Many Neighborhoods Find a Voice Online

Blogs, Listservs Part Of Community Fabric

Just like that, two hanging ferns vanished from the front porch, the owner reported. A neighbor told of potted red geraniums disappearing from the entrance to a nearby house. A third wrote that someone had walked off with their impatiens that very morning.

Was a serial plant thief stalking Mount Pleasant?

The chatter took place not on a street corner or at the local supermarket but on the Internet, on a kind of virtual bulletin board that has become a ubiquitous part of neighborhood life across Washington.

Community Web sites and listservs, clearing houses of the arcane, are burbling just below the city's surface. There are alerts about yard sales, community meetings and lost pets. There are also impassioned discussions about local issues and services, such as recycling pickup (or its lack) in Adams Morgan, and the screech that the D1 bus makes in Glover Park when drivers put on the brakes.

In Columbia Heights, the arrest of the graffiti artist known as Borf inspired no shortage of commentary, including a recommendation of "severe punishment for all who take it upon themselves to take over and destroy public property."

To which someone replied: "All of you people on this list seem quite paranoid."

Then there are those listings that defy easy categorization.

A Cleveland Park woman requested referrals for a "cat therapist" after her feline took to regularly urinating on her couch when a certain man came to visit.

"And if you know a handsome, forty-something guy, I'll take one of those, too," she wrote.

Joseph Malherek, a Public Citizen policy analyst, posted a message last month after hearing gunshots near his Columbia Heights apartment. After more gunfire five days later, he went on the Web site and declared, "I think it's time to leave this place."

In a telephone interview, Malherek said that he regularly checks out the Columbia Heights postings to get a "sense of what's going on in the environment that surrounds me."

"You experience things, and you don't have a way to communicate with the people you see every day," he said. "It's a forum for that. It's nice to know that the things you experience -- hearing those gunshots, storms, racial conflicts in the neighborhood -- it's not just affecting you, it's a community thing. It provides a sense of community."