Over the past four decades, probably no reader called me more often than Larry Rosen. He was the definition of a pest, yet I always took his calls, always listened to his plaintive riffs and piercing memories, always hung up thinking about what it means to be stuck and what it means to be a necessary noodge.
By the time I got to know him in the late 1980s, Larry was living in Rockville, well into what he insisted was a forced retirement. He was literally burned out of his life’s work in 1968. Larry’s shop on Washington’s once-grand 14th Street NW, Smith’s Pharmacy, where he served Black and White customers alike at the lunch counter (bacon and eggs, 60 cents), was one of more than 275 businesses on that single street that were lit aflame in the riots that followed the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that April.
Larry died this month, eight days short of his 101st birthday. If you read The Post closely over the past half-century, you saw Larry’s name here and there, in news stories about the peril and progress of gentrification, in features recalling the searing impact of the riots, in Larry’s letters and photos — persistent reminders of what was lost on those four nights of fire, rage and destruction. Thirteen people died, 900 businesses were charred, thousands were left without a roof over their heads.
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The city changed forever. One-third of the middle class fled the District, most of them Black families escaping to better schools and safer streets, creating one of the nation’s most affluent Black-majority suburbs in Prince George’s County. Most of those left behind were poor and short on hope. The city’s population plummeted by 17 percent in the 20 years after the riots. You’d hardly know it given today’s boulevard of pricey restaurants and multimillion-dollar condos, but the empty spaces on 14th Street lingered for decades, symbols of a lost community.
Larry kept a massive archive of what had been — pictures, essays, government reports, personal recollections. Here he is standing at his glass storefront in Columbia Heights, smiling in front of the sign that offered Smithburgers for 39 cents.
And then Larry would show me an image from April 6, 1968, his jukebox reduced to an unrecognizable rectangle, his floor invisible under mounds of glass shards.
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“I’ve been told many times by friends that I should forget that day,” he once told me, “but I find it hard to do.”
Share this articleShareLarry was nostalgic for a time and place that never really existed, some said. Even if Black and White people were treated with equal decency at his lunch counter, his Black customers stepped out into streets where they were reminded at every turn that they were second-class citizens. In later years, to Larry’s astonishment, he was even criticized as having been part of the problem, in that he was one of the White or Jewish or Asian shopkeepers whose dominance of the economy in Black neighborhoods was perceived as one more way in which the path to success was blocked for many Black folks.
In Larry’s memory — massaged on each of the roughly 20,000 days since the riots — every detail of his store shined brightly, even if the images were now in the black-and-white of his photo collection. He remembered every call he made to police who never showed up, every time the city denied assistance to merchants who lost their businesses, every former employee he’d visit on his drives down from Rockville to the city.
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Larry would drop by to see Ray Flowers, a Black man who ran the soda fountain at Smith’s and later worked as a maintenance supervisor in Montgomery County’s public schools. They’d reminisce about how Flowers hustled back inside the still-smoky shop to save vital documents, about how the rack of Easter cards remained oddly unmarred by the fire and about how good it was that the site of their shop became home to a Boys & Girls Club and, more recently, short-term housing for homeless families.
Both Flowers and Rosen left the neighborhood after the riots. Flowers went on with his life. Larry got stuck in ’68.
Far from seeking any closure, Larry insisted on remembering. Not one business from his block ever reopened, he constantly reminded me. His family urged him to quit living in the past. He couldn’t. Maybe that was his loss. Definitely, it was my gain: Larry opened a window onto 1968 that I couldn’t find in old news clips or history books.
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That year — like this one threatens to be — was a moment when the American center did not hold, when the foundation cracked in ways that still threaten the stability of our common home. We tend to remember that year as a furnace of conflict and division, as well as a moment of innovation and cultural ferment. But Larry insisted we also remember it as personal trauma, a smoldering violation of our basic social compact. The scar of ’68 is still raw today. It’s a big reason we are so deeply set against ourselves this year. I’m glad Larry kept calling. Sometimes it takes a real noodge to make us see how we got here.
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