Christine J. Washington, community advocate

CHRISTINE Jackson Washington, founder of a nonprofit housing corporation and wife of the late Rev. Paul Washington, rector of the Episcopal Church of the Advocate, died of heart failure Saturday at Cape May Regional Hospital. She was 83 and lived in retirement in Cape May.

Washington had her first encounter with North Philadelphia after her husband was named rector of the Church of the Advocate, at 18th and Diamond Streets, in 1962 and he drove her through the neighborhood.

A native Philadelphian, she had never set foot in the section of the city that had been written off as "the Jungle," her husband later told the Inquirer. "She saw the density of population and the streets not very clean," he recalled, "and her heart fell."

"She cried," a son Kemah said, "but she came to love the church and the people."

Washington pitched in to improve the neighborhood. When a family was burned out, she and her husband took them in and tried to find them a place to live. Their frustration at finding affordable housing, their son said, led to the founding of Advocate Community Development Corp. (ACDC). Washington became its unpaid president. The goal, she told the Inquirer, "is a mixed-income community with housing for the homeless, for the handicapped, and combination sales-rentals."

The first project, built with federal aid in 1970 and 1971, consisted of 15 two-story rowhouses on a block south of Diamond. Twenty years later, ACDC had produced more than 200 housing units and helped revitalize a neighborhood. Rev. Washington noted that his wife launched ACDC with "no track record and no experience."

Washington sang in the choir and taught Sunday school at the Church of the Advocate and assisted in the food kitchen that fed 150 people a day.

She supported her husband when he hosted Black Panther and black-power conventions and offered his church for the ordination of 11 women as Episcopal priests, in 1974.

She and her husband moved to a rowhouse in Strawberry Mansion when he retired in 1987.

Washington graduated from West Philadelphia High School and attended classes at the Settlement Music School.

The couple married in 1947, the year he was ordained. She was 19, he was 26.

For six years they lived in Liberia, where he taught at Cuttington College, and she gave birth to their two oldest sons.

Washington also is survived by sons Paul Marc and Michael; a daughter, Donya Ture; seven grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

A celebration of life will be held at 4 p.m. Tuesday at Church of the Advocate, 1801 W. Diamond-Father Paul Washington Ave., Philadelphia.