An update on H Street NE (DC)

After the Florida Market tour on Saturday (and after eating Korean food at the "Florida" Deli on Morse Street), I spent a few hours with Elise re-exploring H Street block by block. It's been awhile since I have done that and it is really kind of edifying and surprising at the same time. In 2000 (or maybe it was 1999) when I got heavily involved in neighborhood improvement activities, it was partly because I thought without getting involved myself, that the neighborhood would continue to languish ("suck").

Now the funny thing is that I don't know how much I myself really contributed. (Actually I did a lot, but it was so long ago...) There were a number of key events:

1. Then Councilmember Sharon Ambrose getting the city to fund and conduct a revitalization study. (Which was finished in 2003.)

2. The Robeys trying to get the Atlas Theater.

3. They didn't, but it put the Atlas Theater in play, and the Sprenger-Lang Foundation got it out of the clutches of the H Street Community Development Corporation, which let the building languish for years. It reopened after a $20+ million renovation in 2006.

4. And the Robeys in turn started the H Street Playhouse, which helped lead the renaissance of the eastern end of the long corridor.

5. At the same time, other people were investing in their commercial properties, while for the most part most of the buildings had been allowed to languish for decades. Not just the Robeys but people like Stuart Bennett (The Language Doctors) and David Bernhardt at the western end (David bought a building at 421 and fixed it--in my opinion it was the most "blighted" building on the corridor--in the turnaround it became one of the best, and others toward the eastern end, such as Delores Montgomery (she fixed up her simple building at 1307) and the owners of the Dry Cleaners at 1100 H Street, who restored the second story of the building, including reopening the windows that had been boarded up for decades, etc. (Elise and I, along with Anwar Saleem, who we ran into while on our walk, talked with him on Saturday.)

6. Many people don't agree with me (they are wrong, and it was watching the impact of this station that shifted my interests to transportation planning, because I believe that when done right, transportation investments are the public investments with the greatest return on investment in urban revitalization), but I attribute a lot of the improvement to the neighborhood to the New York Avenue Metro Station, which made living north of H Street less risky and more appealing for people with choices.

This has led to an improvement in the neighborhood's economics and safety--instead of drug dealing on Orleans Place, you have people pushing baby carriages, something that always shocks me thinking back to the late 1980s, when dozens and dozens of people were murdered in that part of the neighborhood.

People complain about "gentrification" without recognizing that the reason that urban neighborhoods languish is because of lack of demand, i.e., money. Neighborhood and city economies that are broken need money to improve. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

I don't use the G word. Yes, we need to deal with displacement and how to maintain mixed income communities. But we should for the most part never criticize investments in neighborhoods and cities. How else will they improve?

(I still remember one day in 1989 or 1990, when people were murdered at 5th and H and at 5th and K in unrelated incidents, within an hour or two, or the frequent incidents/shots fired at 7th and I, etc.)

7. The investment in the streetscape. While it is still being built and will take awhile to finish, the process started with planning in 2003, so it's pretty fast for a transportation project. But you can see the impact it is having. And I think of the work that people like Kiran Mathema did (then of Baker Projects) conceptually and now seeing it being installed (e.g., his idea for metal banners has been simplified but has been fabricated and is up on the light poles) -- although I have to say one of my best lines ever at a planning meeting, in response to their early planning which was going in a seriously wrong direction -- urban brutalist faux shopping mall aesthetic -- helped the process too.

8. The entry of Joe Englert, the tavern and night time establishment impresario, to the corridor has made a huge difference. I have said before that this has accelerated the improvement of the corridor by 5 to 10 years. I still believe that. Pretty streetscapes don't matter if the buildings are empty, or if the buildings are occupied by middling businesses that are not appealing. Joe brought verve to the business environment. H Street is the happening neighborhood (I refuse to use the term Atlas District), covered in the national press, and the destination for weekend entertainment.

I mean I was talking to a retired Baltimore County worker at Bike to Work Day in Towson last Friday, and she was telling me her son "lives in Capitol Hill." I asked her where, she said on the 900 block of 6th Street NE. (I used to live on the 800 block, for about 15 years.) I was floored. H Street is becoming "Capitol Hill" and it's where the younger set--those people hopefully with energy, verve, ideas, and gumption--want to live, not just where they can live/buy because it's cheap.

9. Yes, it will take a long time for retail to redevelop the way people want it to. And it might not ever really happen. (Explaining why takes up another blog entry which I don't have time to write.) But without getting people out to resample the commercial district, which they do because of the night life, you can never restore a retail district. The real problem with retail there is that the rents are too high, which makes it almost impossible to create a funky retail district on the scale of Carytown in Richmond, or Hampden in Baltimore, which of course is a shame, because if that could occur, it would then be a national best practice example of how to do urban revitalization.

10. The streetcar. As I was walking back to my bike, after leaving Elise at her house, looking for her cat which ran off the night before, and after having a great milkshake, Cheerwine soda, and waffle fries with gravy at the Capitol City Diner (why don't we have a place like this in Takoma, where I live now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), one of the business owners called out to me and asked me about my opinion about the streetcar and overhead wires.

He does not favor overhead wires.

I said that (1) the technology isn't there yet to not have overhead wires. (And regardless of what people say, at DDOT or anywhere else, it isn't there, with batteries or anything, not for a few years, except for extremely short distances.) (2) And that the reality is that in modern streetcar systems like in Portland or Seattle, the overhead wires don't look that bad. (3) BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY, there is no modern streetcar system in operation on the East Coast, that this one will be the first, and if you want to build value and verve for the commercial district, make it truly unique and a place to see, visit, shop in, and play, build it. (4) But that as the technology improves, it can be converted from overhead wires to another method--why not make DC the testbed for streetcar technology improvements in the meantime? (5) and work to improve the system over time (incrementally).

After the conversation, he was convinced that it is better to focus on what the streetcar can bring to the corridor (if not to the city) and how it can be improved, rather than on the overhead wires.

Streetcar wire in Seattle. Flickr photo by Kevin R Boyd

11. The amazing thing for me was seeing, despite the fact that H Street is a construction project now, and pretty hard to negotiate, the numbers of people walking up and down the street. I remember how H Street used to be pretty dead on Saturdays, with not much going on. Now there are places like the Taylor (which was full) Sandwich Shop, art galleries (we went into one, which I won't mention, because I thought the art that was displayed was "not very good"), and other places to shop and eat.

12. And every time I see the conglomerate stone topped sidewalks around the city, this treatment has become the standard for commercial districts in the city as streetscape improvements occur elsewhere in the city, I think of how Gina Arlotto suggested doing this on the ANC-6A listserv, and the idea was picked up by Karina Ricks at DDOT, evaluated, and became the standard. Citizen involvement can and does improve the city. (I was involved some in this decision too.)

13. Now, H Street is still a somewhat wacked place in terms of leadership, social capital, and organizational capacity (I'm thinking of people like Robert Pittman, and even people like Margaret Holwill), with lots of different groups all vying to take credit and shape the change and fight the change (plus I gather that the ANC6A has declined a bit in quality as Joe Fengler has left the ANC for a different part of Greater Capitol Hill), or to just be illogically insane, and I am happy to not be dealing with it, but to have learned all that I have as a participant in and an observer of the process of neighborhood and urban improvement.

Most people don't get to experience this kind of neighborhood improvement in their lifetimes.

And I definitely want to go back to Capitol City Diner.

(NO photos. I took some, but haven't uploaded them yet.)