By Frank Leone and Denise Vogt
Shortly after its founding in 1955, the Foggy Bottom Restoration Association (now the Foggy Bottom Association or FBA) began issuing a hand-delivered semi-monthly newsletter, the Foggy Bottom News. Its format changed over the years, and it is now digital. Over the decades, it has provided an important community resource. The News described important events, including the protection of the neighborhood’s row houses, new construction and highway issues, and conflicts with George Washington University expansion. It also provided articles that looked back at old Foggy Bottom and those displaced by new development. It provided information about comings and goings of residents (and their pets), recipes, poems, original artwork and other details about people who inhabited the houses where some of us still live. Finally, it carried advertisements for now-gone businesses.
Until now, to review past print editions of the Foggy Bottom News from 1958 to 2006, you had to visit the George Washington University’s Gelman Library Special Collections Research Center or the D.C. Public Library People’s Archive Washingtoniana Collection. When reviewing the issues, box by box, you had to take photos or notes of any information of interest. Now, at the request of the FBA History Project and through the extraordinary efforts and generosity of GWU Archivist Brigette Kamsler, Digital Services Manager Dalton Alves, and others at GWU Special Collections, you can review the past issues of the Foggy Bottom News on-line at any time or place. Thanks also to the Foggy Bottom Trust for their generous initial grant offer to fund this project.
Scholars, students, current and former neighborhood residents, family history researchers – actually anyone with access to a computer – may search past editions by date or using key words. Click on “sort by … Date Published” to put them in (reverse) date order. If one takes the time to review the issues year by year, the articles and photos reflect the evolution of the neighborhood, the variety of people who lived here, the issues they thought were important and the businesses that served the community.
To do a key word search – e.g. “Hughes Mews,” or “Maria Tyler,” or “garden tour” -- go to the Internet Archives page: https://archive.org/details/gwulibraries. Enter the term “Foggy Bottom News” (use quotation marks) and your keyword(s) into the search bar, select the “search text contents” button, then hit “search this collection.” You can then review the issue – the key words in relevant articles are highlighted in blue!
For many of you, this new opportunity to easily flip through the past issues will bring a mix of emotions and recollections. Let us know about your interesting finds.
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