Day: May 26, 2010

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.