LOOKING IN FROM CENTERFIELD
2004: The unit block of O Street SE will also likely be sacrificed to create the playing field and grandstands. Like Half Street, it is now lined with rather aesthetically undistinguished former warehouses. But O Street SE has figured in the history of Washington's gay community since the barely post-Stonewall days of 1970, when the first of a series of gay-oriented clubs opened in the blue building at the center of the photograph.
The beige building behind the telephone pole has been home to the Club Baths Washington II since 1972. In 1976, the Baths were the scene of a highly-publicized police raid which was widely viewed as harassment by the gay community. Charges against those arrested were eventually dropped.
In 1975 the Washington Square disco opened in the venerable black industrial building at 1345 Half Street, which had housed the rug laundry of the Mark Kesheshian Company in the 1930s and 1940s. Washington Square was eventually succeeded by "The Other Side", a bar with a largely female clientele that stayed in business for nearly ten years. Today the sign in the circular window over the Half Street entrance advertises "Ziegfeld's", which has featured notable drag shows, while the canopied O Street entrance is for a club called "Secrets". The Washington Square site will be somewhere in left-center field when the stadium is completed.
