There are other businesses in D.C. that draw frequent glances from passersby, but few have arguably raised as much curiosity as the building on 14th Street in Northwest Washington with the words “Monarch Novelties” written in faded letter on the front.
The Logan Circle store has long featured a tattered awning, a mess of toys haphazardly placed in its display window and a weathered wooden sign out front advertising what people might find inside. (That is, if they were let in, because no one could just walk in at any time. They had to ring a doorbell and hope someone answered.) Some of the items advertised on that sign: anniversary favors, arm bands, ashtrays.
When I visited the place six years ago, old campaign buttons, an inflatable football and a paper bell bearing the words “Merry Christmas” sat in the window. Those items were still there on a recent afternoon when I went to see if it was true that Monarch Novelties had finally closed.
The shuttering of a store in D.C. is not usually newsworthy. But Monarch Novelties wasn’t just any store.
Those who are familiar with it know that it has held a unique place in the city’s history as a survivor — a survivor of economic and social forces that pushed other businesses to shut down, move or modernize. It survived a 1968 civil unrest that left businesses across the city looted and destroyed, and it survived years of gentrification that priced out other family-owned shops. That the store is now closing is surprising, only because it seemed as if it never would.
An iconic photo that The Washington Post published of Monarch Novelties in 1968 — after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. sparked riots in D.C. that left parts of the city burning — shows the family who worked and lived in the building fighting to save it. In the photo, three brothers, guns in hand, stand in front of their parents, ready to protect the place.
When I visited the store in 2018, while doing reporting for an article about the 50th anniversary of the riots, I met Douglas Robinson whose family owned the building. He was there when that photo was taken. He recalled running to grab a sheet for his brother to wrap around his arm after it was cut by glass from the store’s shattered display window.
“If we didn’t have shotguns, we would have been burned out, too,” Robinson told me at the time. “It put a lot of people out of business.”
Robinson told me his parents had 11 children and that growing up, he and his siblings lived above the store. He was still living there when we spoke.
Now, on the front door of the building, three signs let people know that no one should be working or living there. D.C. officials posted the signs earlier this month. Two read: “Danger.” Another reads: “Vacant Structure.”
Vito Maggiolo, a spokesman for D.C. Fire and EMS, said the signs were placed there after inspections were conducted of the building. Four inspections took place between March 18 and April 1. Maggiolo said officials found “numerous fire code violations and life hazard conditions.”
No one who has stepped inside the store in recent years would find that surprising. Like the outside, the inside didn’t keep up with time. It took only a glance around when I visited for me to see potential obstacles, including old shelves filled with dated toys and piles of paper items, that would make it difficult for a person to escape during a fire.
But even if I understood why those signs were on the door, seeing them left me with questions. The main two: What happened to Robinson? And was the store closed-for-now or closed-for-good?
In search of those answers, I ended up on the phone on a recent evening with Betty Robinson, one of Douglas Robinson’s sisters. The 79-year-old said her brother has experienced health problems in recent years and is now being taken care of by family members.
“Douglas lived there his whole life,” she said of the store. “It’s sad that it’s closing. It needed a lot of work, but it’s sad that it’s closing. There’s a lot of memories there.”
She recalled her mom and dad working at the store some days until late into the night, walking upstairs to sleep for a few hours, then heading back down to start working again. She said her dad owned a carnival before selling it and opening up his own store and entering the real estate business. At one point, she said, the store on 14th Street provided carnival items, sold custom-made products, such as key chains and signs, and produced a catalogue that people could use to place orders.
Robinson said there was a time when a hamburger cost 10 cents on that block. Now, a person can find a hamburger next door at Birch & Barley for $21 or a few blocks away at Le Diplomate for $24. With a short walk, a person can pick up a boba tea, check out furniture at Joybird and grab groceries at Whole Foods.
Robinson recalled the day the rioting reached the family’s business. A man ran over to warn her family that the chaos was heading their way.
“We thought he was kidding,” she said. “We didn’t think they were coming down that far.”
She said she needed to go to the pharmacy to pick up medication, and her mother assured her she had enough time to make the trip. She took her two young children and dog with her. She said they hurried back after they saw people flipping over cars.
A Post article describes the toll of the riots in this way: “In three days of upheaval, 13 people were killed … Hundreds of blazes left vast avenues of burning wreckage and nightmare scenes of desolation. The air was filled with smoke and the smell of tear gas, and the streets were littered with broken glass and tumbled-down bricks, as if in the aftermath of an air raid. Stretches of 14th Street NW, Seventh Street NW and H Street NE, among others, resembled combat zones, and 13,000 members of the Army, Marines and National Guard were brought in to regain control.”
Robinson said Monarch Novelties will remain closed and eventually sold. She told me that in a matter-of-fact way, but it was clear as she talked, that it won’t be easy for her family to see that space transform into something else. To her family, it was more than a business. It was also a home.
“It meant everything to us,” she said.
