A2 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 , 2019
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CORRECTION A Sept. 5 Page One article
about the impact of Hurricane
Dorian on communities in the
Bahamas incorrectly referred in
one instance to Great Abaco as
Grand Abaco. Washington Post
journalists flew to the Abaco
Islands, and the trip included a
stop at the island of Great Abaco.KLMNO
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[email protected].“They moved out or died out,”
the owner, Richard Ables, 77,
whose uncles founded the funeral
home in 1941, said of his lost
clientele.
When the furnace gave out last
fall, Ables didn’t bother calling a
repairman.
“What’s the point?” he said one
afternoon in his second-floor of-
fice, every inch a jumble of files,
stray tombstones, unused urns,
blank death certificates and busi-
ness cards once given to prospec-
tive clients. “In the event of my
death, please notify: Hall Bros.
Funeral Home,” the cards read.
At the entrance, an announce-
ment board, typically lined with
dates and times for viewing the
dead, was bare.
“I’m sitting in here dying with
the business,” Ables said, his face
framed by a white beard and
round tortoiseshell glasses. “It’s
time to go.”
On Wednesday, Ables sold the
property for about $2 million,
more than twice the assessed
value. That figure was unimagi-
nable 75 years ago. Land records
show that his uncle Ocy D. Hall
paid $10,000 for the rowhouse
near Seventh Street and Florida
Avenue.
Ables said he has not met the
buyer, negotiating only through a
real estate agent, Amy Harasz.
Harasz, citing a confidentiality
agreement with her client, said in
a text message that she was un-
able to divulge the buyer’s identi-
ty, details about the sale or plans
for the property.
The view beyond Hall Broth-
ers’ front stoop — a new condo
tower to the right, another rising
to the left, a former Wonder Bread
factory turned into a WeWork
space down the street — in no way
resembles what Ables remembers
from childhood. In those years, he
spent afternoons and weekends
hanging out at the funeral home,
stowing himself in emptycaskets
during games of hide and seek
with his cousins.
In later years, they befriended
a worker at the Howard Theatre
who sneaked them in a side en-
FUNERAL HOME FROM A1 trance to see the likes of Smokey
Robinson and the Temptations,
Chuck Brown, James Brown and
Aretha Franklin.
“If we saw a white person, we’d
ask, ‘What are you doing here?’ ”
Ables said of the neighborhood.
“Now it’s the opposite.”
In recent months, he sold the
hearse, a bright-white 1994 Cadil-
lac. He figured he would scrap the
metal “Hall Brothers” sign above
the entrance — the “B” fell off long
ago — along with stacks of Ameri-
can Funeral Director magazines,
a TV that hadn’t been turned on
in years, and his embalming tools.
He planned to seek guidance
from the District’s Board of Fu-
neral Directors about what to do
with a dozen or so containers of
unclaimed cremated remains,
four of which were beneath a
stack of files on the floor to the
left of his desk. Another, holding
the ashes of Yvonne C. Henley,
who died in 1988, was on his
office mantel.
“Her daughter came down
from New York to order it,” he
said. “We haven’t seen her since.”
Ables seemed most concerned
about those 18 ledger books scat-
tered around his office, and pre-
serving a record of people such as
Lonnie Burton, a “laborer” who
died of “congestive heart failure”
May 7, 1947; Sarah Lee Rush, 37,
whose 1981 death occurred after a
“gun shot wound of the chest”;
and Clyde Gossett, 29, a “counsel-
or” who died of AIDS eight years
later.
“All of this should go to a
museum or somewhere,” Ables
said. “I just don’t know where to
send it.”
A
s Hall Brothers’ phone rang
less frequently over the
years, Ables was torn over
whether to close the business that
his uncles had started after mi-
grating from Mississippi in the
1930s. On Sundays, he liked to
drive to a Maryland cemetery to
contemplate the future at the
graves where his mother, father,
brother, aunt and Uncle Ocy are
buried.
In his wallet, as always, he
carried his parents’ newspaper
death notices and his father’sSocial Security card — documen-
tation that makes him feel con-
nected to them no matter the
number of years since their pass-
ing.
“Do what you gotta do,” he
could hear them telling him, he
said.
When he took over Hall Broth-
ers in the late 1990s, Ables had
promised to “keep it going as long
as I could and pass it on.” But no
one in the family was interested.
Not his children. Not his cousins,
nieces or nephews.
