It\’s funny the way your mind will suddenly snap back to something you had not thought of in years. Walking out of my/his/the apartment in Dupont Circle this morning, where I am now more or less living, with a stack of old City Papers in hand, I remembered when I first happened upon one. Some memories just stick with you.
It was in the very early spring of 1995. March, I believe. I had attended a rawk show at the old WUST Radio Hall, which is now the 9:30 Club. I don\’t recall offhand who the opener was, but we were there for the headliner: the bad attitude that was the British Invasion part Deux of Oasis. Across town at the old 9:30 Club, some of my other friends were attending the sold out Bush show, with Veruca Salt as the opener. I remember thinking then, as I do now, that I scored the better deal. At the end of the rowdy show (spent crowd surfing and throwing things at the bassist, Bonehead), I happened to see a pile of papers at the door, and I grabbed one.
I immersed myself in that copy of the paper for weeks, reading, rereading, memorizing details. I poured over the contents of the nightlife listings and in the coming months it became a checklist of places to go and check out for myself. With the copies of the City Paper that I gathered in the following months, I answered a lot of ads (even then I was a classifieds junkie) — one for a wicca class, some for jobs, one for an apartment. I was 13, but already desperate to \”leave this town, leave this place, gotta get out of here — gotta move!\”
Something I had not remembered until recently — something I had forced myself to forget — is that in my games of Let\’s Pretend that I carried out in the secret privacy of my bedroom, my locale of choice was New York. In my day light fantasies, the plan was to get out of high school at seventeen and then pack my bags and head to New York, which I saw to be the end all and be all of all the things I was interested in. I would go to New York and find my first club that played jungle, I would live in a loft in Greenwich Village (not yet aware of the fact that it had become gentrified) with my musician friends that I would, of course, make, as I would be the drummer or the bassist in some amazing band that sounded suspiciously like what I would soon known to be as Garbage. I would attend art school, or maybe I wouldn\’t, but I would definitely write, play music, dance all night, wear crazy outfits, ride a moped, have a lot of tattoos and piercings and pink hair, and volunteer at ABC No Rio. New York was where I wanted to be.
Enter my first introduction to the internet, July of 1996. Compuserve. A LGBT youth chatroom. A chance meeting with a young Scottish lad. Ba-bye, NYC, good to have never known you, fuck you America, I am out of here! And so I kissed my dreams of New York goodbye and took up with the idea of getting the hell out of this country and planting myself in Edinburgh — a much more appealing option than anywhere in the States, as far as I was concerned. Damn falling in love with someone in another country just as you\’re growing fed up with this one. Damn falling in love just as you\’re growing up, in general. And so I forgot about New York and focused on Edinburgh instead. Years spent in devotion to making my stays there permanent. Finding that impossible, attempting to get the boy to move here, and when that failed, heading off to Pittsburgh. You know things have to be bad when a city that essentially thinks it is in the midwest is, in your mind, a better place to live than the one you are living in, here on the east coast.
The nation\’s capitol. Whoop-de-fucking-do. For those of us who grew up here in the suburbs, this place may as well have been a prison. No public transportation, no friends with transportation, parental placed restrictions that kept you far, far outside the city limits. And the suburbs? Good for housing a lot of bad punk music, drinking in the woods, fondling your date in the parking lot of the late night Wendy\’s, and that was about it. Oh, and drag racing — don\’t forget the drag racing.
I grew up just five minutes from Burtonsville, which, unbeknownst to most people, but ask anyone from the DEA or the local police enforcement, is the illegal drub hub of the mid-Atlantic. En route between Canada/NY and FL/further points south, most drug traffic went through here, at the edge of Rte 95, smack in the middle of DC (points south) and Baltimore (points north). Which means, essentially, that you can obtain pretty much any drug that you want just by asking the right people at the local high school. Some kids in Burtonsville, they grow up, and then they don\’t leave. They move into one of the rental townhouses along 29, and do dope until they crash or flee. So the drugs, here in the boonies, are plentiful. And if that is your scene, then this is the place to be. However, if you are trying to escape that sort of nonsense with at least one of the inner walls of your nose cavity intact, as I was, then this was definitely not the place to be.
