Pennsylvania Avenue has served as both the presidential inaugural parade route since Thomas Jefferson and a central street of local Washington since the city's founding. Jefferson planted the first trees along the avenue, and in the city's early days it was a promenade lined with shops, hotels, taverns, and boarding houses, where Mary Todd Lincoln shopped. Over the years, countless demonstrations and parades, including President Lincoln's funeral procession, traveled along the avenue, and those who marched there—soldiers, suffragists, civil rights activists, anti-war protesters, gay rights advocates, and the Ku Klux Klan among them—reflected freedoms of expression and assembly embedded in the Constitution and expanded by the Civil War. At the time of the Civil War, the area across the avenue was a run-down neighborhood of theaters, saloons, cheap hotels, light industry, and houses of ill repute known as Murder Bay and sometimes Hooker's Department, a pun on the name of General Joseph Hooker. It remained a light industrial area until the 1930s, when the growing federal government consolidated scattered offices in a new complex of Neo-classical buildings called the Federal Triangle. In the 1970s, the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation began revitalizing this side of the avenue with new office, commercial, and residential buildings while preserving some of its best 19th-century landmarks.
