Check out Vince Gray’s “One City,” from corner to corner, and you will find it is white and getting whiter by the week.
Back in the day, a mere 40 years ago, when blacks accounted for 70 percent of D.C.’s population, the nation’s capital was known by locals as “Chocolate City.” Now you can go to a bar and sample a tasty new, local beer called Chocolate City, made in a micro-brewery — owned by white guys.
Upper Caucasia, my moniker for the city’s northwest corner west of Rock Creek, has been reliably white for many decades. East of the Anacostia River used to be reliably black, but no longer. White folks are fording the river. My friend Bennie says they are moving into his Fort Dupont neighborhood, along Minnesota Avenue. Ditto Historic Anacostia, along Good Hope Road.
A few Fridays ago I did the “Joe Madison Show” on Sirius radio, out of a refurbished warehouse on Eckington Street. It lies at the east edge of the Eckington neighborhood, facing the FedEx transfer center amid D.C.’s warehouse district. It’s also close to the intersection of Florida and New York Avenues, where you will find the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, still the ugliest building in the District.
I headed left out of the Sirius parking lot and stopped for a white guy on a bicycle, then a young woman wearing ear buds on her way to the Metro, also white. I had asked the parking lot attendant about a building going up across the street. “Condominiums,” she said.
Just a few years ago, Eckington was a solid black middle class neighborhood, anchored by McKinley Tech, still one of the city’s top high schools. Now developers are snapping up row houses and Victorians and turning them into condominiums. One of my colleagues researched the crime stats and found it safe. She and her fiance hung out on the street night and day. They saw other white couples pushing baby carriages. They bought in.
Same with once black neighborhoods of Shaw, Bloomingdale, Columbia Heights and Petworth. Capital Hill now extends to the banks of the Anacostia. White folks have taken over the H Street corridor in Northeast and beyond to Benning Road.
So what does this dissection of D.C. beyond the census mean? Market forces are shaping Vince Gray’s “One City” so quickly that we risk losing the shred of identity that once defined local Washington. Money, rather than race, is driving the changes, but that seems to be pushing blacks out. There is not much a mayor can do about those changes, with or without slogans.
Harry Jaffe’s column appears on Tuesday and Friday. He can be contacted at [email protected].
