Long before a Green Line station opened here in 1991, rail lines along the river and on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, together with the area's riverfront location near the Washington Navy Yard, drew industry to Anacostia in the early 1900s. Pittsburgh-based Firth-Stirling Steel opened the Washington Steel & Ordnance Co. at Giesboro Point, where from 1907 until 1928 the plant made armor-piercing projectiles and sold most of them to the Washington Navy Yard. Its 300-acre campus replaced small farms and the Buena Vista resort, once popular among many German immigrant farmers in the area, and at its World War I peak the company employed 1,600 men, creating a strong market for local housing and goods. World War I transformed Anacostia further as the Navy Department built the riverside Anacostia Naval Air Station north of the plant, and the Army Signal Corps Air Service installed Bolling Field and took over the old Washington Steel property in 1935. When the Navy acquired Bolling Field five years later, Anacostia had become a true Navy town. Pauline Munson Chapman, who grew up there in the 1940s, remembered waving to trainloads of sailors who sometimes tossed candy from the windows, and Rev. Oliver Johnson, who lived nearby in the 1950s, recalled that Poplar Point was all Navy barracks and that he and his friends collected caps dropped by sailors returning from nearby taverns.
