Black D.C. Is Gone? The Truth Is Always More Complicated

“Startled” should not be interpreted as alarmed. A bit surprised, yes. Between gentrification, the internet and Covid, I had assumed that the street sex trade was over pretty much everywhere. More specifically, I assumed it was over in Logan Circle, where open prostitution was once — not as long ago as it seems — one of the neighborhood’s most thriving and visible businesses.

But it was a reminder that the standard narrative of rapid urban change, of a Whole Foods or Starbucks flipping the nature/culture/color of a neighborhood almost overnight, is a notion that is always more complicated, more nuanced than it appears. That is especially true for Logan Circle, less than a mile from the White House, which, for all the dramatic visual transformation on its core 14th Street, is still a place very much still in transition — as is the rest of D.C.

The idea that “Washington has changed” is now almost as central to the city’s identity as its monuments — the shift of central D.C. from seedy to boutiquey, from sex workers to juice bars, empty lots to beer gardens. Perhaps the clearest way to measure this change is demographically. The city has changed from a majority Black city to a much whiter one, with all of the cultural and economic baggage that attends it.

At least that is the conventional narrative. My own experience suggests that it is much more nuanced — the seeds of this new city were there decades ago, and the signature of the “lost” Black capital are still very much with us. Nowhere is that clearer than Logan Circle, once the red light district, now a neighborhood of renovated mansions and wine bars. Its shift, like that of many places, has deeper roots than what rises above.

That the city has changed is undeniable. How, why and what it all means are the source of much argument and debate — the prosecution of Marion Barry coupled with his self-defeating tendencies, congressional interference, a control board that threatened self-rule, a string of new mayors with strong ties to developers. The list goes on. A writer friend recently decried in a Facebook post that “The city I love has become a dystopian hellhole.” To some, perhaps, certainly not to others. I will admit it does feel different, in ways that are more in the gut than in detail. Yet there are feelings and there are facts, and the facts don’t feel that great either.

Since 1980, D.C.’s Black population has slid from 70 percent to just 41 percent today. The year 2015 was the pivotal point: D.C. no longer had a Black majority — a distinction that had been critical to its image, to its status as a mecca for the Black middle class and, some would say, to its soul.

In the early 1980s, I was launched, like a couple of hundred other Howard students, unceremoniously into the middle of — well, we didn’t know what — when Howard University purchased two apartment buildings, Sutton Plaza and Eaton Towers as off-campus dormitories. Sutton sat amid boarded buildings, potholed streets and next to a liquor store where hustlers of all kinds hung outside and dipped in to bet on the illegal “numbers.” Eaton looked down on lines of cars looking at soliciting sex workers who stood just outside its doors. Parent drop-offs were, as one might imagine, tense.

Yet, the dorms were an oasis in the center of movement and chaos, with rooftop pools and empty garages that hosted Friday night dance parties where kids from New York and Philly introduced us to the first strains of hip-hop. It was possible, if one wanted to, to generally ignore much of it all and just be a shuttle bus away from another existence. Or you could be a bit more adventurous.

My first real foray into the streets came a week after arriving, when an upperclassman grabbed me for an unrequested tour of the sketchiest sections of my new neighborhood. The walk started with a beer at a strip club (the drinking age was 18 then), directly across from the dorm’s front door, down 13th Street to extra-sketchy Greyhound and Trailways bus stations (now luxury office buildings) and up 14th Street, D.C.’s red light district, dotted with X-rated movie theaters, peep shows and adult toy shops and a late snack at Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips on 14th and K.

It was an eye-opening introduction that ended with a gentle warning: “You know all those things we just did? Don’t do any of that again and you’ll be just fine.”

I listened, mostly.

As a budding writer I could not resist the urge to dig deeper. There was a cinematic quality to it all: the lights, the din, the characters. So many stories being played out just below our windows — stories about choices, options and the lack of them; of power, economics, consequences and opportunities. Whether what you saw was temptation or motivation was all about perspective.