Macy Hall Jr., 76, the founder’s
son, had gone to medical school,
an interest inspired during child-
hood when he accompanied his
father on funeral calls.
“I was 5 and I’d ask him, ‘Why
are they dying?’ and he’d say,
‘Because their heart stopped,’ ”
Hall Jr. said. “And I’d say I wanted
to become a doctor to keep those
hearts from stopping.”
Macy Hall Jr. said he loved
hanging out at Hall Brothers as a
child. Ocy Hall, his favorite uncle,
lived upstairs. On Halloween,
trick-or-treaters ringing the bell
at Hall Brothers could find them-
selves greeted at the front door by
youngsters popping out of a cof-
fin.
Everyone had chores. Macy Jr.
polished the brass rails at Hall
Brothers’ entrance and, when he
got his driver’s license, drove the
hearse during funerals. “It gave
me a sense of power and control
that traffic would stop to let the
hearse through,” he said.
He became a plastic surgeon
instead of a funeral director be-
cause “the business wasn’t for
me,” he said, lapsing into morti-
cian shtick. “Too dead.”
Ocy and Macy Hall Sr. started
their enterprise at a time when
blacks — often shut out of medi-
cine and other professions —
found prosperity and prestige in
mortuary science.
By the 1920s, after African
Americans had settled in neigh-
borhoods such as Shaw and
Ledroit Park, black-owned funer-
al parlors opened along the area’s
main thoroughfares. The Jarvis
Funeral Home was at 14th and U
streets from 1920 until it shut
down in 1985. Frazier’s was at
Florida and Rhode Island ave-
nues from 1929 until 2008, after
which a developer turned the
building into condominiums.
After the 1968 riots, which
started at 14th and U streets,
McGuire Funeral Service moved
north from Shaw to Georgia Av-
enue NW. R.N. Horton’s relocatedfrom 13th and U streets to Ken-
nedy Street NW, where it still
operates, always looking for ways
to draw new customers, including
by recently purchasing a
$100,000 replica of a 1932 hearse.
“This kind of thing makes your
phone ring,” said Randolph Hor-
ton, the son of the business’s
founder, Rufus, who himself at-
tracted patrons by leading funer-
als in a tuxedo and wide-
brimmed hat.
Hall Brothers never went any-
where. Ocy and Macy eventually
turned the business over to Wil-
liam Ables, Richard’s brother.
When William died of a heart
attack in 1998, Richard arranged
his brother’s funeral and then
took over.
He tried to draw new clientele,
placing ads catering to Hispanics,
Ethiopians and Indians, but there
was little, if any, response.
Since 2000, Hall Brothers pre-
sided over 446 funerals, or about
a quarter of the 1,816 it conducted
from 1980 to 1999.
“We got stuck in time,” Ables
said.
As funeral director, he orches-
trated the rituals of mourning,
helping families pick caskets,
shrouds and plots. He especially
enjoyed embalming, when, alone
with a corpse in a prep room, his
radio tuned to classical music, he
used his tools to “put that smile
back on their face.”“It’s an art, man,” he said.
“We’re practicing an art.”
As he worked, he often found
himself thinking about how little
he knew about his own family’s
history and hoped that the person
before him had “shared their story,”
the names of their ancestors and
the details of how they had lived.
“Otherwise, all that they know
is going into the ground,” he said.
His final “case,” as he likes to
refer to the dead, was Fannie
Lomax, 82, of Northeast Washing-
ton, a mother of five and grand-
mother of eight, who died March- After her funeral, the only one
he performed this year, Ables
made sure to log her address,
religion, date of birth, date of
death and burial site.
As always, he said, he consid-
ered it not just his obligation to
record the spare details of a life at
its end, but also his privilege “to
leave behind a legacy for folks to
reflect on.”
A
s Ables was negotiating
with a potential buyer ear-
lier this year, his assistant,
Derrick McArthur, got an idea.
Perhaps the D.C. Public Library
would want to preserve Hall
Brothers’ registries of the dead. A
few emails and phone calls later,
and Derek Gray, a library archi-
vist, went to Hall Brothers to
inspect the records.
“A gem for genealogists,” Gray
declared after looking throughthe books.
In addition to the registries,
the library system took assorted
memorabilia — samples of the
hand fans, funeral programs and
the brass-coated “Hall Brothers”
name plate that was in the side
window of its hearse.
When Ables started telling sto-
ries about the neighborhood and
performers he saw at the Howard
Theatre, Gray said, “We knew we
needed to pull out a tape recorder.”
