Can I boycott a place I’d probably never get to

Some of ya’ll are aware of the kerfuffle regarding U Street Girl and the owner of a wine bar threatened legal action. She has recommended that others join her in not patronizing or promoting the 14th Street business. Okay.
I totally agree on principle, but honestly I haven’t even gotten to the wine bars I actually want to go to, like Cork, so I don’t know what use that would be. Also as a fan of redemption and forgiveness I hope that the owner of Du Vin Osteria, David Shott, will make an honest effort to undo the damage done.

Hopefully, we’ll have none of that in nearby (to me) Bloomingdale. Tonight there is going to be an open house Q&A for a proposed bar/pub/wateringhole at 116 Rhode Island Ave NW between 6 and 8pm. I guess it would be a good place to unwind after some yoga ’round the corner. Seriously, I’m looking forward to the development, growth and appearances of all the small businesses in the Bloomingdale and eastern Shaw area.

It’s time to go

This weekend one of the neighbors was out doing some minor painting, reminding me I have to do some minor painting to my fence and security gate. Ah, home ownership. When asked about the sprucing up she was doing she confirmed that she is indeed planning on selling the house and moving back to her homecountry. “It’s time,” she said.
She’d been on the block a little bit longer than I have, by some months to 1/2 a year. In that time she’d done some home improvement, so at least 1/3 of the house is new. She’s also been a good neighbor in that she’d taken on the alley cat issue, trying to catch cats to get them spayed and neutered and the kittens adopted. Hopefully someone can fill that role when she does sell the house, and provided it isn’t listed at some super high price, it should sell. And hopefully, whomever buys it will integrate themselves into the fabric of our block.
And so another person makes an individual decision that can change the block adding to the dynamic nature of neighborhoods and neighborhood change. Which reminds me of the various reasons people I have known have given for moving, job relocation, family pressures, marriage, house too much of a burden/downsizing, etc. For renters, sometimes the decision is not theirs and is more financial when the owners choose to cash out or fail to keep up with their mortgage. No organized effort here, just individuals, with a tiny sliver of land, doing what they think is best for them.

Gentrification and Theatre

This weekend I and the Help were invited to see the play Clybourne Park at the Woolly Mammoth Theater down in Penn Quarter. According to the theater’s website on the drama and the promotional information:

Clybourne Park explores the evolution of racism and gentrification over the past half-century in America by imagining the conflicts surrounding the purchase of a house in a white neighborhood in the 1950s by an African American family, and then the re-design of that house in “post-racial” 2009. While Clybourne Park is a Chicago neighborhood, the play makes no direct reference to its geography. Woolly believes Clybourne Park is highly reflective of the changes happening to neighborhoods throughout DC and across the metropolitan area (and urban America).

And it is a riff off of Raisin in the Sun with the first half of the play taking place in the home of the family selling the home (that we assume) the RITS’ Af-Am Younger family. I thought that first half started a little slow.
I really appreciated the director’s commentary after the performance at a reception. On one point as urban DC people living in 2010 we know how to judge the characters of 1959 in the first half of the play, saying with confidence Mr. Lindner, from the Clybourne Park Improvement Association, is wrong in arguing against selling to the Black family. However in the second half, taking place in what I gather to be 2009, that moral surety is not there and issues of race and gentrification are tied up in arguments about ‘history’ and architecture.
Since the Help and I are both in the History field, we pondered the ‘history’ part for a while. We also pondered the racial and chronological make up of the audience at that performance. History is messy and we found it interesting that one of the Af-Am characters was pushing the idea that the desired preserved history started with the integration of the neighborhood, not its establishment or previous ethnic makeup. Also when the Help (the whitest white guy who was ever white) pointed out the demographics of the audience which had a smattering of Afro-Americans, I mentioned audiences like my Aunt and her friends tend to favor Tyler Perryish morality plays over at the Warner Theatre.
The second half of the play does try to press a lot of gentrification topics into 6 characters. Two topics did ring a bell in relation to stories and events witnessed in the Shaw neighborhood, history and racial defensiveness. The Shaw historical narrative isn’t wrong, it just leaves a whole lot out that isn’t particularly marketable in the larger “Heritage” theme. And one character reminded me so much of a former neighbor who was one of those isolated* white families who moved to Shaw, who tried to be a good neighbor but had to walk on eggshells every time they interacted with their Black neighbors because even the banal issues were hidden roadside bombs of pent up racial anger.

UPDATE- Theater Discount

Readers of this blog can see any performance of Clybourne Park for only $15. Use this numeric code 789 when arranging tickets. Reservations can be made online (woollymammoth.net), over the phone (202-393-3939), or in person (641 D Street NW, Washington, DC). Clybourne Park runs March 15 – April 11, 2010. Performances are Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8pm and Sundays at 2pm and 7pm. Questions? Visit woollymammoth-dot-net or email Rachel Grossman, Connectivity Director, Rachel-at-Woollymammoth.net

*Isolated in that they were the only white people on the whole block.

