communitylife
Margot Kelly Hale to the Queen of Barrack’s Row by Stephanie Cavanaugh
B
arracks Row was not always cupcakes and cosmos, a fact that might surprise some newcomers to the Hill. “The porno queen of 8th Street, that’s what they called me,” laughs Margot Kelly. That was near the start of her 40 year odyssey: cleaning up
8th Street. Barracks Row. It’s been a bumpy ride. In the late 1960s, when the liquor store closed in a building she owned across from the Marine Barracks, Kelly was approached by a man wanting to open a bookstore. A bookstore on 8th Street! Fancy that, she thought. She instantly leased him the space and fantasized, in six month’s time, adding a winding staircase to the second floor “for a tea room where people could sit and read.” “I don’t intend to have that kind of bookstore,” he said, red-faced. With the lease already signed, she insisted he paper over the windows. The store quickly closed. “He was a nice young man,” she remembers.
Foul Fowl and Happy Hookers Hanging in Kelly’s kitchen is a cartoon of the street created by a Marine at the beginning of this century with plushly upholstered prostitutes hanging out of upper windows, street people leaning against storefronts, and pedes-
trians gaily tossing trash. It’s amusing to those of us that have lived on the Hill for more than say five years to overhear conversations -- let’s go to 8th Street for brunch, lunch, dinner, a drink. Kelly was there before Lola’s and Ted’s. Before many folks dared cross the Berlin Wall that was the Eastern Market Metro Plaza. She was there when the Shakespeare Theater Rehearsal Studio was a seedy movie house where vile stuff clutched stickily to your sandals and there were ominous rustlings beneath the rickety seats; when their main offices across the way--that grand Victorian with the mansard roof--was a grocery with rotting chickens on top of the freezer, pigeons cooing in the roof beams, and an owner sneering about gentrification and how he was serving the poor. Kelly grew up in Berlin and came to the U.S. in 1950, as a secretary at the German Diplomatic Mission--later, the Embassy. By the early 1950s she’d married and divorced. Realtor Millicent Chatel sold her a little house in Northwest and talked her into selling real estate. She joined Chatel’s Georgetown office. “We were all divorcees. It was marvelous,” which comes out mawvelous. Her German accent is still buffed and shiny. Chatel also urged her to buy real estate, advice she seized on: renovating and renting out several houses in that part of town, but rarely selling. “When you’ve got something good, you hold on to it,” she says. Answering phones one day, as new agents often do, she took a call from a man with a house for sale on East Capitol Street. “A coming neighborhood,” pronounced Chatel, who led her gaggle of agents on tour. Kelly got the listing; Chatel opened an office on Pennsylvania Avenue. Along with a friend, Kelly bought a house at 504 7th Street, SE. “$11-12,000 with $2,500 down,” she remembers. “A dump.” They let it to a woman for $100
Margot Kelly at work; a younger Margot Kelly profiled in the Hill Rag’s business section in 1985