We learned that many years ago the LeDroit Park Civic Association meetings used to get heated.  How times have changed; every meeting we’ve attended this year was calm and polite.

This contrasts with some neighboring Shaw and Mount Vernon civic associations, which, as the blog The Other 35 Percent reports, have involved member blacklists, police-escorted ejections, membership schisms, and restraining orders.  Sounds like the plot of a novel!

One wonderful feature of living in LeDroit Park is not only its proximity to downtown, but the variety of options in getting downtown.

A cab ride to Chinatown is only about $5.50.  A walk is only 25 minutes. The Green and Yellow lines stop at 7th and S Streets in Shaw.  Numerous buses run along 7th Street and Georgia Avenue toward downtown.  For those of us who can’t tolerate the 70s buses that stop every block, the limited-stop 79 stops at 7th and T Streets, just two stops before downtown.

Yet there is another frequently overlooked option: picking up a SmartBike at 7th and T Streets and riding downtown to another bike station.

SmartBike was established by the advertising company Clear Channel Outdoor as a quid-pro-quo for having the right to advertise in the city’s bus shelters. For a flat, annual $40 fee, subscribers receive an RFID card (just like a SmarTrip card) that they wave at a station, which then unlocks a bike in response.  A member may use the bike for up to three hours and can return it to any station.

When the weather is nice, your author frequently picks up a bike at 7th & T Streets and rides it to work near Metro Center.  He returns it to a station located on his office’s block at 12th and G Streets (across the street from Macy’s).  Since the cost is a flat $40 per year, there is no additional cost for each ride.

DDOT, which pushed Clear Channel for this program, is ultimately responsible for bringing the idea to the District.  DDOT Director Gabe Klein, formerly a Zipcar executive, promises to expand the program by next spring.  Currently there are only ten stations, which limits the program’s utility for many residents.  Since a bike must be returned to a station, but may be returned to any station, SmartBike is subject to something akin to the the network effect, i.e. the more stations there are, the more inherently useful the system is.

Though Mr. Klein did not specify if the SmartBike expansion would use a new bike vendor, Greater Greater Washington noticed that the Montréal newspaper Le Soleil (The Sun) is reporting that their hometown bike-sharing champion, named Bixi, is preparing to sign a deal with the District, presumably replacing the current Clear Channel arrangement.  The main advantage of the Bixi bikes is that their stations are solar-powered and can be deployed virtually anywhere, whereas the current stations require the costly (and often complicated) installation of power lines under existing sidewalks downtown.

Hopefully by next spring we will be able to pick up a bike and tool on over to places other than downtown.

The LeDroit Park Civic Association will meet tomorrow night at 7pm in the basement of the Florida Avenue Baptist Church.  Enter through the back entrance at U and Bohrer Streets NW and descend the stairs.

On the agenda:

• Representative from Florida Avenue Baptist Church on community involvement
• Gage Park Update on delayed construction
• Representative from North Capital Collaborative on the group’s activities
• Committee business
• Your updates, ideas, questions

Please join us, get informed and meet your neighbors. We hope to see you there!

Soon after we moved to the neighborhood, we playfully nicknamed the 600 block of T Street (in front of the Howard Theater) as the “Block of Blight”.  Boarded-up and decaying buildings, garbage on the street, visible idleness, public drinking, bullet-proof glass at the store counters.  The 600 block of T Street is the scene of constant littering and loitering— both clearly on display even when the Google Street View car drove by this summer (see photo above).  It wasn’t until the latest listing of MPD Third District arrests that our suspicions were confirmed: the block is the site of drug dealing, too.

On October 1, 10, and 30, three different people were arrested for “Distribution of a Controlled Substance”, and those are only the cases the police actually uncovered.

The MPD has posted a sign on the light post reading

WARNING
Persons coming into this area to buy drugs are
subject to arrest & seizure of their vehicles.

We certainly hope that this is the police department’s policy citywide regardless of whether or not there’s a sign posted.  It’s the law.

According to the MPD’s crime map, within 500 feet of that block within the past 365 days, there have been no homicides.  However, there have been two burglaries, one case of sex abuse, twelve unarmed robberies, nine armed robberies, six assaults, thirteen thefts, 46 thefts from cars, and eleven cars stolen.