There was danger, as well, not just perceived, and the scars of the ’68 riots more than a decade earlier remained. But it was also “Chocolate City,” and all the promise that concept brought. The city mirrored what Howard University’s campus offered — a double whammy — an oasis where Black people occupied the full spectrum of lows and highs: the guy throwing trash on the street, the guy working the trash truck, the family that owned the sanitation company and the mayor making sure they got the contract. Choices.

Even then there was the innate sense that Logan Circle was ripe for change.

The evidence of a glorious history was still present and connected us to the past, in the form of the Mary McLeod Bethune House on one end, or the former home of Madame Lillian Evanti (one of America’s first Black opera singers) on the other, or the history we learned at Howard about the Whitelaw Hotel and the great professors who used to call the area home. And though many of the houses were boarded up and in disrepair, they stood too proud to stay that way for long. It was only a matter of time.

Before gentrification became a buzzword, students buzzed that “speculation” was going to change the reality of what the area had become. It was all too crazy, too hectic to be sustainable, and too full of potential. Sooner than later, we predicted, the homes we all coveted would be refurbished, Black homeowners would sell out and the neighbors/neighborhood would become whiter. That was the assumption. Ronald Reagan was in office, and as we saw it, it was all a part of “The Plan,” the long-whispered theory within the Black community that the lack of investment was part of purposeful and intentional slow takeover by the “powers that be” to take the city back.

If that was inevitable, we all dreamed of fighting it off by owning a piece of it, pooling funds. Cooperative economics to fight the man. Dreams without dollars.

After a time, I dug in by making extra cash delivering liquor for that same store that gave people pause. No mobile ordering or logos on a car, just old-school delivery — a hand truck, cases of spirits and a money bag with cash wheeled through whatever the street was bringing each night. Dumbest job ever, in retrospect. But it led me into places I would never have seen otherwise, through lobbies, down hallways and into the homes and apartments of people who turned out to be much more diverse (whiter, wealthier in some places, poorer in others, more established, more LGBTQ)—something wholly different than what the surface revealed.

It seemed an almost hidden and blended community of people who had stuck it out during and after the riots, artists in alley studios and makeshift work/home spaces, transients and urban pioneers who had done beautiful work inside but seemed to be waiting for other shoes to drop before restoring exteriors. And since delivering big boxes often meant carrying them inside, it often meant conversation. Some seemed to want that part more than they wanted the alcohol.

Deliveries at older buildings, like Claridge Towers, an elderly home, always took longer. There was advice to listen to — mostly unsolicited, sometimes requested — bottles to twist open and loose change to wait for. Everywhere there were doses of information, political and cultural discussions, bits of history, valuable lessons or just a warm greeting. In fairness, much of the same came from the people who lined the streets as well.

There were also people with new ideas who were driving the energy of the Circle, like Ricky Clay, a D.C. native who now lives in Los Angeles, whose Saturday night parties at the “Studio,” a second-floor loft space at 14th and Church, were centers of fashion, music and young, Black creativity. And Doll Gordon, who along with her husband Richard led the Circle’s renaissance as one of the first to renovate one of the huge brownstones on Rhode Island Avenue, their efforts now immortalized on a heritage trail sign.

Later, when I joined a punk band and became part of D.C.’s music scene, any available space around the neighborhood became a rehearsal studio — studio apartments, abandoned mansions with bootleg electricity, Gil Scott-Heron’s living room (that’s a whole other story) and, most important, the space above what is now Stoney’s on P St., where Maury “Kazz” Montgomery lived and ran the Kazz Klub, an after-hours spot where after a night of performing at d.c. space, Cagney’s or the 9:30 Club, local bands would come to drink, eat and collaborate until the sun came up.

They, and the artists whose studios were in carriage houses and makeshift spaces in the alleys along 15th Street, above stores and in basements, defined the culture of Logan Circle and made it more than what it looked like — vibrant, quirky, weird in all the best ways. They, of course, were driven out by the higher rents and development that grew out of D.C.’s growing reputation as recession-proof and a magnet for a new generation of young people attracted to politics by the Clinton administration.

