WaPo: "Once home to civil rights pioneer, historic house is now worst on the block in LeDroit" -- 326 T St NW

I have not copied in the entire Washington Post article -- just the first few paragraphs.

You can click on the link to read the entire story.

Once home to civil rights pioneer, historic house is now worst on the block in LeDroit

By Robert Samuels, Published: February 15

                          

Cloistered behind a chain-link fence, the boarded-up house at 326 T St. NW is a duplex sliced in half, abandoned and seemingly forgotten. But the marker outside indicates it shouldn’t be.
                                                                               
Deemed historic in 1975, this former home of civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell, and her husband, Judge Robert Terrell, had been preserved to help tell a narrative of the city’s past. But now it tells a story from the present: of a city undergoing a seismic demographic shift and struggling to keep its rich history alive.
                                                                                   
The home’s owner, Howard University, has halted its plans to rehabilitate the Terrell House as a local museum and community space. That movement lost its momentum during the Great Recession, and there has been little effort to resuscitate it since.
       
So the Terrell House sits, a strange, decaying relic of another time, in the middle of a block lined with newly painted Victorian homes updated with features like exposed brick and granite countertops.
     
“Almost every house on this block has been renovated, except for that one,’’ said Brian Baylor, a 27-year-old paralegal who has lived in the neighborhood since birth. “No one wants it to go because it’s historic. But it is an eyesore, and it should be restored. It should be a tourist attraction.”
                             
Baylor knows the broad strokes of the Terrell family history: Mary Church Terrell was the first black woman appointed to the school board and led the charge to integrate city restaurants. Husband Robert Terrell was a Harvard graduate and the first black municipal judge in the District. The duplex looks sliced in half because the other side of the dwelling burned in a fire long ago, and the Terrells’ half was saved by the firewall.

...

And here are the last three paragraphs:

LeDroit Park residents have sometimes been frustrated with Howard’s stewardship. At one point, there was a clamor about the university’s abandonment of properties along a city block while it sought to expand its hospital. In 1998, the university worked with Fannie Mae to renovate the houses, which helped prompt the neighborhood’s revival.
       
Now, the neighborhood is concerned about the Terrell House. But so is the university, which takes its duty to honor Terrell’s will seriously, Bennett said.
       
“Our job is to keep the story of the Terrell family alive,” she said. “There’s been no place in the city to tell their story, and we think it should be in their home.”