I just had an awful feeling: I realized I don\’t know my city at all any more. There are now two bedroom apartments for rent in Columbia Heights for $3,000+. There\’s a building on Belmont — one of my formerly most loved, now one of my most despised streets — where studios 185 sq. ft in size sell for $30,000 each. Another unit in a different building on Belmont is currently renting for $8,500 a month for a 3 bed/3 bath with 2,700 sq. ft. In 2001, I had friends who lived on Belmont in a cute little three story unit; they had three bedrooms for $1100.
What used to be our Chinatown has now become Penn Quarter. In 2004 I remarked that it was starting to look like Times Square. Well, the transformation of hideousness into tourist appeal central, gawdy capital of our city, is complete. It\’s been Disneyfied, Manhattanized, all the things I hate.
Old City near the Hill is quickly following in the footsteps of U Street NW, using its black heritage as something to put on a wall in a picture frame and then discard as easily as the residents who actually remember Black Broadway are being displaced by all this nonsense. Biggest difference being, Old City has become Joe EnglerTown — former mayor Williams and current mayor Fenty might as well have handed him the keys to the \’hood by now.
D.C. is now overrun by Michelin star ratings on restaurants, paid parking on streets, designer clothing boutiques, Food Network chefs roaming around taping their shows, \”residents\” who don\’t know who Mayor Washington was or why D.C. doesn\’t have the vote (\”What do you mean, our votes don\’t count?\”), more chi-chi frippery for the discerning yupster than affordability, etcetera. The diversity keeps bleeding out into the suburbs. I\’m tired of seeing young, upwardly mobile people (not all white — there is definitely a fair percentage of Buppies
I keep writing, then deleting, because it\’s all been said before so many times. Sometimes by me, sometimes by others. But I just don\’t know D.C. anymore, I\’ve come to realize. It\’s like waking up in a bed that\’s been shared with the same person for all my life, only to realize that other person has become not just a stranger but a stranger that I don\’t want to know.
Matt feels the same way about Silver Spring. I don\’t feel quite as vehement about SS as I do DC because I only visited a couple shops in SS before 2001. Matt, on the other hand, has been here for pretty all of his 38 years. He hates going into SS\’s city center, where the Armory used to be. He misses the old shops, the old character and feel. He hates all the neon, the droning people milling around the shutdown square on weekend nights, the bad traffic, the continually rising costs of real estate, the lack of parking, the loss of the boutiques and open spaces, etc.
I think I\’m just particularly bitter today because our second house offer got turned down. Also, last night the massage parlor two doors down from where I work was raided by the cops. The raid brought the neighborhood kind of to its knees, clearing out the people hanging around on the streets, closing the nearby sandwich shop early (of its own accord), emptying the street of parked and loitering cars, and just sort of scaring out the customer base. Over the past weekend, our resident dealer got busted by the cops and is now banned from the bar. This has led to a sharp drop in our customer base (with people coming in and shouting \”where can I get some fucking coke?!\”) and has sort of put everyone in a sour mood. It\’s been pretty dead for the past few days, so no one of us are making money. To top it off, one of the dealers walked in the bar last night and started screaming (loud enough for anyone to hear) that he was going to shoot my boss.
There\’s got to be something wrong with me and how I\’ve lived my life if I prefer the company of drug dealers and working in a neighborhood with massage parlors, pimps, and crack addicts, to the company of yupsters in a neighborhood of gastro-pubs and chi-chi boutiques.
