One Urban Panorama Fades, Another Rises

Friday afternoon at Paradise is like the old days. The bell on the door jingles madly and customers are lined up at the check-cashing window. A woman with "Daddy's Girl" tattooed across the back of her neck wants two Red Bulls and a pack of Capris. At the far end of the counter, a woman in a pressed nurse's uniform purchases two money orders and two postage stamps.

Alfredo from the used car lot across 14th comes in wearing his mirrored sunglasses, leaning down toward the opening in the bulletproof glass, flashing three fingers and whispering in his Spanish accent, "I got a Honda Accord, man, just for you."

Inside Paradise, the linoleum floor is peeling up in hunks. Kids throw their bikes in the doorway when they come in to buy cold drinks after school. Trembling hands peel off a few bills to pay for a fifth of gin.

This is David Lee's turf. For eight years, he has been crammed behind the bulletproof glass with Prince Albert's Cherry Vanilla, Slim Jims, aspirin, phone cards, Ensure, Snickers bars, Philly Blunts, batteries, peach snuff and studded condoms. Lee was born in Korea but grew up in his parents' corner store in a low-income black neighborhood in Chicago, which explains his Asian homeboy dialect. He wears his hat cocked and his Nikes beaming white. He lives in an apartment in Annandale with his wife and a new baby, but Paradise is home. Lee describes the early years as "a pay-per-view special." Back then, he would leave the window to fight when someone challenged him. Now he is 41 with a bum leg, and the world beyond the bulletproof glass has become unrecognizable. Not long ago, he observed several dogs being led around by one person. Someone explained the concept of dog walkers to him. "Like a human babysitter," he says, bewildered. "That's when I know this neighborhood is really going down the hill."

Paradise received its formal death sentence last year when a new landlord bought the rundown building for $900,000, raising the monthly rent from $2,460 to $8,000, an impossible increase for Byung In Min, the owner of Paradise. His 10-year lease expires this fall.

The beginning of the end really started two years ago when the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission and others who live nearby -- sick of public urination, drunks sleeping in the grass and empty half-pint bottles glittering in the gutters -- presented Paradise with a 22-point voluntary agreement. Lee couldn't believe the clout of the neighborhood group. Basically, Paradise had to give up its ghetto ways or lose its liquor license.

The three-page agreement put it this way: "Licensee agrees to attempt to better serve the needs of the neighborhood residents by selling upgraded, quality products including but not limited to corked wines, juice mixers and other food products, etc."

The list of demands called for Paradise to stop selling single beers, single cigarettes, rolling papers and to-go cups. No more cheap black shopping bags. One of the neighbors brought Lee a bag from a Dupont Circle wine store as an example.

Lee says the loss of single-beer sales -- the 40-ounce in particular -- severely cut into profits. Longtime customers accused Lee of turning his back on them. "They tell me, 'Oh, you trying to be with them high-class white people now,' " he says. To entice the upscale market, Lee started ordering imported beers he had never heard of, $12 bottles of wines with corks, and single-malt Scotches such as Dalwhinnie for $39.99. He brought in Tia Maria coffee liqueur gift sets.

But higher-end customers failed to materialize in large enough numbers. Residents such as Louis Patierno, a mortgage broker who lives a block away, patronize stores that have adapted to the new flavor of the neighborhood, such as the Whitelaw Market on 13th and T, which started stocking Ben & Jerry's ice cream and better wine and listened to Patierno's request for "more table crackers, less pork rinds, please."

Lee refuses to take down his bulletproof glass, another request the beautification people wanted. Still too dangerous. So for nine hours a day, he works the area of a gangplank with two helpers. At the far window, Sang Choi runs the lottery machine. Customers are convinced that the bespectacled Choi is gifted with numbers. "No, I want him to do it," a customer insists, pointing to Choi. And there is Nega Mengisto, an Eritrean employee whose halting grasp of English includes phrases such as "Hennessy Privilege."

Business is so slow in the afternoons that they sometime just stare at one another. The priestly Choi paces the gangplank with his hands folded behind him. Lee chain-smokes. Mengisto, wearing the Hypnotiq T-shirt a liquor salesman gave him, stocks the cooler with pints of Christian Brothers for the after-work rush.