Pawn shops are often among the earliest storefronts to open up in a neighborhood and usually the first to shutter if a street starts turning from funky shops to “fantastic” condos. So it was not a great surprise to hear that Sam’s Pawnbrokers, north of Logan Circle on 14th Street, is closing its doors in May, after more than 30 years of lending money and buying and selling stuff.
On Thursday I hit Sam’s to see if I could grab a few CD’s for a song. Alas, Sam’s shelves had already been stripped. Rather sad.
Pawn shops have the reputation for being grim places where folks down on their luck go to unload family jewels for quick cash. Or they are seen as the loan sharks of last resort who provide cash to poor folks for high interest rates. In D.C., that’s not exactly the case. The city regulates lending rates. You might be better off being in debt to a pawn shop than to some credit cards. The rates are comparable, and the amount of loans is capped at a few hundred bucks.
Take Crown Pawnbrokers, two blocks up 14th Street from Sam’s. For the Logan Circle community, Crown is an institution. The place was buzzing with customers Thursday afternoon — some buying, some selling, some at the loan department window. Jessica Barakat is the third generation of her family to work at Crown. The story of this family’s storefront tracks the immigrant odyssey in the nation’s capital.
“My great-grandfather started the shop as a tailor,” she tells me. She fetches the black and white photo of a well-dressed gentleman standing behind a counter in the shop, circa 1937. “His name was Morris. He couldn’t speak English; he sewed and his daughter did the books.”
As Jessica tells it, her grandfather realized he could make a buck by loaning out dress suits to immigrants who needed them for a special occasion but couldn’t afford to own nice clothes. Then shoes. Then ties. The tailor shop morphed into a pawn shop. Morris’ son Henry took it over. “Everyone called him Mr. Crown.”
When rioters burned down most stores on 14th Street after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., in April 1968, Sam’s Pawnbrokers burned but Crown was protected — by Morris and a cop and the neighborhood.
“We’ve been in this exact spot for 75 years,” Jessica says, “and we have no plans to change. Business is good. We get people from all walks of life.”
Mostly musicians, from the looks of the 70 or so electric guitars hanging on the wall — from a little red one that goes for $65 to a Fender Jaguar with a $1,295 price tag. Barakat calls her merchandise “a form of recycling.” That’s a stretch, but with Sam’s on the way out, Crown is the one of the last pawn shops in the city.
In a neighborhood that’s losing its character and authenticity, a pawn shop like Crown provides a dose of both.
Harry Jaffe’s column appears on Tuesday and Friday. He can be contacted at [email protected].
