Cat sitting on fence at 1616 4th St NW. Taken October 31, 2003
I wrote the post below back in the early days of the blog in 2003. I was undergoing my first major house renovation, the kitchen with a contractor I found via some swing dance friends who live (still live) in the H Street area.
That contractor had his own company and paired up with a fellow and they created a company. I see that company’s trucks all over my new neighborhood. But this post is about a kitty.
My neighbors down the street had a cat. They kept the cat outside most of the time. Lucky was a very sweet cat.
My contractor has run off with the neighbor’s cat. She’s doing much better now he says. I kind of miss her. Lucky is an extremely affectionate cat. Of course she mainly wanted food and tried breaking into my house often. But now she’s in a warm house, the neighbors kept her outside, eating regularly, I used to feed her a little & thought her owners were too, and she doesn’t slobber anymore.
My contractor took her home. She was well cared for. She became an indoor all the time cat and got fat. She was in kitty heaven. Well she died after many, many years and is now in kitty heaven.
I’m going to guess it was 2005 when I visited 23 N St NW to look inside the home. I was impressed by its storage.
So many cabinet doors…. Interesting floors. It had a slightly arty bo-ho look. A look that has been renovated away by the looks of the real estate photos from its 2017 sale of over a million dollars.
I vaguely remember it having a loft in the bedroom, along with wooden bookshelves. It was a neat home.
I’m very excited to announce that I’ll be presenting at the 2024 DC History Conference and I’ll be talking about the Black Homeowners of Truxton Circle.
So if you are available Saturday, April 6th at 10:15 at the Neighborhood History and Housing panel, come see me. Ask some questions.
You can register now for the April conference, and take a look at the program here.
So in order to get ready for the conference I’m going to slightly ignore the blog for a bit. Also I have some personal things I need to deal with. Even once the conference is done, there will still be some personal things that will need to be dealt with, maintained? So I’m thinking of a schedule of one researched post a week with a few Memory Lane posts. I’d like to get around to actually getting something published outside of the InShaw blog about Truxton Circle and that’s going to take some focus and time, in addition to some of those personal things I’ve been ignoring.
I’m looking into my collection of photographs and going down memory lane.
Taken Feb 12, 2006
I took these photos eighteen years ago. The snow just fell and it was pretty. Pretty until you have to go to work and it gets packed into ice on the sidewalk.
Taken 2/12/2006Taken 2/12/2006. 1500 blk of New Jersey Ave NW,
Taken December 26, 2005. View of 300 Block of Q St NW from 1600 blk of 4th.
Happy Boxing Day.
A quick look at this photo taken in 2005 shows the block before the Fourth St Friendship Seventh Day Adventist church built their modern wing. It appears ground had been broken and fencing was up.
This morning, the District of Columbia Public Charter School Board (PCSB), an independent board, voted to revoke the charter for Community Academy Public Charter School (CAPCS). While the vote will undoubtedly cause angst for the 1,600 CAPCS students and their families, the District of Columbia is ready to make sure that the needs of the students are met for the 2015-16 school year.
At the request of Mayor Bowser, I developed a plan in collaboration with Friendship Public Charter Schools, DC Bilingual Public Charter School, and the Chancellor of DC Public Schools to provide as much continuity as possible for CAPCS students and families.
Armstrong Campus (1400 First Street, NW): Friendship Public Charter School will assume operations beginning next school year (2015-16) for all 523 students……
After that Armstrong has been operating as a regular old charter school. I’m happy it is a building that is being used and maintained.
Armstrong Technical High School, March 1942. Photo by Marjorie Collins.
I’m going through my old drafts. Some I rewrite, such as this one. Some I delete. And some I rewrite, still think they’re crap and delete them. This was written October 8, 2008.
1700 Blk Richardson Place NW, Dec 2005
Sometimes.
I’ve just finished reading an article regarding the upsides of raising a family in a 1,200 sf house over that of a McMansion. The author writes:
Looking back on 18 years of living small, I see that our snug house has prevented us from easily avoiding one another by retreating into our own spaces. We’ve been able to eavesdrop on our kids as they played with friends and look over their shoulders as they did homework on the dining room table. It’s been good for our health too, forcing all of us, especially our sons, to spend more time out-of-doors. There simply isn’t room to get too rowdy inside, so often they have headed outside to a neighborhood park that’s conveniently located just across the street.I hope we’ve given our sons the message that wealth doesn’t come from our material possessions, but instead from the diversity of experiences we have and the richness of our community.
The author also mentions that with a smaller house she could pay off the mortgage quicker, heat it for less and have a better commute. I already have the great commute. It is my great luck to work for an agency whose DC metro branches are all along the Green Line. My current commute is a 30-45 minute walk, or 20 minutes by metro, and that is priceless. The house is small and there isn’t much to heat or cool, and I tend to be happy lounging in 1/6th of the space. And there is the possibility of actually paying off the mortgages in the next 15 years, but I owe that more to when I bought the house as opposed to the size of the house.
The article was in the conservative online magazine Culture 11 “Living Small”
The podcast Myths and Legends is a pretty good reminder of one of the problems with being in a Greek tragedy, that bad thing you’re trying to avoid is going to happen. Sometimes the very actions taken to avoid the bad thing, lead straight to the bad thing. That’s one way of looking at things, the other is to blame the Oracle for giving vague easily misinterpreted answers.
Shaw has experienced tragedy. It took 30+ years for the neighborhood to mostly recover from the 1968 riots. Of course, prior to the first window broken or building fire, the neighborhood suffered as a slum.
Southeast on 7th and M Street, 1969
I wonder, and this is just me spitballing, if some actions taken to ‘improve’ the neighborhood, or anywhere, could wind up doing the opposite. I used ‘improve’ in quotes because I’ve seen enough government records to get a bit jaded. Along with plans from the past that did not work out the way they were supposed to. And in the case of George Basiliko and his “improving” the Bates area, I see the road of good intentions being contracted out to a corrupt front that on paper is supposed to build the road but pockets the money elsewhere.
So in prepping for February 2023, I have finally finished Shaw resident and father of Black History, Carter G. Woodson’s, History of the Negro Church. Good lord this book is boring. I’m just yawning at the thought of writing anything about it.
Sadly, this book is not as engaging as the Mis-Education of the Negro. But there are some useful parts, which unfortunately require getting through the tedious parts of the book to appreciate.
One of the biggest things I got out of it was that African Americans were organizing and establishing and operating churches and preaching in America prior to the Civil War. Slavery and emancipation where major themes in the book. It is also Methodist heavy.
Thinking of this book makes me wonder if there is an alternative approach to Black history, which tends to be focused on the period of slavery. It is so much so, one may be left with the impression that African Americans didn’t do anything until they were emancipated, either by running North or with the Emancipation Proclamation.
There are gems, but you need to dig through a lot of dullness to get to them. When February rolls around, I’ll try not to bore anyone. Well, no more than I normally bore you.
