Kenneth Ellerbe, of D.C. Fire & Emergency Medical Services, fresh with his department’s safety and health demonstrations at the Georgetown Safeway Jan. 28, addressed the meeting and stressed the role of firefighters who are also paramedics and emergency responders.?Ellerbe’s insistence on the use of the full name?and not just “DCFD” (the chief ordered uniforms and t-shirts must show the full acronym, DCFEMS)? has some firemen and members of the union bothered. But the chief continues to talk about the department’s “soft presence on the streets” and the 161,000 calls in 2011: 130,000 were medical, and only 500 were real house fires. Ellerbe also said the department had gotten 25 new ambulances and defended the newly proposed firefighters’ working hours of?12 hours on, 12 off.

**Building Collapse Still Unknown**

Nicholas Majett, director of the D.C. Department of Regulatory and Consumer Affairs, talked about how the agency “touches everyone,” and then dealt with the partial collapse of the building at 1424 Wisconsin Ave., N.W., as well as regulations on the newly popular food trucks around the city. The partial collapse happening Thanksgiving Day, and there is a stop-work order on the site. The owner must hire a structural engineer to determine the cause?a possible conflict of interest that commissioners found troubling and said so to DCRA’s Bill Davidson and his boss. Citing a construction collapse of a Wisconsin Avenue building ten years ago, which was owned by the same businessman and about one block to the south, commissioner Bill Starrels recalled, “The owner has a history as a bad actor.” Owner Robert Solomon of the 1422 Wisconsin Ave. building complained about a window being bricked up. The cause of the collapse remains undetermined, and DCRA needs to know if it is to issue a permit for rebuilding at the site, which was slated to became a Z-Burger eatery.

**Where Food Trucks May Park**

As for food trucks, the commissioners voted to ask that they not park on residential streets. Current law allows them to park in any legal spot.?

**Evermay to House S&R Foundation**

Evermay’s zoning variance request was approved in a most collegial manner. Evermay LLC requested that the S&R Foundation, headed by the property’s new owners, biotech business partners and spouses Ryuji Ueno and Sachiko Kuno, be allowed to operate from the estate at R and 28th Streets with strict restrictions on frequency of events and number of employees. The foundation’s mission encourages musical and scientific excellence while it promotes American and Japanese ties and studies responses to disasters, such as tsunamis or earthquakes. S&R Foundation attorney Alice Gregg Haase listed the restrictions, which include parking all cars on Evermay’s land, no outdoor amplified music, no more than 100 persons on regular events and more. The ANC voted to review the approval after five years, not seven as was requested by the foundation. “This is the way it should work,” said ANC chair Ron Lewis. The zoning commission will make its final decision at the end of this month.

**Hey, Be Alert: Lock It**

The monthly police report by Metropolitan Police Department officer Kathryn Fitzgerald stated the obvious: lock your doors and secure your items. One business cash register was robbed when employees left keys in the register; another left its business office doors unlocked and was robbed. (The perps were caught.) As for iPhone thefts, need we say more?

**Better Wiring in the Hood**

Pepco officials were also at the meeting to discuss outages and how the utility is switching neighborhoods to different electrical grids, such as Hillandale, and upgrading lines as well?all to improve service in Burleith.

**Hang On, O and P**

For the O and P Street Project: the 3400 block of P Street should be complete now.? Check [FixingOandPStreets.com](http://www.fixingoandpstreets.com) for updates, such as a utilities turn-off next week.

Quick question: Who said the following? “Rocky’s Report should be taken with a grain of salt.” It was ANC chair Ron Lewis speaking of Georgetown University’s more personable approach to campus crime reporting.? More quotes this and next week on the zoning commission’s decision?expected momentarily?on the university’s 2010-2020 campus plan.

Donna Evers •

As you leave the Dupont Circle Metro station’s north exit, you will see words carved into the granite walls — lines from a poem by Walt Whitman, called “The Wound Dresser.” Since it’s hard to get the whole inscription when you are riding the escalator, here it is:

Thus in silence in dreams’ projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals;
The hurt and the wounded I pacify with soothing hand;
I sit by the restless all the dark night — some are so young,
Some suffer so much — I recall the experience sweet and sad.

This was a subject Walt Whitman knew a lot about, since he served as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War. Already known as a journalist and poet, he first got involved after the bloody Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, where he went to take care of his brother who had been wounded in battle. There he met another impressive volunteer nurse, Clara Barton, with whom he would cross paths again in Washington. When Whitman arrived in the District to help out as a medical volunteer, the city’s public buildings were turned into crowded way stations for wounded soldiers. There were not enough doctors, and no formal nursing profession, so the military had to rely on recruits and volunteers. Even with that, doctors could not deal with the types of wounds inflicted by the advanced bullets and weapons of the war. The quickest solution to treat an infected limb — and save the soldier’s life — was to amputate. Meanwhile, the wounded were crowded into any shelters available, waiting for the meager medical help to arrive.

One of the most haunting passages in Whitman’s journal about his experiences during the war was his account of the makeshift hospital at the Old Patent Office in Washington. This building, recently restored to its original grandeur and serving as the National Portrait Gallery and Museum of American Art, made for a bizarre hospital ward. The maze of long narrow galleries was originally created to hold glass display cases, which held wood and metal models of inventions submitted for patents. Wounded soldiers, sometimes as many as 800, were laid on cots arranged alongside the glass cases, creating a path so inspectors and inventors could still get through the maze to view and judge the models, stepping over the soldiers as they moved along. This was one of many hospitals where Whitman volunteered during the war, bringing food, paper and pens for the men and sometimes just staying on so a wounded soldier would not have to die alone.

Out of these terrible experiences came some good. The war encouraged many advances in medical science. Volunteer nurse Clara Barton went on to found the American Red Cross, an organization that we rely in times of national emergencies and disasters. Meanwhile, Walt Whitman, who continued to write poetry, supported himself with a job at the Department of the Interior. Ironically, when Secretary of the Interior James Harlan discovered that Whitman was the author of “Leaves of Grass,” he fired him, citing the poems as “damaging to the morals of men.” By that time, though, Whitman was revered as a poet and supporters rallied to his cause, soon securing him another government job.
Whitman’s war experiences earned him the title “the good gray poet,” and his poems about the Civil War are forever burned into our collective memory. There are many, among them “O Captain! My Captain!”, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and, of course, “The Wound Dresser.” And while his words carved on the subway’s wall describe the horrors of war, they also tell about human compassion, which will always be our saving grace.
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