Vanished/The Ruined Capitol doesn't live up to promise

Sloppy work on blogs deserves to be called out, especially when the author of the work seeks an air of authority on a subject. I'm taking this opportunity to ask Simon Jacobsen to do a better job with the Vanished/The Ruined Capitol blog.

Early last year, his blog called "The Ruined Capitol" (since re-branded "Vanished:Washington," though the URL never changed) was briefly profiled by the Washington City Paper. In this short interview, he gave an interesting quote:

I'm not putting any facts down...

In fact, Mr. Jacobsen puts a lot of facts down with every post. The most important of these facts is the address of the buildings. Unfortunately, he can be sloppy with those facts. Here's an example:

Image from Vanished

Mr. Jacobsen shows this picture and says it's at 6th and College Streets NE. That's a non-existent corner. There is a 6th and College Street NW, though. Here's a piece of the Baist Atlas for that part of the city in 1937 (two years after the date shown on the photo):

Image from Historic Map Works

You can see a line of rowhouses on the west side of 6th Street, north of College Street. I think it's a safe bet that these are the houses in the photo. What's there today? This:


View Larger Map

It's Lewis K. Downing Hall, home to Howard University Engineering.

Jacobsen, though, shows this image of what he believes is at that corner today:

Image from Vanished

That's actually the corner of Georgia Avenue and Howard Place NW. Jacobsen manages to start by saying the original location is in a different quadrant, then believes today's corner has somehow moved a couple blocks away. It's terribly sloppy. Google Maps is how he verifies the location of all present-day buildings. He'd be helped by actually going out to the corners where he believes these old buildings were located and doing some ground-truthing. It would probably make clear some of the more egregious errors and avoid the embarrassment of publishing mistakes.

Here's one more. The page was taken down after I pointed out an error, he refused to acknowledge it, and further information from me made it crystal clear that he had made a simple mistake. I saved the page as a rough PDF:



Jacobsen mistook the numeral "1" (for 1st Street) for the letter "I" (for Eye Street), and insisted Florida Avenue "flattens out" (whatever that means) at Eye Street NE. A simple walk around the neighborhood would show how incorrect that is, but he didn't take the time to go out and look at things in the real world.

It's a shame, it could be an authoritative site, but there are so many holes in it, it's hard to say how many of the before and after pictures he posts are just plain wrong.

A better example of the genre is the "Then and Now" series that Kent Boese did for Greater Greater Washington. Admittedly, this is more thorough than the "drive-by shooting" (a poor choice of words) that Jacobsen claims to offer at his site, but the basic idea is that a little more research goes a long way.

Do we really need to describe neighborhoods negatively?

Photo by Thomas Hawk on Flickr.

On Sunday, the Washington Post ran an article about Industry Gallery, a design gallery here in DC. The Post mentioned that the gallery is located in Trinidad, which was a positive point in my mind, because many write-ups of the galleries along Florida Avenue NE at the southern edge of the neighborhood fail to mention the neighborhood, and instead take the somewhat lazy route and say they're located "near H Street."

Interestingly, the author chose to include a descriptor for Trinidad, calling it "the hardscrabble neighborhood in Northeast Washington" (emphasis mine). "Hardscrabble" is defined by Google thusly:

–adjective 

1. Returning little in exchange for great effort
2. Characterized by poverty and hardship

Monday, Matt Ashburn (owner of the Capital City Diner and a Trinidad resident) found an advertisement for a new restaurant coming to the H Street NE corridor. An excerpt:

We want to give the idea of a nice restaurant, but we are in a dive neighborhood.

What do they mean by "dive neighborhood?"

Why call Trinidad a place characterized by poverty and hardship?

The history of H Street NE, and why it includes so much disinvestment is important and shouldn't be glossed over. The long shadow of segregation and the 1968 DC riots are extremely important reasons why H Street is what it is today. It's not just a "dive."

Trinidad, by my personal experience, wouldn't qualify as "hardscrabble." It's a traditionally middle-class neighborhood that is being viewed in a new light given its proximity to the activity centers of DC, and is struggling to come to terms with what that will mean as the population of the neighborhood rapidly changes because of economic and social pressures.

We've been deeply involved with the Ivy City and Trinidad Neighborhood Stabilization Initiative, a process that is diligently working through a process to attempt to increase homeownership access while maintaining affordability in the neighborhood. We believe there will be a significant return from this "great effort," and the experience has shown that there is much more than "poverty and hardship" in our neighborhood.

