Month: May 2010

UHOP Parade this Saturday, more info

From PSA 301 via the MVSNA listserv:

The parade hours will be Saturday, May 29, 2010 from 10am which will be the assembly time, and start at 12 Noon to 3pm which will be the disbanding time.

The route is as follows:
The parade will form at 6th and M Street NW and will proceed over the following route: North on 6th Street to S Street, West on S Street to 13th Street to Logan Circle, Southeast around Logan Circle to P Street, East on P Street to 7th Street, South on 7th Street to M Street, East on M Street to 6th where participants will disband.

Enjoy the parade, but if you got somewhere to go, don’t do it during the parade unless you’re on foot or bike.

Razin’ Hell

I’ve pulled two Washington Post articles from the pile.
The first is from May 10, 1955 “5000 Homes To Be Razed In RLA Plan” by Robert C. Albrook. The RLA is the Redevelopment Land Agency, a government agency that dealt with blight. And the blight in this case were some 5000 houses in the general Shaw area. I say general because the agency was working on the 2nd Precinct (think 14th St NW to Union Station, Florida to Mass Ave) and hadn’t paired it down to the Shaw School borders. They were considering what needed repair and what needed to be bulldozed. The neighborhood had yet to organize against those plans and the impact of the SW Urban Renewal hadn’t really sunk in yet.
Fast forward a couple of decades to “RLA Sets Razing in Riot Areas” February 20, 1971 by William L. Claiborne. 1971, a little more than 2 years after the 1968 riots that ruined many parts of Shaw. Instead of several thousand structures to be razed, the effort was to tear down several hundred damaged properties. Fun quote from this article is:

Marion Barry, executive-director of Pride, Inc., who also attended the session, said, “You never get anything done unless the citizens go out and raise hell…. This (demolition schedule) came because of our protest.”

Flower Power 2010

Two things you’ll want to know about the neighborhood beautification for the Bates Area (northern Truxton Circle, north of P).

One, you need to sign up ASAP for the treebox improvement on June 5th on the BACA blog. By doing so you can get some free treebox plants, mulch and dirt. But you have to sign up. If you don’t sign up, maybe, you’ll just get some free mulch or compost that DPW (hopefully) will dump at 1st and P. (G-d willing). So sign up here.

Second, Flower Power is on this year on June 26th and tickets for the garden walk are back to recessionary prices. Five bucks if you get them the day before. Once again I’m selling them. Contact me at mari at inshaw dot com or show up at the next BACA meeting June 7th or get them from others on the Flower Power committee. In the meantime you can nominate your or your neighbor’s yard or your block (which is why you need to sign up for the treebox thing) for the Flower Power walk. Some of you should have gotten fliers but if not you can go to the BACA blog’s Flower Power page and fill out the nomination form.

Making Ice Cream

This has nothing to do with anything, but last night I felt like I just discovered fire or that cold vodka is useful in making pie crust.

I like to make my own ice cream. I have a hand cranked thing that uses a cylinder that I set in the freezer a day or so before. Some of my neighbors have had my creations. I tend to make chocolate and BAM!Vanilla! (as my cousin calls it) and I tend to like it more than anything I’ve had elsewhere. However, the new gelato place on 7th St in Penn Quarter is pretty darned good too. Anyway, the only problem, if you consider it a problem, is my ice cream is typically too dense. The chocolate is like eating a frozen brownie sometimes. Or it bends spoons. I figure I’m just not churning it enough.

But last night, I made a Strawberry Sage ice cream using a recipe from an Irish Ice Cream store and it called for whipping the cream. I’ve never whipped the cream when making ice cream and this whipped concoction is lighter in texture. The whipping I see makes it less dense and easier to scoop.

Now the whole fruit herb combo makes me wonder if I can make a Twizzler’s sorbet with strawberry and tarragon.

As I said, this has nothing to do with anything.

Dunbar Marching Band Scam

via the Eckington Listserv
It seems some kid is going around collecting funds for the band, but it seems Dunbar no longer has a band.
I’ve pretty much gotten cynical when it comes to mealy mouth kids and fund raising. I don’t truly believe they are raising money for their school or football team. I may give out of pity or explain that I only give to the kids who live on my block, sorry.
When I want to do charitable giving I have lots of choices and I have a higher preference for those who I can somewhat hold accountable.

Grusesome Playground Injuries

This has very little to do with Shaw but I was invited and the Wolly Mammoth, where this play was performed is between work and home, so good enough.
We did make an effort to go to one of the WM supporters, Cedar Restaurant. I was barely aware of the place before seeing anything at the Wolly. We enjoyed the appetizers. Maybe next time 701, I sometimes go there for lunch.
The play itself is funny and later touching but not for the easily grossed out. If the sounds of loud retching makes you want to toss your cookies. Avoid. The story is about two self-destructive accident prone people and their relationship. The staging is a little odd, and made it difficult to see some on stage wardrobe changes if one sat in the balcony area. The music was modern, right now Lady GaGa is stuck in my head because of it. But in the end, it is quite touching. The Help noticed that I wasn’t the only one teary eyed leaving the theater.

