The Hill is a different place today because some forty four years ago, Dick Wolf and his wife Muriel bought one of the homes in the famous Philadelphia Row on 11th Street SE, and then felt the need to fight to preserve the atmosphere of the community that had attracted them to Capitol Hill in the first place.

Today, after a four-decade career as a lawyer in the executive branch of the Federal Government and an almost equal period of volunteer service in the cause of neighborhood preservation, Wolf is in the third year of his second (non-consecutive) term as President of the Capitol Hill Restoration Society.

Born and raised in Michigan, Wolf came east to attend law school at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut – a city he now says was suffering from repeated failures of efforts at urban renewal and reconstruction. While he studied law, he met and married Muriel, who was studying medicine. After graduation, they moved south so she could take her internship and residency as a pediatric cardiologist in Baltimore.

Dick found his first post-college job with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights as the Eisenhower years were coming to an end. Soon he took a new post as an attorney at NASA just as President Kennedy was appearing in the hall of the House of Representatives to propose that “this nation … commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”

Through the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, the Space Shuttle, deep space probes and the International Space Station, Wolf was there. But at night he came home to 11th Street and took on challenges of a more domestic nature.

Two major issues loomed when the Wolfs first purchased their home – the issuance of liquor licenses to ostensibly private clubs and the construction of freeways through the area then considered to be just outside of Capitol Hill. Wolf found that the Capitol Hill Restoration Society, which had been in existence for a decade, was interested in some of the very same issues that he found vital.

Now, looking back on nearly four decades of involvement with CHRS, he cites the organization’s role in saving Eastern Market’s building from the rush toward development, getting a master land use plan adopted as required under the new home rule law, and obtaining designation of Capitol Hill as an historic district which was crucial to protecting the area from what he calls “the tear it down and build something new” movement.

He says some aspects of the Society’s impact on today’s Capitol Hill that he is proudest of are not things that did happen but things that didn’t’ – the buildings, blocks and neighborhoods that weren’t destroyed. High on his list of examples would be the fact that the block bounded by 3rd and 4th Streets and Independence Avenue and A Street SE still houses St. Mark’s Episcopal Church and a number of fine old residences instead of a new Library of Congress building which might well have been relocated there had the House of Representatives built a fourth House Office Building where the Madison Library Building now stands on Pennsylvania Avenue.

As its president, he views the Society as an open/transparent organization. “All it takes is $25 to join and anyone who wants to be a board member need only be a worker.” He sees Capitol Hill as “a problem solving community” where working to find solutions and obtain agreement is a tradition.

Among the bigger issues facing the Hill and the Society today, he lists the future of Eastern Market, the planning for the Eastern Market Metro Plaza and the future of the Hine Junior High School property. He also cites the “Beyond the Boundary” effort of the Society to reach out to neighboring areas that are not included in the historic district but which are interested in planning and preservation, such as Near North East, the H Street Corridor and Barney Circle.

For many on the hill, the most visible activity of the Society is the House and Garden Tour held every Mother’s Day. This year will be the 51st annual tour. Wolf and the Society will probably be able to point to more than one house on this year’s tour that wouldn’t exist had it not been for the effort to preserve what Wolf refers to as “the inner city row house neighborhood feel” that attracted him to the Hill forty years ago.

Brad Hathaway is a freelance writer living on Capitol Hill. He can be reached by email at Brad@PotomacStages.com.