History
The brick building that houses the recreation center was constructed in 1951–52 by consolidating, expanding, and adding a second story onto three single-story fuel sheds that stood behind row houses once located at 1621–1625 P Street NW. The unsegregated park was formally opened on November 13, 1953, at a cost of $80,000.
In 2003, plans for a four-story, multi-million-dollar gay community center to be built on a small section of the aging park sparked a dispute among Dupont Circle residents and the Washington D.C. Center for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender People. The plans were ultimately abandoned.
In 2008, the recreation center and playground were renovated. Work began in April and the park reopened on December 15. During the renovation, archaeological work uncovered several artifacts and two brick foundations: one from a row house at 1613 P Street and one at 1625 P Street. Researchers concluded that the latter supported a house built in 1878 by Henry Hurt, a Confederate Army veteran and president of the Washington and Georgetown Railroad Company.
Read more about this topic: Stead Park
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)