I remember that back in 1995, you could rent a one bedroom in Dupont Circle for about $500. I remember seeing those ads in the City Paper and scheming the impossible — how to get $500 a month so that I could move. I was 13, which is two years younger than the legal working age in Maryland. How many lawns would I have to mow? Yards to rake? Kids to sit, for how many hours? Parties to throw? (Disgusting, I was charging $7 a head to attend parties I was throwing in 1994 and 1995.) How many papers would I have to deliver? How could I get $500 a month? I came up with no plan, and hence, stayed put for the time being.
Upon turning 16, I was finally able to land my first job. Having left school the year before, I was free to work 60 hour work weeks for minimum wage, while juggling the physical attentions of both my manager and assistant manager in the back room of the store. After a month, I had a thousand odd dollars. I used it to get the hell out of Dodge…to Edinburgh. When the money ran out, so did I — back to DC, and a little more than a year later, to Pittsburgh.
Interestingly enough, I was still finding it hard to come up with $500 a month. Every attempt at working an outside job left me sick in bed, a raving, suicidal lunatic. Avoiding a job left me sick in bed, broke, a raving, suicidal lunatic. Back to DC. Saved money. Back to Pittsburgh. Autumn 2000. Sick, in the hospital. My house in Pittsburgh, killing me. My credit cards maxed from rent, groceries, medical bills. Back to DC. Fast forward two and a half years.
My parent\’s house is now uninhabitable to me, due to my allergies (dust/mold/mildew/dog). This would not be such a bad thing, if my apartment in Greenbelt had not resulted in me 1)totaling my car, 2)frantically buying a new car, 3)having the new car stolen, 4)my sub-let being unextendable. And so now I find myself unable to really afford anything around here, and so, technically, homeless. The few physical possessions I still call mine (literally nothing but clothes, computer set up, records, cds, dj equipment, books, a bed, a CD shelf, a bookshelf, and some kitchen ware) are scattered between my parent\’s house and the apartment in Dupont. Nearly daily, I make the reverse commute from M Street to the suburbs of Maryland. After doing this for the past three months, I can tell you that I have learned something: I have seen hell, and it is the Washington, DC metropolitan area.
I hate the gentrification that is laying waste to downtown Silver Spring, Columbia Heights, the U Street corridor, Logan Circle, and points east. I hate watching the overpaid white folk spread like a disease in their SUVs across the 16th Street divide and into what they like to refer to as \”Frontier Country.\” In the 1800s, folk of European descent who were looking for a little adventure, had a little money, a guarantee from the government on price reductions for \”settling,\” and were looking for a place they could afford to live in, went west. After looking around at what there was to see, they decided that they could make it better. They could get rid of what was already there, change things around, make it more suitable to their tastes. The government financially assisted them with this, and the \”settlers\” milked the local resources…forgetting, of course, that those resources rightfully belonged to the people who already lived there — the local inhabitants! But, to those European descendants, the local people were persona non gratis. Whitey said, \”they ain\’t using it the way I want to use it, and therefore, it ain\’t being used, so I\’m going to drive them out by any means necessary, and take over.\” Commerce and \”law enforcement\” worked together to drive the natives further west until there was no other place to go. Homeless, their lives ripped out from under them, many of them became part of the invisible underclass. Which brings us back to the gentrification of DC.
Having moved west, Whitey of DC has doubled back, bridged Rock Creek Park, and is headed east. Nevermind that these neighborhoods — Shaw, Capitol Heights, Capitol Hill, Edgewood, and others — have residents just as Adams Morgan, Mount Pleasant, and Columbia Heights had before \”Victorian Restoration\” and \”Neighborhood Revitalization\” moved in. It\’s not revitalizing a neighborhood if you\’re forcing the current residents to move so that you and your rich brethren can \”restore\” it. And maybe it\’s news to you, but fancy homes, bars, clubs, and upscale shopping, do not make a neighborhood vital. Listen to any of the residents of Dupont Circle and Adams Morgan complain, because of lack of local doctors offices, grocery stores (Social Safeway and Columbia Rd Giant may satisfy some peoples\’ idea of \”groceries\” but the quality of the fresh food at these places is enough to make many people weep and then choke at the prices at the Whole Fields over on P, or haul ass over to Wisconsin for the Soviet Safeway), hardware stores (the mom and pop on Connecticut not withstanding), grass to walk dogs on or room to kick a ball around, and parking. Parking! I have been told that finding parking in Manhattan is easier than finding parking in any gentrified area in DC.
