Washington Stories

Rupert Cornwell on how the US capital has revitalised a relic of its segregated past, while Pat Buchanan gets into bed (figuratively speaking) with our very own Taki

Good tidings at last from a front line of America's own annus horribilis of 1968. After 34 years of neglect, incompetence and squabbling among Washington's city fathers, they're finally going to do something about Columbia Heights. And that means they're going to do up the wonderful old Tivoli theatre.

I noticed the Tivoli almost as soon as we arrived in DC more than a decade ago. Each time I drove down 14th Street I would wonder at this strange building, in the style of a Renaissance palazzo – though only beggars slept now – boarded up and covered with graffiti. The vertical signs at either end with charred lamp sockets spelling T-I-V-O-L-I suggested it had been a cinema. But why hadn't it been pulled down? Then I studied a little history, and I understood.

Once upon a time, Columbia Heights was a thriving neighbourhood, set on a hill with wonderful views down over the monumental heart of Washington and the government buildings where many of its inhabitants worked. And the Tivoli was the jewel in its crown.

It was a gorgeous old-time movie palace, built in 1923. Washington in those days was a Southern city, and for much of its life the Tivoli was segregated. But it was no less magnificent for that, with its frescoed foyer and an auditorium with red damask walls and organ grilles sculpted in the shape of lyres, seating 2,500 beneath a high-domed ceiling.

Gradually, though, the area went down. Then came the terrible times of April 1968, when Martin Luther King was assassinated. Rioting swept through Washington, as it did through many other heavily black cities, and the 14th Street corridor through Columbia Heights was torched, never to be rebuilt – until now.

One reason nothing happened was the Tivoli itself. Conservationists wanted to restore it exactly to its former glory; others wanted to pull the whole thing down. In the middle of the tug of war was the DC city council, never a beacon of good governance, pulled hopelessly this way and that by rival development schemes.

But everything seems to have been sorted out at last. I noticed a shiny new sign on the Tivoli last week. A company called Horning Bros is going to redevelop the site, one of 11 such projects in the area. The golden age of the movie palaces, with their chandeliers and Wurlitzer organs, is gone, but at least they're going to preserve the Italianate façade and the two Tivoli signs.

Inside will be a supermarket, restaurants, "town homes" and – most telling of all – a Gala Hispanic theatre. For Columbia Heights is now a multi-ethnic neighbourhood, still heavily black but with a thriving Latino community as well, and even a few whites. Washington has truly moved on since 1968 – and at last this benighted section of 14th street is catching up.

The zap-Iraq, globalisation-crazy neo-Conservatives who have this city in their grip have new challengers – and not from the left. Step up Pat Buchanan, below, and Taki Theodoracopulos, founders of the new magazine American Conservative. They are an unlikely duo at first glance: the immigrant-bashing three-time presidential candidate "Pitchfork Pat" (who once described Congress as "Israeli-occupied territory") and the (self-styled) "poor little Greek boy" of Spectator fame, trailing clouds of cocaine convictions. The idea is to reclaim the true mantle of keep-things-as-they-were conservatism from the zealots of the new right.

But isn't Taki just the sort of foreign-born immigrant with bad habits that our Pat wants to keep out of the US? Well, countered a smiling Buchanan at American Conservative's launch this week, "I don't think he came across the Rio Grande." To which Taki added: "In fact I came on my yacht."