A vacant home owned by Shiloh Baptist church at 1533 Ninth St. NW. In 1998 the church received a grant of $340,000 for a makeover of this property into a youth coffeehouse.

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Photographs and captions by Joe Tresh

The crowd listens as religious leaders speak at the Shaw neighborhood anti-violence rally Saturday, March 31, 2007.

Rev. Walter Fauntroy, left, greets Washington D.C. Councilman Jack Evans at the Shaw neighborhood anti-violence march and rally Saturday, March 31, 2007. Directly behind their handshake in maroon is Bishop C.L. Long, who organized the event.

Story from the Washington Post: More than a dozen ministers, along with D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), other politicians and community leaders, led a march for peace yesterday that called for a new community effort to stem violence.

“We need to set the tone to let people know that there is hope,” said Apostle H. Whitner of the United House of Prayer for All People. His church’s brass band was at the front of the march that started at Ninth and O streets NW and went several blocks to a rally outside the Kennedy Recreation Center at Seventh and O streets NW.

Apostle C.L. Long, pastor of the District’s Scripture Cathedral, organized the event, which included the Rev. H. Beecher Hicks Jr. of Metropolitan Baptist Church, the Rev. Wallace C. Smith of Shiloh Baptist Church and the Rev. Walter Fauntroy of New Bethel Baptist Church. Fauntroy, a former D.C. delegate to Congress and a civil rights activist, said the event reminded him of a rally in the same area during the 1960s.

“Forty years ago, Martin Luther King walked through here with a group of pastors calling for people to renew this community,” Fauntroy said. “As a result, we trained drug addicts and ex-cons, and a lot of these buildings you see today were built by them.”

Washington D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, left, and Jack Evans, Councilmember for Ward 2 laugh as Fenty’s son, Andrew, looks on.

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A mural that was located on O Street near 7th Street NW, “99 Bottles of Beer on a Fuckin Wall,” by Borf, the infamous graffiti artist from the Washington DC summer of 2005, has been “buffed,” or painted over.

On top of that, in the early hours of this morning, Saturday, October 15, 2005, the site of the mural was defaced with new unsightly graffiti tags. The graffiti is displayed on the side of a disgraceful convenience market, adding to the collective eyesore of that corner.

The Mark Of Borf

Bottles of Borf beer on a wall.

(File photos taken Summer 2005.)