Harry Jaffe, The Examiner
2008-04-04 08:00:00.0
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WASHINGTON -

Jay Levy was hanging out in his Takoma Park apartment the night of April 4, 1968. Maybe playing music. Maybe rapping with friends. He was 20. His father, Isadore, called.

“The alarm went off at the store,” he said. “Could you go down and check it.”

The Levys owned Sam’s Pawn Shop, just below 14th and U streets Northwest. Jay borrowed his buddy’s Yamaha 250 and biked down 14th Street.

Iz Levy had owned the shop since 1943, when he bought it from Sam Balman. His customers called him “Red.” He loved them; they loved him. They would walk in and ask for 10 bucks.

“Whaddaya got?” he’d ask.

“Nothin,’” they might say. He’d fork over $10 and say: “Pay me when you can.”

Jay rode past 14th and U just when Stokely Carmichael and a crowd had walked into the Peoples Drug and looted it, beginning the days of rioting that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

He checked the store. It seemed fine. He figured it was a false alarm and headed back up 14th Street.

When he stopped at the light at 14th and Park, by the Tivoli Theater, men rushed him and said, “Get whitey.” He looked around for “whitey,” realized they were coming for him, popped the clutch and raced all the way home without stopping at one light.

Jay Levy listened to the radio and heard about the looting. His father called at 11 p.m. and said: “I’m coming to get you. Let’s go to the store.”

“Not sure that’s a good idea,” Jay said, but they rode down in their Buick Wildcat, through a barricade at 16th and U streets, and stopped at the store. It had been cleaned out, but the safe was untouched. His dad calmly opened the safe, they loaded all the jewelry and cash into the Buick, and rode home.

“Someone upstairs was watching us,” he told me.

I drove down 14th Street yesterday to find Jay Levy. The riot corridor is remade, of course. Park Road at 14th is home to Target and banks and Starbucks. The Reeves Center with D.C. government offices occupies the Peoples Drug corner.

Isadore Levy moved the pawn shop down the street, opened it in January 1969. Jay Levy still runs it, with his son, Sam.

Washington, D.C., bears little resemblance to the city that burned 40 years ago. The population has dropped from 850,000 to 550,000. What was then known as Chocolate City, with about 80 percent African-Americans, is now Mocha Town, where black residents hover at just more than 50 percent.

Adrian Fenty wasn’t born yet; now he’s mayor. Marion Barry, then a civil rights militant who became mayor for 16 years, is the only politician still standing. Isadore Levy endured threats and drug dealers, before he retired in 1984; Jay survived a .357 barrel pressed to his head.

“Could the riots happen again?” I asked Jay Levy.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

I agree. But that was the conventional wisdom in April 1968, too.

Harry Jaffe has been covering the Washington area since 1985. E-mail him at hjaffe@washingtonian.com.