Glib descriptions of these neighborhood are lazy. It's disappointing to see them applied to Trinidad and the H Street corridor.

Don't forget local history

Nob Hill. Photo from Metro Weekly, May 22, 2003.

A couple weeks ago, New Columbia Heights and Prince of Petworth ran stories about the 6th anniversary of The Wonderland Ballroom, a bar located at the corner of 11th and Kenyon Streets NW.

Both blogs told a story about the period before Wonderland opened, with Andrew of New Columbia Heights saying, "When it opened, the Wonderland Ballroom was maybe the only place to get a beer in the area: I have friends who lived here before then, and the closest spot for them was Chief Ike's Mambo Room on Columbia Road in Adams Morgan, kind of a hike," and Dan of Prince of Petworth saying, "I hate to be that old guy who says “I remember when” but I remember when Wonderland was not open."

In both instances, they're leaving out some important history. A quick read of both Dan and Andrew's accounts could lead one to a false belief that no bars existed in that part of Columbia Heights before Wonderland opened. That is not the case.

This story raises the question of how in-depth a neighborhood blog should go to report a story. These outlets are not peer-reviewed journals, or even a traditional broadsheet newspaper with full editorial and research teams, so expecting a fully-researched story is unrealistic.

What makes blogs a unique form of writing, though, is the crowdsourcing aspect, where those reading can add to a story, and the author can update as more information is brought to the attention of all.

This is the model that Jaime and I believe should be standard for all neighborhood blogs, and is a reason why we were excited to join the TBD Community Network, because we saw the potential for many voices to come together and tell as thorough of a story as possible when reporting the news or items of interest.

A quick Internet search (or a glance at the Cultural Tourism DC sign on the street in front of the bar) finds that another bar existed at this location for nearly 50 years before The Wonderland Ballroom opened, and that bar was called Nob Hill.

Nob Hill was unique in that it was a black-owned gay bar, and until the time of it's closing in the spring of 2004, it could claim the title of the "oldest gay bar in Washington." Stories about Nob Hill exist in the archives of local publications like the City Paper and Metro Weekly. These stories note that the clientele was not exclusively gay, and the bar was open to all neighbors, though ownership did cater to black gay men.

The Metro Weekly article, published in May 2003, tells the story of a bar that is doing well financially, but a follow-up story less than a year later in February 2004 notes that the bar closed, apparently due to a fall-off in business. The story also seems to hint that ABRA helped to close the bar because of charges of code violations, which may or may not have come from neighbors moving into the neighborhood during rapid demographic change in the last decade.

Even though the bar is closed, it still holds an important place in the history of DC, especially in the gay community. The National Trust for Historic Preservation notes that a strong case exists for the site to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

(DC's official tourist website, washington.org, could stand to update things, though, as it states Nob Hill is still open.)

Only six months passed between the closing of DC's oldest gay bar and the opening of what would become its popular replacement. DC is full of rich history beyond the standard textbook stuff that happens on the Mall or Capitol Hill, and Nob Hill is one of those stories that we need to be reminded of, else we forget our past.

Additional links:

• http://www.rainbowhistory.org/drag.htm - talks about the history of drag shows in DC, including Nob Hill performers

• http://www.gaybars.com/states/washindc.htm - dated, but interesting to note where other gay bars have closed in recent years

Zombie streetcar rails rise from the dead

With all of the news about the new streetcar network under construction in DC, I thought it would be worth stopping and taking note of some of the relics of the old streetcar network that used to exist all over the city.

Check out this map from the National Capital Trolley Museum's website:

Clicking on the map will let you see the routes that were in use in 1958, just a couple years before the end of streetcar service in DC. Many of these rail lines still exist—they were simply paved over when the streetcars were taken out of service. You can, of course, still see some of the old tracks in places like Georgetown:

Photo by Kmf164

Dan Silverman of Prince of Petworth has a photo of some old streetcar rails being torn up as part of the Columbia Heights streetscape project, and I saw some old rails being disposed of during the reconstruction of 11th Street NW between Massachusetts and Rhode Island Avenues.

Some of the old rails are making themselves visible without construction projects. Check out these photos from the corner of Florida Avenue and 8th Street NE. This is right in front of the main gate for Gallaudet University.

The curved pavement cracks in the first and fourth photos show where tracks that are hidden just beneath the surface are making their presence known. Interestingly enough, this corner is part of the proposed second phase of DC's new streetcar network. Looks like these tracks aren't willing to be replaced without a fight!