Neighborhood Corps Graduation Invitation

Neighborhood Corps Graduation Invitation

~Congratulations GRADUATE~

Serve DC Requests Your Presence

at the Inaugural Neighborhood Corps Academy Graduation

Please join us in honoring dc residents who have chosen to make emergency preparedness a priority in their lives and in their communities

Date: Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Time: 6:00 – 8:30 pm

Location: Washington Convention Center Room 102 A & B

801 Mount Vernon Place, NW

Metro Stop: Mount Vernon Square , Yellow & Green Line

Please feel free to bring family members, neighbors, or co-workers to join in this celebration and learn more about Emergency Preparedness training in the District of Columbia

Please RSVP to Amy Ward at amy.ward AT dc.gov

Light refreshments will be served

Attire: business casual

History, memory, and stuff

It’s been well over a decade since I’ve had to take a historiography course and several years since I’ve had to study and read about bias in public history. One book that I know I’ve read for the public history portion of a museum class was Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays by Mike Wallace. Another book, which I have not read is A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston by Stephanie E. Yuhl, and from the reviews it seems to tell of a ‘history’ story shaped by a particular social group via selective building preservation and appropriating aspects of the African-American story that did not undermine their own. Both point to how history has been used and as Wallace asserts, abused. Wallace provides an example of President Ronald Reagan’s style of storytelling that supported whatever conservative point he was trying to make. One example was the story of immigrants’ coming to America, the land of opportunity, and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. This image glossed over the discrimination, poverty and other things faced by those immigrants, Wallace points out. A jewel from Yuhl’s book:

“Similarly, Charleston’s heritage trade was an ideological construct that enabled a small group of elite whites to perpetrate their selective historical memories and peddle them to eager tourists in a highly consumable form.”

Bringing this down to the local level, Shaw has a story, which in it’s most basic form is fine. That story being, black people lived here, black notables lived within the borders we know as Shaw, Dunbar was a the top African American high school in the country, and U Street was only second to Harlem. Okay, maybe some other cities may argue that last point, whatever. One of the problems in it’s retelling, and these can be considered really minuscule problems, the Jewish/Italian/general immigrant story seem less real in the face of this popular story. Another small problem I see, is some unnecessary straw grabbing, such as claiming notables who lived in other neighborhoods, like LeDroit Park. And maybe a more important problem is selective memory and the sin of omission, that retells the popular story by picking and choosing the nicest parts, ignoring the huge social problem that made the area a target for urban renewal. The popular story doesn’t tell where the black middle class went after the golden age, it doesn’t explain why there are so many social services here and why the area became ripe for gentrification and street crime. It doesn’t tell the long sad tale of housing, vacancy, slum lords, and programs that fell a little short due to cronyism and inflation. It does tell the story of the riots, the hint that there was something amiss. Messy history with still lingering sore points isn’t exactly highly consumable for the tourist crowd.

Lotta stuff going on at the Big-bear

Call for Drummers!!
Haitian Drumming Sessions after the Streetside Symphony
Sunday, September 9th

Haitian Tombou drummers are incredible.
If you play bongos or congas, or anything that can hold a beat, come bring an instrument and play after the streetside Haitian Symphony this Sunday, September 9th at the Bloomingdale Farmers’ Market.

Drummers will be playing before and after the classical music performance. The symphony should be over by around 1:30pm, so bring a drum and see what happens.

Just a Few More Days Until …. Haitian Choral & Orchestral Symphony and Free Neighborhood Pig Roast

See this message from Big Bear Cafe’s Stu Davenport:

Haitian Choral and Orchestral Symphony, and Free Neighborhood Pork Roast!

Sunday, September 9th, Bloomingdale Farmers’ Market

We have raised over $500, and we are almost ready for the BBQ. Special thanks to Councilmen Harry Thomas Jr., and Kwame Brown for their support…. and commissioner John Salatti for helping get the money together. This should be a lot of fun.
On September 9th, Les Petits Chanteurs will be performing at the 10am service at St. George’s Episcopal Church, and then around 12 noon the group along with the congregation of St. George’s will be coming to the Bloomingdale Farmers’ Market for the street side Caribbean symphony…

Bloomingdale Farmers’ Market
10am-2pm
First and R Streets, NW

message from Martha Cherlot from the Embassy of Haiti:

===========================================================================

A Haitian Choral and Orchestral Symphony, and Free Neighborhood

Pork Roast!

Sunday, September 9th at the Bloomingdale Farmers’ Market

Come to the Bloomingdale Farmers’ Market Sunday September 9th for a free neighborhood Bar-B-Que!

There will be free-range pork and lamb on the grille, vegetables and fruits in the stands, and a full suckling pig roasting in a fire pit!

There will also be music from a group of 50+ choral and classical musicians from Port Au Prince, Haiti, playing with six violins, two violas, two cellos, a double bass, a flute, and a Haitian tambour drum.

Come and celebrate the Bloomingdale

Farmers’ Market!

Come and help us thank everyone who has helped make it a reality..

Sunday, September 9th
First and R Streets, NW

10am-2pm

Robin Shuster
Markets & More, LLC
Director, Mount Pleasant Farmers’ Market
14 & U Farmers Market
1318 Wallach Place NW
Washington, DC 20009
1-(202)-536-5571
703-328-6559
The Bloomingdale Farmers’ Market:
June 17- November 18th, 2007
Rain or Shine
Sundays, 10-2
First and R Streets NW
right next to the new Big Bear Cafe

We welcome WIC and CSFP Senior Farmers Market Coupons.