Whitey moves east. With him, he brings the almighty dollar. Store fronts full of a bunch of crap no one needs, furniture the current residents cannot afford, bars and restaurants that cater to a certain crowd with a certain sort of twenty dollar bill stuffed wallet, and before you know it, landlords are raising rents or just plain evicting their tenants, homeowners are being forced to comply with the new neighborhood home restoration standards unless they sell out, and in a few years, you walk down those streets and you are blinded at night by all the shiny, obnoxious, drunk, loud, white faces. This is vitality? This is Gap culture. This is Benetton on a night out. This is Starbucks moving in next door on your left, and on your right.
DC got it\’s nickname Chocolate City in the years following the baby boom. As the white folk moved into the new suburban planned housing communities, sprawling this way and that way in a completely unsustainable lifestyle, the black folk moved back in from the \’burbs where they had been forced to live in years prior. After MLK Jr was assassinated in \’68 and much of the city went up in smoke in the ensuing race riots, much of the city east of 16th St NW went quiet. Some residents moved, others stayed and attempted to make the best of the many remaining flame gutted homes and businesses. Post WWII through the \’80s, the city was predominantly black, with only a few pockets here and there — mostly in Northwest — that were white. Chevy Chase, Friendship Heights, Georgetown, Tenleytown… and suddenly DC became trendy again.
The more affluent neighborhoods in Northwest expanded until they could be expanded no more, and then city planners, developers, and real estate moguls started pushing east. As rents went up, folks edged closer to 16th Street. As neighborhoods were \”revitalized\” the city became more and more of the place to be, and those in the suburbs started moving back into the city in flocks. Neighborhood by neighborhood has been \”improved,\” leaving the resident black and Latino families with lower incomes with no choice but to pack up and move elsewhere. First eastern Dupont Circle, then on to Adams Morgan. All of Adams Morgan, then north, to Mount Pleasant. East of Adams Morgan to Logan Circle and slowly into Shaw. U Street, all this time, being taken over and expanding in all directions, all the way up to Columbia Heights. North past Columbia Heights into 16th St Heights. East of 16th Street Heights and into Park View. Almost half of what once was Chocolate City is now gentrified. Once again, \”settlers\” are \”frontiering\” with no regard to the people already inhabiting the area. Not just in DC, of course; it is happening the world over. It makes me sick.
Gentrification equals globalization equals you are a resident of McWorld.
I propose that in DC whitey take his ass back west. Let him move his way through Virginia. Rosslyn is a hot spot these days. Go make it hotter. Set Arlington on fire so the residents of Southeast can push you further west into Ballston. You deserve Ballston. They have a big mall. You will be happy there.
I, for once, am practicing what I preach. Instead of renting the nice one bedroom I found on the north end of N. Capital NW and helping to raise the rent in the area by bringing in my white ass with my new car and my supposed consumer driven spending and lack of being a \”crime threat,\” I am getting the hell out of dodge. To the residents of Chocolate City, I wish you luck and I remind you that there are better ways. Vitality does not equal commerce and it does not equal your sorry ass moving in and running everyone over. You have the means (money, skills), you have the time. Now proliferate, and remember that the greatest gift you can give is life. Now go volunteer some your means to revitalizing. How do we revitalize? Education, recreation, no manipulation.
Counting down to four and a half months.
Jesus christ, being hopped up on vitamins and supplements (no ephedra or ephedra-like stimulants), nutrients and proteins, adrenaline and endorphins, and my favorite — 5-HTP — is a hell of a lot like being on crank or being manic, except there is no come down! Is this really what it is like to feel healthy? It\’s been so damn long — nearly ten years — that I had forgotten. But daaaaaaamn, is it nice.
I would same more, but I have to go pick up my recovered, repaired, and repainted car from the dealership now.
