Time passages

Today's Post has an article about H Street NE and neighborhood change, "U-Turn on H Street," subtitled "If you were eight blocks past uncertainty, three steps from neglect, five houses down from hope, and you just saw a white man with ear buds rollerblading past a crack house without looking up, would you know what street you were on in the City?"

1920 Census data, H and 9th Streets NE, Washington, DC. Image courtesy of Peter Sefton. Click through for a larger image.

While there are a lot of words, I can't say the article covers any new ground. Even compared to Paul Schwartzman's article from last year----"Whose H Street Is It, Anyway?" Or any of the other similar Post articles from the past couple years:

-- A Bittersweet Renaissance (Shaw)
-- Letters to the editor in response, A Disturbing Snapshot Of Shaw
-- One Urban Panorama Fades, Another Rises (14th and T Streets NW, part one)
-- A Boom Giveth, and It Taketh Away (14th and T Streets NW, part two)--


It's worth mentioning that I think the time frame is pretty narrow, even though he mentions the riots (1968) and the Catherine Fuller murder (1984--three years before I moved to the neighborhood). Surprisingly, he doesn't mention Rayful Edmund, a crack distribution kingpin in the late 1980s.

Over the 130 years since the neighborhood has for the most part existed--since the creation of the Columbia Horse Car Trolley (built around 1872) by a group of land owners wanting to boost demand for houses in the neighborhood, ethnic groups have come and gone. Different groups--based on age, race, educational attainment, ethnicity, continue to come and go, over time frames that last decades.

Tom Toles editorial cartoon about center city changes from the late 1990s, when Toles was at the Buffalo News.

See:
-- Commerz in the 'hood... (aka "Commerce as the engine of urbanism")
-- Commerz in the 'hood, part two
-- Commerz in the 'hood, part three
-- Commerce dans de quartier de la ville, partie quatre (Commerz in the 'hood series) 在商业街道
-- It appears as if I am becoming a sociologist...," about the outmigration of African-American families to Washington's exurbs and the invasion-succession theory about neighborhood change (an 80 year old theory...)
-- It's demography (reaction to City Paper article "Honey, I shrunk the District")
-- Passion and vision as the building blocks of revitalization (Commerz in the 'hood, part five)

for more discussion about those broad issues, and

-- More about Contested Space--"Gentrification"
-- Community Preservation and Gentrification
-- Gentrification article in USA Today (about Lance Freeman's work)
-- David Nicholson's Outlook Piece on Gentrification
-- The Onion on the process of neighborhood change
-- Historic Preservation in Low Income Neighborhoods
-- Revitalizing places that are contested spaces
-- Tom Sherwood, Duncan Spencer, Anwar Amal, and thinking about what I call the 'Uncivil War'

for a discussion about "gentrifrication"

The Old Pioneer, Red Hook, Brooklyn . Flickr photo by elevatedprimate.