What we buzzed about as students all happened, eventually. Faster than we imagined in some ways, much slower in other ways. By the time my entering class graduated, what remained of the red-light district was already mostly gone. Crackdowns and street patrols pushed prostitution down a few blocks to the business district. The D.C. Lottery had already killed the illegal numbers trade, offering far worse odds. People who had held on to property cashed in. But if it was “The Plan,” it was the most inefficient plan ever, with fits and starts and speed bumps, progress, failure and delays.

More realistically, it was the sum of the quiet work of the people who had taken the liquor deliveries, who had hunkered down and made change happen nail by nail, house by house, block by block.

There is rarely a single catalyst in gentrification, no single defining moment. It’s more like watching dominoes slowly tumble. One homeowner takes a risk, another follows. One business fails, another replaces it. Howard University closed and sold Sutton Plaza, my former dorm, in 1996 for $2.5 million, about the price now of a Logan Circle home with a studio basement thrown in. A one-bedroom apartment there now rents per month for about the amount we paid for a year. More, in fact. More importantly, the sale effectively shut down the yearly influx of hundreds of young Black students who used to feed into neighborhood apartment buildings and set up roots.

A few years later, Metropolitan Baptist, a cultural mainstay, moved its vibrant and community-minded congregation to the Maryland suburbs. A funeral home razed to build apartments, patches of emptiness became productive, new neighbors preferred gelato to fried trout and nail salons to model trains.

I stuck around for another decade or so, moving just a block north of the dorm for several years, then just a block east for a few more. And after stints in other cities (always in neighborhoods that looked and felt very much like Logan Circle), I settled just a short walk away — again. I like a little movement, a little chaos, if only to block it out.

Walking through the neighborhood now, I’m less surprised by how it has changed visually than by how much it has not, at least when you step off of 14th Street. It is prettied up a bit, for sure, but the bones remain. Most of the changes have been respectful. Most homes brought to some modern version of their original beauty, not too many done over in the dreaded “gentrifier gray” that makes my neighbors roll their eyes in disgust.

Some things throw me off. I’ll never get used to a former homeless shelter, Central Union Mission, becoming a mission-themed luxury loft rental. That’s just me. Some of the businesses that I loved the most are still there, like Crown Pawnbrokers, which held many of my instruments and saved me from hunger or eviction once or twice, and Yum’s — where I first met mumbo sauce. Gone are places like Republic Gardens, Soul Brothers Pizza, Utopia and Mocha Hut, Black-owned businesses that fueled U Street’s first renaissance. They are too often left out of the story of the area’s rebirth.

I do miss places that were strange and quirky because the people who owned and occupied them were equally strange, not as a result of a marketing plan. Yet some relatively recent places such as Cafe Saint-Ex, Miss Pixie’s and Som Records have developed their own weirdness and authenticity. Even the pricey Le Diplomate — where the president and vice president were spotted dining last year — has found a way to feel like it was always there.

If there’s a culture driving today’s Logan Circle, I can’t say I “feel it,” at least not in the way I once did. In fairness, most of what I see as lost or missing has to do with yesterday, not today. I can admit that and be at peace with it. I want people to know the past, not live in it.

Still it remains a place, I think, that is more than what you can see on the surface. Something more than the bars and the $15 cocktails and “secret” speakeasies. It is demonstrably less Black, less brown, less poor, for certain, but that’s not the full story. It arguably still has the kind of compelling, if different, mix of people that make a vibrant neighborhood necessary, those who take root and those who just pass and flow through. For all I know they have found, for their time, something worthy of remembrance. I hope they are also finding opportunities to dig deeper, take in wisdom and gather lessons in ways that are meaningful for today. They’ll see that the change they bought into still has a few cracks in it — pockets of poverty, people who lost the fight, dreams unrealized, work to be done.

Like all places, Logan Circle is an evolving story, not a static one. More complicated, more nuanced. Still being written.

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