This part of town is obviously in transition, with huge cranes looming along M Street SE, constructing buildings that will be home to thousands of government jobs. More government offices are rising in Southwest, leaving South Capitol Street as a kind of hole in the donut, in the metaphor of planner Patricia Gallagher.
But that hole contains some enduring institutions. On N Street one can find a brick building with windows so heavily fortified by security grates that it's impossible to see inside. This is Patent Reproduction Co., founded 1927, and on this site since 1960. It's a business only Washington could inspire, a boutique operation that drafts and reproduces patent drawings. Owner Sarah Callahan says she likes this location because "we don't have to go into town." To her, "town" is miles away, toward K Street.
Robert Siegel will be one of the entrepreneurs affected by the creation of a new baseball stadium in D.C.
(Lucian Perkins -- The Washington Post)
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Half a block away, the Washington Sculpture Center offers classes in blacksmithing, bronze casting, stained glass, stone carving and so on. The high-ceilinged rooms hold heavy equipment for sawing, baking, chiseling, grinding. This is where a sculptor named Renaldo Lopez made four concrete lions for the Taft Memorial Bridge. He restores historic buildings. He says, "They want beautiful buildings? We can make it!"
Mary Frances Michaels, wearing a vinyl apron and goggles, paused from her project cutting glass and said that when she found this place she told herself, "I'm home." She's from Berkeley, Calif., and ached to find something in the capital that wasn't so polished.
"I like it that it is kind of trashed, that it's offbeat, that it's not so perfect."
Not so planned.
Another block or so away, Admiral Limousine Service does a brisk business, dispatching its gleaming vehicles to the tony parts of town. Bob Blair, a driver, asks the question of the hour: "Where is everybody going to go?"
Chaulis Jones, the limousine company foreman, has been watching the area change for decades. He spent 28 years in this part of town as a cop, and knew it when it was a crime zone with a crack epidemic. "Every other block you had a corner boy selling sidewalk commodities," he says. You wouldn't want to walk around like you were lost, he said -- robbers figured they were just doing their jobs. The city closed some of the worst housing projects and the dealers had nowhere to hide.
There are a lot of eyes on the street these days, including the cabbies who use this part of town as a base of operations.
"What is Mr. Tony Williams going to do about these small businesses? Kick them out?" asks Adil Mukhtar, sitting in the office of Pak Auto Service, a garage catering to taxicabs.
When the stadium comes, gone will be a number of venerable low-budget eateries, including one simply named Carry Out, opening before dawn to feed the blue-collar workers. Fatback and egg is $2.55. Fish cake and egg is the same.
"I been working here 15 years; the business been open 35 years," said Marie Pacheco, the manager, a Salvadoran who commutes to work from Hyattsville, arriving no later than 5 a.m. The stadium will throw her life into turmoil.
"I don't know where to go," she says. "I'm scared, that's right."
Bob Siegel took a brief walk through his domain -- east on O Street, south on Half, west on P, north on South Capitol. He veered from vigorous and almost rhapsodic descriptions of his home ground to denunciations of the city for neglecting the neighborhood.
