Larry Rosen’s D.C. pharmacy burned in the ’68 riots. He never got over it, becoming an enduring voice for victims of the violence.

Over the past four decades, probably no reader called me more often than Larry Rosen. He was the definition of a pest, yet I always took his calls, always listened to his plaintive riffs and piercing memories, always hung up thinking about what it means to be stuck and what it means to be a necessary noodge.

By the time I got to know him in the late 1980s, Larry was living in Rockville, well into what he insisted was a forced retirement. He was literally burned out of his life’s work in 1968. Larry’s shop on Washington’s once-grand 14th Street NW, Smith’s Pharmacy, where he served Black and White customers alike at the lunch counter (bacon and eggs, 60 cents), was one of more than 275 businesses on that single street that were lit aflame in the riots that followed the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that April.

Larry died this month, eight days short of his 101st birthday. If you read The Post closely over the past half-century, you saw Larry’s name here and there, in news stories about the peril and progress of gentrification, in features recalling the searing impact of the riots, in Larry’s letters and photos — persistent reminders of what was lost on those four nights of fire, rage and destruction. Thirteen people died, 900 businesses were charred, thousands were left without a roof over their heads.

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The city changed forever. One-third of the middle class fled the District, most of them Black families escaping to better schools and safer streets, creating one of the nation’s most affluent Black-majority suburbs in Prince George’s County. Most of those left behind were poor and short on hope. The city’s population plummeted by 17 percent in the 20 years after the riots. You’d hardly know it given today’s boulevard of pricey restaurants and multimillion-dollar condos, but the empty spaces on 14th Street lingered for decades, symbols of a lost community.

Larry kept a massive archive of what had been — pictures, essays, government reports, personal recollections. Here he is standing at his glass storefront in Columbia Heights, smiling in front of the sign that offered Smithburgers for 39 cents.

And then Larry would show me an image from April 6, 1968, his jukebox reduced to an unrecognizable rectangle, his floor invisible under mounds of glass shards.

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“I’ve been told many times by friends that I should forget that day,” he once told me, “but I find it hard to do.”

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