Reeves Municipal Center Dedicated - The Washington Post

Remembrances of Frank D. Reeves flowed yesterday.

D.C. Council Chairman David A. Clarke said he "learned the practice of law at his feet." Mayor Marion Barry told how, as a student in a segregated Mississippi high school, he first heard of Reeves when he read the brief on the historic 1954 decision advocating desegregation of the nation's schools. Reeves' name was on it.

Council member Polly Shackleton held aloft a 1960 newspaper photograph of her and Reeves together, working 26 years ago on city and civil rights issues that consumed Reeves' life as an activist, lawyer, professor, adviser to President Kennedy on minority affairs and the first black nominated to the Board of Commissioners of the District.

Those were just a few reflections yesterday as Barry and a host of other city officials among a crowd of about 400 dedicated the $ 50 million Reeves Center for Municipal Affairs at 14th and U streets NW.

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Barry hailed the eight-story, 489,000-square-foot building as "an anchor" of redevelopment and a tribute to minority business that largely built it in an area that had been a haven for drug users -- and still is something of a hangout for drug dealing.

Barry recalled that some people did not want the center at this site because of "all those drug addicts . . . all those horrible people," and added: "Look around . . . . You don't see them here."

The glass atrium and pressed-concrete building already is home to more than 1,000 city employes and soon will have several businesses, including a bakery, dry cleaner, bank, shoe repair shop and cafeteria -- much like the businesses that were burned out in the 1968 riots.

Barry related how he had been on the same corner in 1968, on the second floor of what then was a Peoples Drug Store, when the riots began.

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The mayor spoke for nearly 30 minutes, at one point introducing Esnora Reeves Early, Reeves' widow, who is remarried and lives in Detroit.

Reeves died in 1973.

Yesterday was a day of celebration, and almost no one mentioned construction problems and delays of more than a year that troubled the Reeves Center, including a finding in the spring that elevated walkways in its atrium were not properly supported and might collapse.

A bulky, two-story steel bulwark, temporarily installed to support the walkways, still mars the atrium lobby.

But yesterday the supports were covered with festive red and white balloons and hardly visible.

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