The archivist hopes Ables will
make himself available for an oral
history, something he may have
time for in retirement, when he’s
not listening to John Coltrane or
Miles Davis and contemplating
the future, including, as it hap-
pens, his own burial.
“Don’t want to be buried in a
suit,” Ables said on a recent after-
noon, relaxing in Hall Brothers’
parlor. “I want a nice pair of silk
pajamas and a smoking jacket. A
jazz trio playing at the service. A
solid wood mahogany casket.
“Something that will last,” he
said.
[email protected]After burying thousands,
funeral home slips away
MARVIN JOSEPH/THE WASHINGTON POST
TOP: Richard Ables, shown in
his former office, has sold the
Hall Brothers Funeral Home
building. ABOVE: The building
at 621 Florida Ave. NW. The
once majority-black area is
gentrifying and has a growing
white population.BY SCOTT WILSONsanta barbara, calif. — An
Oakland jury delivered a mixed
verdict Thursday in the trial to
determine responsibility for a
warehouse fire that killed 36
people during a nighttime con-
cert nearly three years ago, ac-
quitting one defendant of invol-
untary manslaughter and dead-
locking over the fate of the
second.
After a three-month trial and
jury deliberations that ran an-
other five weeks, Max Harris was
acquitted on all 36 counts, one
for each of the victims who died
trying to escape a sudden fire
that burned through an artist
collective known as the Ghost
Ship. The jury could not come up
with a verdict for Derick Almena,
who managed the warehouse
where about two dozen artists
lived and worked.
The trial has been watched
widely in Oakland and through-
out California where sky-high
housing costs, driven in part by
rapid urban gentrification, haveforced many residents to find
unconventional ways to live.
As many as 25 people lived in
the Ghost Ship at any one time,
often in spaces that doubled as
art studios, and practiced a twist
on Satya Yuga, an ethos that is
part Eastern religion and part
artistic celebration. Oakland’s
cityscape has been remade in
recent decades by Silicon Valley-
driven housing demand and in-
vestment, and is part of the most
expensive urban area to live in
the nation.
Testimony over months was
alternately technical, delving
into fire codes and safety re-
quirements, to achingly emo-
tional as parents recalled from
the stand final text messages
from children unable to escape
the Dec. 2, 2016, fire.
Prosecutors argued that the
two men were responsible for the
deaths by failing to keep the
warehouse up to fire code, en-
dangering all of those who at-
tended the concert. Defense at-
torneys suggested the fire was
started intentionally — its offi-cial cause has never been deter-
mined — and that city officials
knew about the dangerous con-
ditions but failed to act.
“I’m totally not satisfied,” said
Alberto Vega, the brother of one
of the victims, Alex Vega, accord-
ing to the East Bay Times. Vega
died of smoke inhalation, as did
the other victims.
Almena, 49, was the leasehold-
er of the building near a freeway
overpass, a Wendy’s drive-
through, and the public transit
system’s Fruitvale Station, a
neighborhood now in the midst
of swift redevelopment.
He was not on site when the
fire broke out, having been
warned that the warehouse was
not a suitable place to raise his
young children.
Of the dozen jurors, 10 be-
lieved Almena should be convict-
ed with the other two dissenting.
The split prompted Alameda
County Superior Court Judge
Trina Thompson to declare the
jury “hopelessly deadlocked.”
The process to begin Almena’s
retrial is scheduled to start earlynext month.
Harris, 29, held the title of
creative director at the building.
He was present during the fire,
managing to escape without in-
jury.
But people who lived there
testified during the trial that he
had little authority over building
rules and safety measures, cast-
ing Harris as the mercurial Al-
mena’s on-site assistant.
Harris and his lawyers, Tyler
Smith and Curtis Briggs, em-
braced on hearing the jury’s first
“not guilty” verdict on the invol-
untary manslaughter counts. He
and Almena both faced 39 years
in prison if convicted.
After the verdicts, Briggs sug-
gested Oakland city officials
should be held accountable for
the Ghost Ship tragedy, failing to
adequately manage housing de-
mand and enforce fire codes.
“Not one city official had the
courage to get on the stand and
tell the truth,” Briggs said, ac-
cording to the San Francisco
Chronicle.
[email protected]Mixed jury verdict in ‘Ghost Ship’ warehouse fire
Frederick GAITHERSBURG Hagerstown
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