Crime & Fashion

This weekend, possibly Friday, two women were shot on N. Cap and S walking their dogs. The suspect was a black male wearing a white T-shirt and jeans. When I read that the first thought that jumped into my head was that a lot of the neighborhood characters wear white t-shirts and jeans. Unmarked white tees. No logos. No distinguishable markings of any kind.
This got me to thinking about what are the white shirt/ blue jeaned young males wearing these days and the differences in the sea of white shirts. Sticking with the T-shirt, you have your low and high v-necks, scoop neck (but isn’t that more of a feminine style?), crew neck. I also know there are several ways to wear a tee, there is tight, slim, loose, and baggy. Baggy being if it were to be tucked in it would look ridiculous. Also some male styles that are slim there are shirts that are long, particularly tank tees. Then there are also ribbed t-shirts, but sometimes you have to get close to tell. Rarely seen, and thus not likely worn, are the muscle shirt and mock neck.
Then you have jeans. No acid washed. No flared pants. Rarely any tight fitting ones among the hang out on the sidewalks of Shaw crowd. I haven’t looked closely enough to spot if a certain style of jeans, like carpenter pants, is shunned or favored. The pants favored do fall in the relaxed and baggy, as they leave a lot of butt room. Apparently, regular fit will show if you got a saggy rear.
Since I’m not a guy, are there other details in causal men’s clothing that I missed? Also when white boys in striped polos and khakis become a usual description for perpetrators, I’ll take a closer look at them too. Just to be safe be be wary of the ones with popped collars.

References:
Hanes Men’s Clothing| Men’s T-Shirts

Levi’s Jean finder

A new day, now get to work

Lot of stuff I wanna cover … It is September and InShaw has entered semi-retirement, or an active retirement. It may be another way of saying I’ll post when I darned well feel like it, and post what moves me to post. So there may be several days when there is nothing, and periods of furious posting.
I’ve also changed the name slightly. So “(now with more gentrification)” has been dropped, in favor of what interests me, history. Gentrification still is in there but isn’t the focus. The mad real estate boom has passed and the gentrification it fueled, has calmed a bit. If that rooming house, crack house, liquor store, vacant building hasn’t been developed yet, it may be a while before it does. Maybe during the next wave of real estate fervor, maybe between now and then, and maybe never. In the meantime, there are other things to look at, like the past.
The past couple of years, the past couple of decades, whenever. I’m going with what a co-worker defined as history, anything that happened in the past. So anything between the Big Bang/Let-there-be-light and last week is up for grabs. But to be more DC focused I’ll start somewhere in the 18th Century.
Today I just want to talk about Sunday’s Washington Post.
Sorta under the title of ‘gentrification’ is Income Soaring in Egghead Capital. Where I see the DC metro area is where the nation’s well off African-American households live. Yet $55,547 is a pitiful amount compared to our Asian ($83,908) and Non-Hispanic White (94,290) colleagues. The data the Post provided kinda proved a belief that I had about the black middle class, they wanna get as far away from “Pookie” as their middle and upper-middle class white colleagues do. The highest median Black incomes $92,492 in Loudoun and $89,096 in Stafford, are far from the District ($34,484 and the highest percentage of population living below the poverty line).
Looking at my own middle class Black family, I and my blind great-aunt are the only ones in the District. The next closest relative tried to escape inner Beltway Prince George’s County because of all that’s going on around, but couldn’t due to a failure to sell the house. If the house did sell, outer-waaay past Upper Marlborough would have been the new address. Then everyone else is in Fairfax Co. and Howard Co. I’ve noticed when the relatives move up in house, they seem to move further out. They express a desire for more space, more amenities (planned communities w/ clubhouse) and less crap.
But back to gentrification…. So if high earning African-Americans are engaging in black flight from the city and inner-ring suburbs, that could mean that they are leaving a residential void. A void filled by poorer Blacks and middle-upper class non-Blacks. Add to that the great big gap in incomes ($91,631-white; $67,137-Asian; $43,484-Hispanic and $34,484-Black), housing prices, and you got a problem. And I wonder, even if District employers provide the higher paying job opportunities, what is there to say that African-Americans who fill those positions will be from the District or will stay in the District? Okay, now I’m rambling, next…
Back from Behind Bars has a graph, that shows Truxton Circle as one of the communities where 5.1 or more (per 1,000 residents) ex-cons return to after being released from the criminal justice system. The other parts of Shaw (except what looks like upper U Street) have a rate of 5 or less per 1,000. The articles goes in on how those released have trouble finding housing and employment, and staying away from the things that led to prison.
And something that has more of a history bent an opinion piece about Dunbar High School in its hey-day. It’s more about integration and colorism than the school itself, but the print version has a nice photograph of the school in 1931. The original school is no longer and it has been replaced by that prison-like building that dominates the TC skyline.

This your bike?


100_0602
Originally uploaded by In Shaw

These bikes were spotted in my alley. There is a chance that they could legitimately belong to people visiting or living in the house behind where the bikes sit. Yet, if that was so, why are they out in the alley? On the off chance that these are being stashed, and belong to someone who has no idea of where they are, email me. mari at inshaw.