Christine J. Washington, founded housing nonprofit

Christine Jackson Washington, 83, 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, March 24, at Cape May Regional Hospital.

Mrs. 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, and he drove her through the neighborhood.

Though 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," son Kemah said, "but she came to love the church and the people."

Mrs. 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).

Mrs. Washington became ACDC's unpaid president. 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. Father Washington noted that his wife launched ACDC with "no track record and no experience." Mrs. Washington sang in the choir and taught Sunday school at the church and assisted in a food kitchen that fed 150 people a day.

She supported her husband when he hosted Black Panthers 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.

"We have lived in North Philadelphia long enough to see it go down to the bottom and then turn around. It is coming back," she said in 1990. She cited residents of the smaller streets with their neatly kept houses and flower boxes as "unsung heroes."

In April 2002, she and her husband attended the groundbreaking of the Paul and Christine Washington Family and Community Center adjacent to the church. He died the following October.

"They were the ultimate team," said longtime friend Acel Moore, associate editor emeritus of The Inquirer. "She was in back of him, beside him, and sometimes in front of him."

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

She and her husband met at the Episcopal Church of the Crucifixion in South Philadelphia, where she sang and played the piano, and he was a deacon. He was then a student at the Philadelphia Divinity School. "I went to her home and said, 'I want you to be my wife,' " he later told The Inquirer. "We had never gone out together, we had never touched. But I thought she would make a good wife."

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.

Father Washington was then vicar of St. Cyprian Church in Southwest Philadelphia before becoming rector of the Church of the Advocate.

Mrs. Washington made suits, overcoats, and vestments for her husband as well as clothes for herself and her children. She loved painting and drawing and shopping for antiques at yard sales in Cape May, where she and her husband had a summer home. She had lived full-time in Cape May since 2009.

In addition to her son, Mrs. Washington is survived by sons Paul Marc and Michael; a daughter, Donya Ture; seven grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

A celebration of life will be at 4 p.m. Tuesday, April 3, at the Church of the Advocate, 1801 W. Diamond St.