First the kitchen sink and maybe a bathtub. The N Street location of the Brass Knob is closing. See CCCA's blog on it . The Brass Knob was good for some things but pricy, which was why I wound up getting a lot of stuff for my renovation from Community Forklift. The advantage of Brass Knob was it had/has old architectural details and things for older homes when you're trying to go for a certain era.
Second, since I'm getting married to a person with one of those gas powered 4 wheeled polluting things called cars, I've actually started paying more attention to parking. I'm going to miss not caring. Anyway the street sweeping will be suspended October 29th, so you can leave your car parked in the same spot until spring.
Third, the Washington Post channels Jay-Z. I've got the print edition and since it is in the Style section I guess its excusable, but C-1, lower right a sub heading, "99 Problems" describing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Lastly, research ain't cheap. I'm finishing up the gathering part of the 1880-1930 census project looking at individual residents who lived in the Truxton Circle part of Shaw. I hired my cousin to do most of the work. Also in the past I hired some strangers off of Craigslist to do some data gathering as well. So add them plus an Ancestry.com subscription, I've probably paid over $1,000 just to gather data. It's raw still and I'll have to check it and look for glaring errors. The other problem is trying to stuff all of it into one big MS Access file. Hopefully I can get this thing done before the 1940 US Census is released on April 2, 2012. Why would you care? Well you don't have to but enough of y'all are curious about what the neighborhood was like 'back then' particularly with me looking at individual houses and individual residents. The 1900 data told an interesting tale of women's work, black married women were laundresses and single white daughters living at home and working as clerks or tailors or a variety of occupations. Skimming the 1910 data the neighborhood is still racially diverse and I'm starting to see Russians, I'm guessing Russian Jews.
Mari - do you think there's a good way to keep this research from playing into the negativity about gentrification in places like Shaw?
Some people will use information showing there were Russian Jews, Irish Catholics, and others to say that those who mourn the loss of "chocolate city" should basically shut up.
And people might be suspicious of you as some kind of agent for gentrification, even, by working to highlight historical ties of non-African Americans to D.C. neighborhooods.
How can we counteract that kind of conflict-oriented thinking about our neighborhoods?
I began the research to highlight the fact that neighborhoods change over time (see PDF of the 1880 paper at http://www.truxtoncircle.org/store/Theproject.pdf ). I wanted to challenge the narrative that the neighborhood has always been predominately black and working class. I'm finding that the answer is yes & no. Based on numbers blacks began to outnumber whites in the 20th century but it's more of a 49/51, 40/60 percent thing in the early 20th.
"People" can be suspcious if they want. I tend to try to point to my sources so if anyone wants to they can go bother to double check my data. I know I have a bias and I know someone may have a different bias and we can look at the same data and come up with differnt conclusions. My bias is I started with 1880 when whites predominated. Others my start in 1960, when I think blacks outnumbered whites in DC. But I didn't start in the 60s because that census data won't be released until 2032.
So when I finally get around to presenting or publishing a paper or article out of this people can do what they will with it. I won't be releasing the raw data tables with house numbers and street addresses though. Considering the time and cost it should be understandable why I won't give that away.
I am very sad to see brass knob go but was overjoyed to learn their inventory is going to community forklift & second chance.
Last chance to buy a pink toilet in the hood y'all!
Any indication what will be replacing the brass knob?