Interview with David Mandel Anthony, September 25, 2021

Could you tell us your name?

Sure, my name is David Mandel Anthony.

And how are you related to Petworth?

So, my partner and I bought a house here and moved here about six months ago. But we've lived in Columbia Heights for the last 10 years.

Excellent. And we so for your celebration photo, you sent us a picture of a tree. Could you tell us about your tree?

Sure. So when my partner and I were looking at houses in Petworth, we found one and in part, we fell in love with it because right in front of this house, it's a row home build in about 1921, was this beautiful, huge old tree. It was so big that it stretched across the street and shaded even the the yard across the street from us. And it was just something that we fell in love with and felt very special about the house.

And that was her celebration was this beautiful tree?

Beautiful trees. That shaded our house and kept it cool. So we didn't have to run the AC as much and contribute to climate change. We could watch squirrels and birds playing in it and even see a beautiful sunset peeking through the tree at night from our porch.

You also submitted a second photo which kind of gets to the change in the neighborhood. Could you tell us about that second photo?

Sure. So this summer about three months after we moved in, there was one of those freak intense storms in DC, which probably has intensified because of climate change, it was like the hottest day on record of the year and then two storm systems collided and all of a sudden this giant tree probably about a hundred years old toppled, completely to the ground, all the way across the street. It smashed two or three cars and the city came in, chopped it up and took it away. It was a really sad. It was actually more sad than we thought we would be, realizing how important this tree was. And also just what it meant to the community that there was this continuity. We have a neighbor who's lived there for maybe 50, 60 years. She's an elderly African-American woman and she would also sit on her porch and look at the tree and talk to us. And she reflected, that when she was a little girl growing up that tree was always there. It was just the biggest tree on the Block, probably, was there at the beginning of when the whole Petworth subdivision was built in the in the 20s. So it was original one of the last remaining original trees.

We had another neighbor who came and reflected remembered that when he was growing up on that street in the seventies, all the trees were that age and they created sort of a canopy over the street as you would walk down or drive down, you felt like you were in a special sort of secret arbor grove and, you know, we're still very sad about it. One thing that we've noticed when we sit on the porch now, there's just an emptiness in the space, but lots of people walk by and they see us on the porch. And they say, oh, I remember that tree was so beautiful and so large. And and the whole Community feels like it has missed something. So, I wanted to put this memory box into this initiative to just remember this beautiful old tree that shaded generations of people in Petworth.

Thank you so much.