In the early evening of November 22, 1963, people stood on a bridge over Suitland Parkway awaiting the procession carrying the body of President John F. Kennedy from Andrews Air Force Base to Bethesda Naval Hospital after his assassination earlier that day in Dallas, Texas; the vehicles also carried Jacqueline Kennedy and the newly sworn-in President Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson. Suitland Parkway, opened in 1944, linked Camp Springs Army Air Base, later Andrews Air Force Base, with the Anacostia Naval Station and Bolling Field, later Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, and connected new federal office buildings in Suitland to downtown DC by way of the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, but its construction razed houses and divided communities. A decade later, when the National Capital Planning Commission considered I-295 as a commuter shortcut through east-of-the-river neighborhoods, Anacostia residents protested that it would destroy school recreation areas, lower property values, and damage businesses. The commission ultimately placed the freeway in Anacostia Park, and construction began in the late 1950s; although this spared the neighborhoods, the highway still cut them off from the riverfront. The modern Sheridan Station replaced the deteriorated Sheridan Terrace public housing built in the later 1950s. As urban renewal displaced low-income renters from neighborhoods across the river, the city rezoned much of Anacostia for affordable apartments to house them. Some of these new units were poorly built and deteriorated quickly, and by 1975 about 85 percent of Anacostia's housing was rental property. Within a generation, this once-rural area had become solidly urban.
