Barry Farm Dwellings was built during World War II for African American families amid acute wartime housing shortages, when people divided large homes into rooming houses, took in boarders, or crowded into apartments, and the government also built racially segregated dormitories and housing projects. Part of the old Hillsdale neighborhood was razed for Barry Farm Dwellings, one of ten projects built east of the river to house African American families, and residents had to show they had jobs, marriage licenses, and the ability to pay rent. Hannah Hawkins, one of Barry Farm's first residents, arrived as a child in 1942 and later remembered it as a wonderful place despite many rules, including no laundry on the lines on Sundays and no playing on the grass. Residents shopped at Almore Dale's market across Sumner Road, while the Barry Farm Recreation Center brought people together for movies, team sports, arts and crafts, concerts, dances, homework, and adult social and political activities; Junkyard Band began there before rising in the city's Go-Go scene. Earlier, Eureka Park, Washington, D.C.'s first black-owned amusement park, occupied part of the Barry Farm site from 1895 to 1918, offering picnic areas, a merry-go-round, dancing, and live music, and both Eureka and neighboring Green Willow Park hosted conventions with nationally prominent African American speakers.
