When the neighbors don’t share your vision (and that vision involves ‘Transformers’ statues)

The area also has its share of stately brick mansions that make you wonder who lives there or used to live there. Often he is well-to-do, but occasionally he is a someone someone. Powerhouses in media, politics, and entertainment, such as Madeleine Albright, Ben Bradlee, Katherine Graham, John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Elizabeth Taylor, have called Georgetown home. But it wasn’t always the glamorous place in Washington.

“Georgetown was kind of a dump in the early 20th century,” said George Derek Musgrove, co-author of the 2017 study “Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital.”

The older houses had largely fallen into disrepair, and the neighborhood was home to working-class Irish and African-Americans. Then, with the explosion of government contracting during the New Deal, Ivy League graduates moved on. They spruced up their homes in a variety of styles until the national craze for historic preservation took hold. In 1950, “Old Georgetown” was designated a federal historic district, with all the restrictions on home modification that entailed.

“For him “When you get to 1960, and John Kennedy leaves his Georgetown mansion on N Street to go to the White House, you just couldn’t afford to go in even if you wanted to,” Musgrove said.

Many of the residents support efforts to keep things more or less the same. Catherine Emmerson, whose family lives near Dr. Howard, helped start the Prospect Street Citizens’ Association a few years ago to stop a condominium conversion that would have blocked local residents’ views of the Potomac River.

When the Transformers arrived, the group had a new goal.

Not that the association was against celebrating film history. In fact, its members argued that the condominium conversion would have threatened something that should be a milestone. (And now it’s): a set of steep steps on Prospect Street, built in 1895, featured in “The Exorcist.” (Think: falling priest.)