Temperance Court is between 12th and 13th, T and U Streets, near the 13th precinct station. More dope peddlers and ginmill operators are annually arrested in this block than on any other street of comparable size anywhere in the world. You can buy anything you want there—girls, bootleg whiskey, cocaine and marijuana, stolen property, guns and knives, articles of perversion and sadism. Anything but a virgin past the age of puberty.
A notorious dope peddler operated there until recently and may still be there when this comes out. He is John Frye. He has so many children, some sleep on the roof, four on a bed, and there is always a new baby in the carriage. Narcotics agents said he hid junk in the baby’s diaper. A competitor in the same block was Wilbur Kenny, known to the cokies merely as “Y.”
Another byway in the NW Negro section, which is unpublicized in the slick magazines, is Goat Alley, off 7th Street, near M. This is terribly tough, with reefer peddlers, two-dollar wenches, a mugging a minute and murders common. Close by the Negro sections of crime and perversion is Ledroit Park, once surrounded by the mansions of aristocracy. This is back of Griffith Stadium, which, like Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox, is engulfed in a sable sea. Baseball lovers must travel through miles of dangerous streets to the stadium.
Nearby is Freedman’s Hospital, the world’s leading institution of its kind for colored people, one of the outstanding institutions in the world. Its internes are Howard University medical graduates, and among these are great doctors. They get plenty of practice. The worst Negro assault cases go to Freedman’s. On Friday and Saturday nights the floors of its emergency wards look like slaughterhouses. Knifings are frequent; shootings run second. Even on weekdays the place teems with police interviewing victims.
Garfield Hospital, also near a large Negro community, is the second in assault cases.
One of the largest Negro islands in NE has as its center Central Avenue—same name as Los Angeles’ Harlem, though purely coincidental.
Gamblers in the NE section get action above the colored poolroom at 507 8th Street and E.
SW’s colored section is one of the largest in Washington and perhaps the oldest. It begins within a thrown stone’s distance of the Capitol and runs through to the Army War College. If you’ve read about this neighborhood in some pinkish publication before seeing it for yourself you will be looking for something awful. But you will drive through miles of wide avenues with deep lawns. They’re littered with rubbish and junk, of course. This homey residential section is reminiscent of God-fearing, law-abiding middle-class sections in typical Southern towns.
But what goes on inside these cozy habitations is not sleepy. The streets, so quiet by day, take on a sinister aspect at night. This whole section is known as Bloodfield. It’s worth a white man’s or woman’s life to walk there unaccompanied. Even respectable Negroes are not safe.
Young colored hoodlums of both sexes, adept at mugging and knifing, prey on strangers. The white man who comes here for pastime will find his luck all bad. The best he can hope for is a beating and maiming. But white women who are known to be Negro lovers are given safe conduct by the men, though they are attacked often by Negro women who resent the intrusion. These streets are barely patrolled by police.