The Howard Theater’s rebirth and reconstruction will at least repair the physical infrastructure (lumpy sidewalks, cracked curbstones, crumbling façades), but we also hope it fixes the social ills with it.

Howard University is seeking neighborhood input for its campus master plan.  The university is planning to work with private partners to develop the parcels it owns between Georgia Avenue and Ninth Street.  Currently, the plan is for a town center development with housing and shops, including a grocery store.

Nonetheless, there are Howard-owned properties in LeDroit Park and in other neighborhood and the university would like community input.

Take the survey and give the administration your two cents.

In our survey response, we wrote that encouraging the presence of a grocery store would benefit residents and students alike.

The National Park Service just launched this impressive new site for the Lincoln Memorial.

XI. Thou Shalt Not Choose Plastic.

Washington city-watcher (and occasion grumbler) Gary Imhoff publishes a twice-weekly e-newsletter on politics and life in the District. In Wednesday’s issue, Imhoff criticizes councilmembers who, though rightly keeping out of citizens’ bedrooms by planning to legalize same-sex marriage next month, “are now working their way through every other room in our houses, looking for ways in which they can regulate whatever we do.”

Nationally, some leaders have declared sugar a sin and want to tax it.  Others want to ban incandescent bulbs in favor of compact fluorescent lights (which, by the way, happen to contain mercury).

Locally, the city council has condemned (via the tax code) plastic grocery bags as the latest fashionable sin du jour, assuming that we shoppers will discard the bags into the sewers.

As if that weren’t enough, Imhoff accuses Councilmember Mary Cheh (D – Ward 3) of introducing legislation, the so-called Wildlife Protection Act of 2009 (Bill 18-498), to solve a problem that, as Imhoff asserts, doesn’t exist:

[The bill] requires household exterminators, or “wildlife control operators,” to be licensed in the District; to follow the regulations in the bill; to prove that each animal they trap and relocate or, as a last resort, kill, is causing actual damage or danger; and to have a written plan for relocation of trapped animals approved by the District government for each job they do.

But certainly regulation is worthwhile if it saves animals from suffering, right? Well, a good philosopher will always question the very premise. Imhoff writes:

[T]here is no evidence that exterminators are currently engaged in any unnecessary animal cruelty. The bill was written at the behest of, and with the cooperation of, the Washington Humane Society (WHS), but all that the WHS can provide in support of it is speculation about possible harms, and no evidence of real harms. [We] spoke with two representatives of the WHS today. They both said that a[n] exterminator could set a foothold trap, or a bear trap, carelessly and harm a child or a household pet.

All right, [we] asked, how many children in the District have been wounded by a bear trap in the last five years?

They didn’t know of any.

How many pets have been wounded by a foothold trap?

They didn’t know of any; they didn’t keep records of any instances.

But a careless exterminator could leave an animal in a trap for days, to die painfully. How many instances of that happening could the WHS document?

Well, none, but it could happen.

What about the provision that forbids moving, trapping, or killing bats nesting in a house for six months of every year? The WHS didn’t know anything about that, but I wonder exactly what the Health Department or the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs or the Department of Housing thinks about the advisability and desirability of humans sharing their houses with bats.

From what we read, Ms. Cheh’s bill may cause more trouble than it solves. If a property owner discovers bats in the attic, “A wildlife control operator shall remove bats only by nonlethal exclusion, prior to hibernation, except when health department requires lethal removal.”

So if they’re hibernating, you’ll have to wait until they leave hibernation or until the Health Department sends a threatening notice.

While animal cruelty is certainly abhorrent, Ms. Cheh’s bill addresses a problem that we are not convinced exists in the first place: that pest exterminators are needlessly torturing pests or that wayward children are wandering into bear traps.

Exterminators are already accountable by civil law and the fear of liability suits. Exterminators are also likely to want to avoid the displeasure of customers who want swift catching and removal of pests as opposed to slow and painful removal.

We concede that cases will slip by, but in this instance Ms. Cheh exhibits a worrying belief that it is the role of the city council to legislate every potential or actual wrinkle out of modern life.

Fretting over bats is a luxury we’re sure that Ward 3 can afford, but we would rather see the council expend its legislative energy reducing the cruel and inhumane destruction of human life that occurs far too frequently in the rest of the city.

The new park for LeDroit Park is one of the halted park construction contracts, but demolition work is still going on.  Fox 5 aired a story this evening on our not-quite-stalled park project.

