Funkstown - Five Years of the FBA History Project – A Report
- Frank Leone
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
By Denise Vogt & Frank Leone, Co-Chairs
It’s hard to believe, but the Foggy Bottom Association History Project has completed five years of researching and sharing Foggy Bottom neighborhood history. In 2025, we retained and supervised two student interns from George Washington University to provide content for the House History pages, updated the Historic District Study Area House Map Project, continued our regular posts on the Funkstown history blog (which now has 150 entries), posted on the FBA’s Instagram, gave presentations, led walking tours, and judged the DC History Center’s 2025 National History Day competition. Our site continues to offer information on Oral History and Resources on Foggy Bottom and DC History. We invite you to share your information (and we know lots of you have some great stories) about Foggy Bottom history and contribute to our Historic District House History pages! We thank you for your continued interest in and support of the project.
From the beginning of the FBA History Project, we have involved GWU students in our efforts. This summer, due to a generous grant from the Foggy Bottom Association Defense and Improvement Corp. (Trust), we were able to hire two student interns – Sarvani Jaladanki and Roan Smith - to research histories of houses and their residents in the Foggy Bottom Historic District. They did a terrific job of combing through census, city, directory, government documents, and newspaper files – going back to the 1870s – to provide details on forty houses and the people who lived in them. We are currently in the process of updating the House History Pages to provide those details. Our consultant Brian Kraft also updated the Foggy Bottom Historic District House Map to include 1920 Census and DC City Directory data, which shows a continuing increase in the African American population of the neighborhood.
We reached a milestone of 150 Funkstown blog posts over the past five years and a recent post provides some short highlights of past stories. This year, we also included a student guest column from (then) American University Student Emma Wiley on the relocation of the historic Lenthall Houses and post with a link to a paper by GWU student Janice Demings about GWU’s impact on the neighborhood. In addition to history stories, we also regularly provide updates on history activities. Foggy Bottom history is being made every day and since May 2025, Co-Chair Denise Vogt has been posting on the association’s Instagram several times a week.
The George Washington University Gelman Library Special Collections Research Center maintains paper copies of the FBA’s newsletter, the Foggy Bottom News, from 1958 to 2006 (donated by resident Ellie Becker). In 2024, we obtained a Foggy Bottom Trust grant to digitize those issues and make them available on-line, but once the library began to process, they decided the project benefited the community and funded it themselves. University Archivist Brigette Kamsler and Digital Services Manager Dalton Alves continue to support this effort, recently updating the digital collection to include issues from 2008 to 2013. The FBA will work with GWU over the next year to digitize issues from 2021 to the current date. Let us know if you have any back paper issues!
In September 2025, we conducted our fifth annual DC Events Walkingtown Historic District Walking Tour, with good turnout and great weather. Visitors were also able to see the 2025 Arts in Foggy Bottom installations. The Historic District History and Arts on-line walking tours statistics indicate there have been more than 18,000 views combined of the two tours since their inception in December 2021.
Our presentations in 2025 included a discussion of the Civil War in Foggy Bottom at the DACOR Bacon House, a brief recap of FB History for the FBWE Main Street GWU Day of Service, and a table at the West End Library Service Fair. We also posted information on talks we gave in 2024 at the DACOR Bacon House on F Street in the President’s Neighborhood and a link to our DC Preservation League Webinar on Historic Foggy Bottom.
We had a table at the DC History Center’s DC History Conference History Network, assisted by GWU students, and this year we were able to coordinate with seven other neighborhood history groups including the Capital Hill Restoration Society. Your co-chairs have stayed active with the greater DC History community during these challenging times. Both Frank and Denise acted as judges for the 2025 National History Day Competition, which is like a science fair for junior and senior high school students, but for history. (Next year’s National History Day is March 28, 2026.) We also participated in the first DC History Center-DC Archives “Crawl” in October. Frank remains involved as a board member of the DC History Center and member of the DC Preservation League Landmarks and Historic District Committees. We supported the new Watergate Museum activities.
We also provided neighborhood information to students, the Washington Post, and the GW Hatchet. As the History Project gains more recognition, we hear from former residents and are enriched and grateful for their contribution to the neighborhood’s history. We monitor building changes in the Historic District to ensure it remains historic. We also have provided comments on the new 2027 GWU Campus Plan arguing for preservation by documentation if buildings of historic significance, which are not protected, are destroyed.
Since the project’s inception, we are grateful to the many people who we have met at several of these venues who share a love of DC history. Oftentimes, the people we meet recommend resources and individuals that broaden our understanding of this neighborhood’s history and its role in the development of the city.
