Ask almost anyone and they will tell you that the 1970’s were not kind to our nation’s capital. In the aftermath of Martin Luther King assassination riots in 1968, a lot of Washington D.C became a really really scary ghetto. The legacy of that ghetto scared the crap out of me when I moved to my nieghborhood of Columbia Heights earlier this year- you see, everyone who my parents talked to who had any vague association with Washington D.C in the 1970’s and 1980’s pegged Columbia Heights as mix between present day Mogadishu, Baghdad circa 2005, and post-laser beam of destruction Alderaan. “How could you let your child move into Murder City USA?” people kept asking my parents. How I was gonna live in a place with a 40 year old reputation of being en embarrassingly dangerous and poor neighborhood in the capital of the world's wealthiest and most power was the more important question.
Well a lot has changed in this part of Northwest D.C since then. There's a Chipotle, the surest sign that things have turned around. Sure, one sees expensive skate board shops and organic markets mingling with soup kitchens and bullet proofed liquor stores, but for the most part the horrors of 1970’s are gone: with one gigantic exception.
You see, Columbia Heights LOVES its 1970’s pop-culture. Maybe it has to do with the mix of upwardly mobile Black residents and white bourgeois guilt, but the soundtrack of this area isn’t so much nauseating club jams like “Tik Tok” as it is straight up “Soul Train”.
The Florida Avenue Grill, a great diner right near my house that my brother endearingly called “The Blackest Place in America” is decorated with photos of prominent black celebrities-that is of course only those up until the Cosby Show Era. Although we have a fucking black president it’s easier to find a photo of Candi Staton or Bootsy Collins than it is B-Rack. Another neighborhood institution, Ben’s Chili Bowl, has been serving outstanding chili since 1958 and feels like an amazing time warp. Late one evening there I was privy to an wonderful spectacle: over the restaurants stereo came “Ain’t Nobody Love Me Better” by Chaka Khan and I got to watch every person in the restaurant, Black, White or Indonesian, GET DOWN. There was not a dry eye in the house.
So maybe, just maybe, this whole idea of post-racial America is bullshit. Gentrification has reshaped the character of my neighborhood (I'm obviously guilty as charged), but I think the thing that attracts people like me to this neighborhood is rough-and-tumble Good Times quality that a lot of places around here still have. In a city with so much soulless corporate culture and architecture, a neighborhood that wears its history on its sleeve, even if that was a painful history, can be very refreshing.
It’s certainly problematic. But if living in a bizarre contradiction means I get more Stevie Wonder in my daily life then I think that’s pretty cool.
I grew up in Rosslyn and remember the bad old seventies clearly...the pimps and prostitutes, the fear of being out when the sun went down, and the dominance of black culture in the nation's capital. Most of all, I remember the great soul music (they used to call it black music).
ReplyDeleteYour story of how it is now is very interesting. Thanks for posting.