Low flying helicopters

Okay, maybe they are actually looking for or at something when they are hovering over my area at a low altitude. But dang it they are loud, and sometimes at different hours annoying.
The day after one of them whirlybirds has been flying overhead I check Airscene.com, hit ‘flight tracking’ then flights to try to find the annoying thing and see how low it was flying. Typically the police copters are UNK, but I know what they are and when they where here, I just can’t gauge how low they were flying. Wednesday, around 4pm, the skies were busy and UNKs flying below 1000 feet.

A snowball’s chance in Hell

Okay I’m back from vacation and I gather I and several other bloggers must have gotten email from the campaign of some guy named Richard Urban who is running for the at large seat on the council. Okay he’s a socially conservative white guy running as an independent. In this town. Snowball’s. Chance. In. Hell.

Last thought, never announce you’re going on vacation on blogs or social media sites. That’s almost asking for it. Even though I had an unemployed unpaid intern house sitting while I was gone, I figured it was best not to say anything.

Spring is loitering on the corner

You know good weather is around the corning when the boyz start hanging around the corner you prayed they had abandoned. Well, it’s better than the bad old days when they’d hang on the corner in bad weather, day and night. So they started hanging out Wednesday, and they’ve brought on new staff. There is one guy I recognize from days past, but the other guys? Ranges from ‘not sure’ to ‘he’s new’.
With vigilance, hopefully, it will prove to be an unprofitable corner. Problem is that we are a handful of blocks from heroin central, over by where the Truxton Circle used to be. But so far, during the hour or so I was watching them, and really didn’t see any cars stop. I wasn’t the only one watching, a few others thought it was nice enough to sit on their stoops, or fiddle in the yard. Mix that in with the odd dog walker, joggers and strollers, I don’t see how that’s an attractive corner for a drug buy.
Also I want to thank the 5D cops who showed up and made several passes by the corner, and ventured into the alley. Of course by then the boyz had wandered off, but it was good they showed up anyway.

Unrelated Announcement– Blogger issues. Blogger is going to discontinuing a service I use so I’ll need to migrate my blogs and I’m not sure what’s that going to look like. So blogging may be spotty towards the end of the month.

Quick Sale

This weekend a house near me got under contract, despite the price. Honestly, I thought $599K was too much, considering a house on the same block with a similar layout, but with a basement and a somewhat functional gas fireplace sold for about $150K less. Others who’d seen the interior of the higher priced home had said it was in move in condition and done very nicely. I saw the inside and admittedly couldn’t play the IKEA/Home Depot game, but I swear one of the interior paint colors was the same as my dining room’s. Ralph Lauren, Stony Mountain, NA15.
Well I gather the Real Estate market in the circle of Truxton, is healthy. That or someone really wants to live on our street. Maybe I’ll go with the second theory as Sunday was nice out, which meant the cute 5 and under set were out riding their bikes and razors. “Hey look, if you had kids they’d be playing with these kids by now.” And the people with dogs chatting with the neighbors doing things in their yards. For a while it was the best advertisement. A living brochure. A clean block (cleaned earlier that day by a neighbor) with happy children, a diverse (age & race) set of friendly looking adults being all frigging neighborly, smiling, laughing. That’s worth about $150K right there.
So putting your house on the market anytime soon? Somehow pick the nicest day for an open house and during the open house, convince your neighbors to make your block look like it’s fricking Sesame Street. Guaranteed sale.

Church gossip

I don’t really keep up with these things, so this may be last year’s news to some. But it doesn’t look like Metropolitan is going to be moving from Armstrong/CAPS school anytime soon. That church they are supposedly building in PG County to move to in order to accommodate their car-centric congregation, well that’s on hold. ‘Cause they broke. Or ‘bankrupt’, using the language of my source. I can’t find anything confirming the bankrupt charge.

Feh, PUDs and other complex development deals

I just rejected a SPAM comment for a old post (any post older than 14 days is moderated) about the Radio One deal. That was back in 2007. It is 2010. So ‘cuse me if I’m not as hopeful as some of you about the other projects proposed back in 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004…. You get the idea.
So far, in my mind, which means you’re welcomed to disagree (and I’ll just ignore you), anything requiring financing more complicated than a credit card form is something you shouldn’t hold your breath for. Yes, complex projects do get built. You know that National Harbor thing in PG built over a year or two ago? Yeah, they started that in the 1970s. I know where the paperwork for that is to prove it. So O Street Market may be done sometime in 2020 at this rate.
Yes, yes, I hear things are moving with O St. I will believe it when the machinery arrives, then a bunch of guys in hard hats are there 4-5 days a week for 3 or more months and something like framing. Real framing, not just stuff to keep the walls from falling down, forms. Don’t just adjust the fence and move the bricks around and call that progress.