Ward 3, where I live, is the District of Columbia’s largest, taking up practically all of the land west of Rock Creek Park and north of Georgetown. This year, in the “murder capital of the United States,” there have been zero murders in Ward 3. The ward is 88 percent white and has no one of working age living in poverty. It has few homeless people and many playgrounds. However statistically bad D.C.’s problems may sound, to get a true picture you’d have to take out Ward 3 and multiply everything else — poverty, murder, illiteracy, illegitimacy — by, say, 1.25. Which sounds like a Henny Youngman set-up: “Take Ward 3 out of the District — please.” Isn’t that what most of these rich white people huddled in the city’s northwest corner think?
Oh, no. The troglodytic right may live in suburban Virginia, the “I moved to the suburbs for the good school system” liberals in Maryland. We Ward 3ers love the raffish combination of an innercity address and an overclass lifestyle, and the whole community has been built around maintaining this balancing act. The bagel shop, for instance, is probably the only deli in the country with aerobics fliers stacked by the front door. There’s the same schizophrenia in politics: Even though Ward 3 cast 97 percent of its votes against Marion Barry in the Democratic mayoral primary in 1994, its residents seem determined to preserve every last vestige of atmospheric slumminess — provided it doesn’t hike crime or lower real-estate values.
Which is why the neighborhood has recently been the scene of strident popular agitation aimed at securing lousier services. At the beginning of September, posters announced the formation of a “Save Our Supermarket” committee. “Our supermarket” is a real past-the-sell-by-date, goop-on-the- floor, bugs-on-the-fruit establishment.
Apparently, it needs to be “saved” because a high-quality supermarket — one that would actually purvey the mozzarella and saffron and ugly fruit the neighborhood subsists on — plans to move in nearby. The flier warns that the new store is “challenging” our crummy one and “wants to push it out of our community! !”
It’s not as if “our supermarket” is a historic monument; it’s only been around since 1987, when the neighborhood Safeway closed and the same activists rallied to have a replacement moved here. By gathering ” hundreds of volunteers, [and] thousands of petition signatures,” they pulled off the Gandhian political feat of enticing a grocery store into a competition-free area with the highest per capita grocery expenditure in the city. The protesters promise us we can preserve this victory if we all just ” volunteer our time.” Not to enrich ourselves, mind you, nor even to help the less fortunate — but to ensure ourselves a continuing supply of bad produce.
The epicenter of this politics is the 350-unit apartment building I live in, the stately Kennedy-Warren. LBJ lived here once, but now it’s a writers” building. We have several people from the Washington Post, two from the American Spectator, three from the New Republic, and two from the THE WEEKLY STANDARD. And don’t forget feminist author Naomi Wolf, the pretty expositor of “the beauty myth” in her bestseller of the same name, who shares her apartment with Clinton speechwriter David Shipley (formerly of the New Republic).
Until April, the building had the meanest, laziest, most ill-mannered front desk staff in the city. They sent away Chinese-food and pizza deliverymen when they didn’t feel like accompanying them to tenants’ apartments. They insulted visitors. They lost packages. They snarled when asked such demeaning questions as, “Any mail for me?” And not surprisingly, when they were fired in April — to be replaced by a “concierge service” that threatened to hail cabs for the older residents, send for laundry, make restaurant reservations, and maybe even smile — the tenants went berserk.
Resident Paul Steven Miller, commissioner of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, led the meetings on behalf of the fired staffers, in which the eccentric octogenarian reporter Sarah McClendon was a vocal participant. The first signature on the petition that resulted was that of Naomi Wolf, who later told the Washington Post: “The choice that the people at the front desk made to humanize their relations with the tenants is a choice for the transcendence of the human bond. And that quality can’t be entered into a balance ledger.” As for the concierge service, she deemed it ” the height of haute bourgeois frivolity.”
The petitioners launched a newsletter, but by the time the first issue appeared, alas, all but one of the front desk staff had buckled and accepted the buyout package offered by the management — scotching a gleefully anticipated class-action suit. So the first issue consisted largely of sneering digs at the same proles the tenants had been championing just days before.
Clearly Naomi and her friends had transcended the human bond — at least those of them who knew what the word “transcend” meant.
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
