Move into an old laundry building! In ever more clever ways to draw in those sassy downtowners, the new Yale Steam Laundry Condominiums going up at 4th Street and New York Avenue NW urge prospects to “Live Like an Icon.” (The graphic includes a va-va-voomy woman with a building on her skirt. She’s extra.) According to Webster’s, that means you could become “any of various stylized figures, as displayed on a microcomputer screen, representing available functions or resources.”

Sign me up!

And not only will you, sassy downtowners, represent available functions and resources (starting in the low 300Gs for a studio), according to an e-mail I just got from the Yale Laundry staff, you’ll also:

• be able to play “billiards” in a glass-enclosed room!
• be blocks away from a “New Starbucks”!
• have access to a “New Urban Safeway” (apparently Safeway’s jumping the gun on the nickname. What? They didn’t like “Soviet Safeway: Where nothing’s on the shelf and there’s always a line?”)
• lay claim to living in and/or near a historic building that was still a laundry until 1976!

All that and exposed brick will be yours, in the “fourth quarter of 2007.” Unless, of course, the Yalies don’t buy into that icon b.s. and the developers have turn to retail.

From today’s Washington Examiner:

Four vacant homes in the heart of Shaw, all owned by a controversial Baptist church, have been condemned by the D.C. government as a possible danger to the community. The D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, which posted the condemnation notices Wednesday, gave Shiloh Baptist Church 15 days to repair its properties at 1528, 1532, 1534 and 1536 Ninth St. NW.

If you saw our groundbreaking coverage of the matter a year and a half ago, you’ll know that Shiloh Baptist Church has taken a lot of heat from Shaw residents for refusing to fix up its numerous properties around the church building at 9th and P Streets NW. Finally, the city’s stepped in to force the issue.

Great story, Michael Neibauer—until the last graf. Are you seriously going to let Leroy Thorpe blame others for “dividing the community along racial lines in an effort to push people out”?

Sent out today on the Shepherd Park message board is a boast that its block party ain’t going to be no beer-sippin’, hot-dog-munchin’ affair. And, kids, you can probably forget about the moon bounce:

Shepherd Park friends,

Here is one more email inviting you to our inaugural block party this Sunday. It’s not your typical neighborhood block party with hamburgers and hot dogs.—we’re closing down an entire downtown street, having five restaurants participate (Jackie’s, Mayorga, Addis Ababa, Tiramisu and Moorenko’s), a platform stage (with performances by eight bands, poets, a fashion show), lots of activities for children (puppets, face painting, games), and dozens of arts, crafts and other items for sale.

What’s so wrong with hot dogs and hamburgers?

Domku. Temperance Hall. Babies. For those left still wondering whether Petworth has fully become a gentrified neighborhood, we give you nathanmboggs writing on the ‘hood’s message board after a recent murder:

Not to be callous or anything. But, this isn’t news. Who cares? I mean really. These young guys hang on the corners selling drugs into the wee hours in the morning. So what he got murdered! That’s the cost they pay to do business? So in that sense, the world is rid of one unproductive animal. Hell, if it wasn’t against the law, I’d love to kill a couple of them myself! Petworth will be all the better with his passing….Let the drug dealers, robbers, and the killers have at each other. And for the lucky ones that survive, hopefully the police can take care of them. I’ll just buy more prison stock and try to recoup some of my taxes spent feeding the animals that don’t learn their lesson from this.

Thankfully, the Petworth board slammed the poster for his comments, telling him he should seek counseling, and just all-around put him in his place. Yesterday afternoon, he posted, “And for the record, I am a black man. So don’t go calling me some racist.”

In attempting to document the lapses of one Postie, our esteemed editor believes that white people gentrifiers don’t say racist shit out in the open, like, say, at a hipster joint on H Street. I disagreed at the time. And then this past weekend I witnessed a Great Moment in Gentrification, one that I think deserves some debate.

What do y’all think of this: It’s about 11:15 p.m. this past Saturday night. In front of Cue Bar, I wait to meet up with a friend and observe a squad of frat goons (you know the look: buzz cuts, thick necks, untucked dress shirts, jeans) approach an idling cab. These men are seriously drunk. One dude, maybe three ask the cabbie for a ride. The cab driver says he’s waiting for another fare. One of the dudes then yells at the cabbie: “We have a lot more money than whoever you’re waiting for!”

I thought: Yikes.

Racism? Classism? Or this is just what happens on the new U Street?

It turns out the cabbie was waiting for woman just getting off a shift at a nearby bar.

The Washington Post is standing behind last Sunday’s Style section feature on the gentrification of H Street NE—even those parts that have been proven wrong. “The bottom line is, I think the story speaks for itself,” says Marcia Davis, a Style assignment editor.

