You (don't) really like me--DC and its suburbs revisited

This blog entry is in part, something I wrote in 2004, in the H-DC discussion about what happened with the City Museum. (From June 2005, "You (Don't) really like me--DC and its suburbs.")

It comes up in the context of the preceding blog entry and the comments, in part to this quote from the Fehr article, "D.C. Hopes Arena Is Just a Warm-Up," from 1997:

"I don't go downtown if I can help it," said Ron Dean, 27, of Woodbridge, expressing a popular perception about downtown crime not supported by statistics. "The main reason for me is the crime. I don't want to be another statistic." Dean was at Fair Oaks Mall in western Fairfax County, one of about 20 centers where suburban residents hang out.

This is the classic conundrum of being afraid of places we are unfamiliar with, and the idea of "stranger danger," and being fearful of people "out there"--which is why children are ferried everywhere, etc. I myself am less comfortable photographing in the Trinidad neighborhood, as I am not from there, whereas I have no problem doing so in the H Street neighborhood.

This came up yesterday in the Frozen Tropics blog, in the comments of a somewhat negative review of the hip happening developing H Street entertainment district from the GWU Hatchet student newspaper, which stated:

When we finally flagged down a cab at the end of the night (no small feat), the cab driver looked us up and down. "You are lucky to get a cab out here this time of night," he said, laughing a loud, deliberate laugh. "You go two or three blocks East, you gonna get shot."

This is such b.s. and so tiresome. But it is also something that a lot of long time residents do when talking to new people, to try to keep the city from changing. I couldn't even count the number of times I have been in places in the city where it is unusual to see whitey and getting comments about how I should fear for my safety.

Granted I wouldn't do it everywhere in the city (after two assaults, I no longer go down K Street by Temple Courts and Sursum Corda), and I'd be ever-so conscious in places like Philadelphia that I consider to be much worse, but I have (yes, through a lot of bad experiences) been trained on how to get around in "the city." (Granted it's been an expensive education. A quicker way to get some book learning on the subject would be to read Anderson's Code of the Street.)

But it reminds us of the reality of how people who mostly live in the suburbs think about and perceive the city. The comments from the denizen of Fairfax or the bar hopping GWU undergrad reflect the belief by most non-urban residents that any place outside of Georgetown or Dupont Circle is seen as a warzone.

This is from last year's blog entry:

Back in the late 1990s, I was at the holiday party for my job and the husband of the director commented to me that he didn't see how "any thinking person could live in DC as long as Marion Barry was mayor." I merely replied that it took me "15 minutes to get to work....by bike" whereas his wife commuted from Gaithersburg or Germantown (whatever, it began with a "G"). He was speechless.

I have always said that the farther you live from the core of the center city, the more you don't like the center city. Someday, I hope to test this with an attitudes survey...

Also, in the thread last year on H-DC about the closure of the City Museum, an instructor from George Mason, J.F. Saddler wrote this:

This semester in my U.S. history surveys at George Mason, I assigned my students to evaluate the (potential) effectiveness of the City Museum and the "Washington Perspectives" exhibit. I gave them a detailed list of questions that asked about, among other things, accessibility of the museum, how well the museum and exhibit held their attention, ease of "use", and clarity of the story being told. In the overall exercise, I instructed them to read the museum and its exhibit as they would a written text or an image that I had given them in class--another way of conveying history and meaning.

The summary of 125 students' answers to the four basic issues above were:

1) Accessibility: Many were put off not by the location, per se, however they were indeed apprehensive about the museum's general environment. Although they realized that the Museum is in a transitional area of the city, they were uncomfortable with what some described as the gauntlet of people asking for money as they entered the grounds of the museum. They related this as well to the level of refuse strewn around the building. In sum, many of my students--almost all of whom are Northern Virginia suburbanites--averred that they would not recommend out of town guests to visit the museum for this reason alone. ...

(Go to his complete email to read the rest.)

This by the way is one of the thing that angers me, suburbanites like Nores, Koma, and Borf coming into the city and scrawling on the environment contributes to the perceptions that their fellow suburbanites have that the city is unsafe.

But this perception, fear of the city, especially because of the quality of the care of the public spaces, litter, and the built environment, is held by people of all races. Karen Alston, one-time chair of the North Capitol Main Street program, wrote about this in an entry in themail, titled "Race in the Race, Plus Politics":

I have African American friends that live in Bowie, Mitchellville, Ft. Washington, and Davidsonville that still will not come to my neighborhood of Eckington, because it isn't safe or stable in their eyes. I have to travel to their homes for events, parties, and social functions. Yes, we are divided by class and race lines in this city and across the country.

This is an ongoing conundrum that becomes more difficult as metropolitan regions continue to sprawl out and become more diffuse, where the core of the region, is just one more agglomeration, in a region of agglomerations. People don't have to go to the downtown department store to see Santa at Christmas, because every shopping mall has a Santa...

That is why (I sometimes hate to admit) that having the Verizon Center in downtown is important as it forces suburbanites to resample the city. I hate to provide public funds to such places (including the baseball stadium) because most of the patrons are not from the city, and it seems an injudicious use of our relatively meager tax revenue stream to spend it on stuff for suburbanites. But if we work to maximize the local benefits of this "investment," I suppose it can work out to the city's favor.

Index Keywords: contested-spaces; urban-revitalization