Housing census 1950- Bad bones

This PDF you can find wandering around www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/index.html
the census website and look at the data and come to your own conclusions. Because
I have a bias, you have a bias, and we filter information differently.

This is for housing, looking at the condition of
houses in the TC part of Shaw, enumeration district 46. ED 46 goes from New
Jersey Ave NW to Florida Ave NW to New York Ave NW. Other parts of Shaw are in
EDs 44, 48, 45, 49, and 50. But I live in ED 46 so that’s what I’m looking at.

In 1950 there were 1766 housing units in Truxton
Circle total. Only 385 of those units were owner occupied, 1,297 rentals, the
rest vacant. What does this mean? If you’re living in the TC the house you’re
in was probably a rental for years because of what I’ve seen in other Census housing
reports. And that means the landlord more than likely didn’t live near the
house and didn’t give the house the same level of attention that a owner
occupied house would get. Of 1720 units, 439 had no bathroom and or was dilapidated,
268 no running water at all and or was considered dilapidated.

Let’s look at a couple of blocks. Census block 2,
Square 507 and Census block 20, Square #617. Block #2 is bordered by NJ, RI, FL
and 4th St. Of 106 units on that block, 26 were owner occupied, 78
rentals, 2 vacant/for sale. Of the occupied units, 47 had no private bath/ dilapidated,
and 7 had no running water/ dilapidated. 100% of the block was non-white, read
African American more than likely. Average rent $37.56 a month. Block #20
bounded by N St, North Cap, O and 1st Streets. Of 189 units, 31 were
owner occupied, 155 rentals, 2 vacant/for sale, and 1 other type of vacant. Of
186 reported occupied units, 90 had no private bath/ dilapidated, 86 had no running
water/dilapidated . 153 were non-white and the average rent was $36.80. To get
a sense, city wide there were 223,675 units, 27,727 with no private bath and 10,965
with no running water, average monthly rent $57.42.

The funny thing is whether a house is considered
dilapidated based on if there was decent plumbing. The actual phrasing is “No
private bath or dilap.”/ “No running water or dilap.” According to the report, “a
dwelling unit is ‘dilapidated’ when it is run down or neglected or is of
inadequate original construction, so that it does not provide adequate shelter
or protection against the elements or it endangers the safety of the occupants.”

In 1960 Block 2 had
77 units, 69 sound, 7 deteriorating, 1 dilapidated. Block 20, 180 units, 45
sound, 86 deteriorating, 49 dilapidated, and a majority of occupied housing
rented. Both majority non-white but not 100% non-white. For both, the number of
units went down, block 2 the most. Renters were the majority still.

College not just for the upper and middle classes

The difficult, I’ll do right now

The impossible, will take a little while

-Billie Holiday

There was a comment on another blog that just
annoyed the crap out of me and continued to bug me. It insinuated that lower
income kids can’t go to college and that college only has middle and upper
middle class kids running around it. My own and the experiences of friends
proves that so wrong and I am so sick of that mindset. Also since this is
Inshaw, the quick tie in to this is a) it’s my blog and b) Shaw and other
gentrifying neighborhoods have lower income kids, who may wind up going to
college.

Let me start with my aunts and mom. They were girls,
in the late 60s. The family was black and sharecroppers in rural North Carolina.
My oldest aunt only had two dresses, everyone else got hand-me-downs. Not
exactly rolling in dough. My aunts went to small black colleges and became
teachers. They helped fund their education by working at colored resorts, one
in NY state. Mom didn’t go to college because grandpa, on his deathbed, asked
her to take care of grandma. Mom did however, many years later went to
community college and became a CNA.

Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Atonement

As far as I can tell this church no longer exists. Well in Washington DC. Not anymore.
The reason why I’m typing this up is because someone. I can’t say who. Annoyingly has a lot of personal chaff included in federal records. Some of that chaff, provides glimpses of a life partially lived at Rhode Island and North Capitol streets. The person in question was white, college educated, married and is currently very dead. He was the head, for a number of years of a Federal agency. He resided in various parts of Alexandria during the 40s and 50s. And he went to church in Edgewood? Eckington?
His church home was the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Atonement. I can tell because of other chaff and detritus left behind, such as church programs, pledge statement, and Lutheran publications.
What does this stuff, which personally we should really throw out our own light and gas bills at least 5 years after they’ve been paid, tell me about a ELCotA parishioner? Apparently you didn’t have to live near the church. You could just drive in from Alexandria, worship in DC and I guess go to the office. Because seriously, how does this stuff wind up in your working files?
Anyway, commuting church goers aren’t new and we still deal with them to this day. I just hope none are not the head of a government agency and have a habit of stuffing church crap in their office files.