“U-Turn on H Street” was a classic WaPo swipe at the complicated racial politics of renewal along this long-suffering corridor. The story’s author, DeNeen L. Brown, took a breezy, poetic approach to the topic, occasionally dipping into second-person storytelling. After describing an encounter with a clever shopkeeper, for instance, Brown writes, “you wonder whether the newcomers would catch that kind of humor, appreciate that kind of street wit that doesn’t come with a degree.”

The “newcomers” in Brown’s piece are basically the white people who have moved into the H Street vicinity. And they take a pretty thorough beating in the piece. Which is fine, so long as the facts hold up.

On Monday, they appeared to be taking a beating. In an online discussion of the piece, two posters wrote in to take issue with the money anecdote in the Brown story. That anecdote goes like this: One night, Courtney Rae Rawls, 26, was tending bar at H Street’s the Argonaut. She was serving a table of white people. These people found some chalk lying around and started writing on the table. Rawls asked them to stop. Here’s the rest of the story, verbatim from the story:

“Please, guys, quit writing on the table. Nobody wants to rub their elbows in chalk.”

The customers laughed. They picked up the chalk again. Exasperated, the bartender yelled: “Come on, ya’ll grown people!”

A white woman at the table mocked: ” ‘Ya’ll grown people!’ What kind of language is that?”

Bartender: “What?!”

The woman: “You ought to be glad I bought a $500,000 house in your black ghetto neighborhood.”

The online chatters—one claimed to have witnessed the confrontation from a table by the jukebox and one claimed to have been at the table—took issue with the Post’s rendering of events. From the person near the jukebox: “The white students were writing on the table but they did not say what Ms. Rawls said they did.” And from the person at the table: “Contrary to what appeared in the story, the confrontation did not take on any race/class overtones until Ms. Rawls said ‘Y’all wouldn’t act like this in your own neighborhood.’”

These issues got a vetting earlier in the week on City Desk, which received many comments on every side of the issue. But no official response from the Post came over the blog lines.

Seeking answers, City Desk called Brown earlier in the week. Brown responded, kind of: Everything’s off the record, she said, except to say, “I stand by my story.”

So City Desk went to Davis, who edited the H Street piece. Davis took issue with City Desk’s blog post from earlier in the week, arguing that it was unfair to drop such a piece before having called the author. (*City Desk response here.) She also said that the title of the item—”Memo to Post Style Section: Do Some Goddamn Reporting”—was also unfair in light of how much reporting Brown pumped into the piece.

City Desk posed a few issues to Davis. They’re after the jump, with her responses:

Read the rest of this entry »

With all this talk of racism in the gentrifying parts of town, I thought I’d share this anecdote.

On Tuesday, I interviewed a middle-aged black man in Columbia Heights. He was angry about construction that had encroached on his mother’s land, and I mention his race because it is relevant. This man expressed racial attitudes that were in step with the policies of a certain Western country between 1933 and 1945.

As we stood in his backyard and looked at the construction, he intimated that the Jews wanted to take his mother’s house. Of one of the persons involved, he said: “She’s a member of B’nai B’rith. You got me, man? You got me? Yeah. Member of B’nai B’rith.”

I took his story with more than a spoonful of salt. But just because I’m a careful reporter, I checked with a Jewish friend to see if she and her acquaintances were hatching such a plot. “I haven’t heard any plans like that,” she said. She did assure me, though, that the Jewish Conspiracy to Take Over the World was still holding regular meetings. “We’re about to have a press conference,” she said.

My friend is from the North, so she’s quick to spot racism. Since I’m from East Texas, it takes me a while to notice, even when racism is leering down at me in form of a loud man with booze on his breath. I grew up with this stuff: Confederate flags as makeshift curtains, prolific use of the N-word by white men, a Bible-class teacher who said whites and blacks shouldn’t mix. (”It’s bad for the children,” he told me when I was 10 or 11.) In coming to D.C., however, I thought that urban blacks might be less racist than the whites down South. After all, the grandfathers of those Klansmen who marched in my town never had to get hosed or go to jail for their rights.

Illusions, farewell.

Back in Columbia Heights, I was hoping that the angry man’s 80-year-old mother would offer me some faith in people. Not a chance. She said, with a hiss, that white people were the root of her troubles. One of her neighbors, who was white, made a nervous joke over the fence. She let loose on him: “You come out way after I was here! I been here since 1953! You come down here ’bout four years ago!”

I wish the story ended there, but it doesn’t. As I was walking away, the man offered to bribe me. “You do this story. I take care of you,” he said. “I get you paid.”