Resident Hugh Boyle and his grandsons are shown observing the construction work while Maria Fyodorova, heavily involved in the planning of the dog park, explains that residents have been caught in the crossfire in the feud between the mayor and the Council.

Even the This is How We Live mural at Third and Elm Streets gets a cameo!

We were walking through Columbia Heights late Saturday night and noticed numerous police cars rushing south toward Columbia Road. Later that evening we learned the terrible news that a nine-year-old boy was murdered in his apartment by one bullet shot through his front door. Though the assailant may not have been aiming for the boy specifically, shooting anywhere in an apartment building is bound to hurt somebody and we have serious trouble understanding why someone would exhibit such reckless disregard for human life.

This murder occurred despite this increased police presence this weekend as part of the MPD’s All Hands on Deck program. The police, though, cannot be in every hallway in every apartment building.

Closer to home, we became aware of a violent attack that occurred at Second and S Streets in Bloomingdale last week. In an email to the police and several community leaders, Former ANC Commissioner Margot Hoerrner (ANC1B11) described what happened to her friend Brad, who was house-sitting for her:

On Wednesday, at 5pm, Brad was attacked by 6-7 young men, at the corner of 2nd and S Street, who wanted absolutely nothing other than to beat the utter crap out of him. Brad, aside from being a military guy, is also an urban-savvy guy, who said that his instincts never warned him that something was about to happen. On his way to the Big Bear Cafe, half the group rushed him from the front, whereas the other half rushed him from the back. They knocked him down, and then, as a group, stomped on him, jumped on him, and beat him senseless, leaving him with black eyes, thoroughly bloodied and with several cracked ribs.

What’s shocking is that there are too many Washingtonians who think nothing of brutally beating and stomping innocent people.

Ms. Hoerrner added something I’ve often felt: that Washington is more dangerous than many conflict zones and poverty-stricken countries around the world:

As an aside, my work takes me to the poorest, conflict-riddled places in the world. I have spent the last two weeks in Kenya and Tanzania, which are at the precipice of humanitarian and civil disaster because of a four-year drought. A friend of mine has commented on my lack of fear in traveling to these places by myself, and asked me if I’ve ever felt fear traveling anywhere – and I said yes… I have felt more threatened and fearful living in Washington DC than I have anywhere else in the world. I am often stunned at the level of violence and crime that we have come to accept as a given for simply living in this city.

We bring up these problems because we feel that we as a city have become too used to this violence, which is actually abnormal. Washington’s homicide rate for last year was around 32 murders per 100,000 residents, still far off from the 1991 peak of 80.6, but far above the national average (5.8) and more than five times the rate of New York City (6.2).

Making Washington a world-class city requires addressing some of the sicker aspects of our civic culture, particularly our extraordinary rates of violence and our tolerance of violence.  We should stand as examples of what a city can be: the elegant, prosperous, and peaceful pinnacle of human civilization and not a place bleeding from occasional bouts of unrelenting brutality.

One of our favorite local restaurants is the feature of a story in today’s Post.  Eatonville, at 14th & V Streets, is inspired by the life and literary works of Zora Neale Hurston, who grew up in Eatonville, Florida, and was one of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance.  Hurston spent a few years in Washington attending Howard University, where in 1924 she co-founded The Hilltop, Howard’s student newspaper.

Her most famous work is her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, which frequently makes the lists of best twentieth-century American novels.  In addition to writing fictional works, she was also a folklorist, collecting tales from rural black communities in the South and in the Caribbean, publishing them in Mules and Men and other titles and incorporating the tales into her novels.

Early this summer we read a fascinating essay on Hurston, who lived a highly unconventional life: she lied about her age (she was 26 going on 17) to get into Morgan State to get her high school diploma.  She eventually transferred to Howard and then to Barnard College for her undergraduate degree.

She deplored racism and Jim Crow but also criticized the New Deal and the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

She died in poverty in 1960, leaving a trail of novels, plays, folktales, academic research, and journalistic work; like many great cultural icons, her fame and acclaim increased long after her death.

* * *

The restaurant Eatonville is an homage to Hurston’s life and work.  The food is decent and reasonably priced (especially for Washington) and the commissioned murals warrant a viewing even if you’re not hungry.