One Urban Panorama Fades, Another Rises

With time running out on 14th and T, the owner of Paradise spends his days searching the District and Maryland for a new location, somewhere deeper into the urban neighborhood not yet touched by gentrification. "Me and black people, we kick it off better," Lee says. "'Thank you, baby,' this and that. Whites, I don't know how to approach these people or serve these people. I get this feeling I'm doing something wrong. Maybe it's my own self-conscious. I say, 'hello' or 'thank you.' There is no expression on their face."

One day a young man comes in and says, "We're making mojitos."

Lee is prepared for this moment. He holds up a small green plastic lime with a twist-off cap.

The man pauses. "I guess that'll work."

* * *

When Mike Benson opened Cafe Saint-Ex two years ago, he loved the idea of starting a bar around the corner from where Duke Ellington lived. Benson envisioned a place where musicians, artists, bartenders, punks, lawyers and bicycle messengers could hang out on a corner as they do on St. Marks Place in the New York's East Village. The dream came true, for about five minutes. Now the changes that Benson helped ignite on 14th and T are obliterating his original vision. He watches a parade of cabs pull up to his bar and drop off customers in spaghetti-strap dresses. Real estate listings use the bar as bait ("Within walking distance of Cafe Saint-Ex.") for the new lofts and condos going up all around.

Saint-Ex is being visited by a khaki aesthetic. "The bridge and tunnel crowd," as one waitress calls them. The people from Reston.

But guess what, says John Snellgrove, the general manager, who one Saturday night is checking ID's at the door. They aren't coming from Reston. "They all live here now."

To combat the influx of suburbia, Saint-Ex discontinued its trendy Pabst Blue Ribbon nights. Benson wants the deejays downstairs to keep playing his favorite Manchester Brit pop instead of the crowd-packing hip-hop. The art school graduate is 6-foot-3 and wears combat boots and a modified Mohawk. At 39, he looks like a Sex Pistol by way of Chapel Hill. His employees lean toward tattoos, motorcycle chains and arty black glasses, and on their breaks, they read books entitled "21st Century Modernism: The 'New' Poetics."

When Benson and his wife, a lawyer, moved to the neighborhood in 1997, he saw that culinary choices below U Street were limited to $7 Salvadoran or soul food dinners and African restaurants with gambling and khat-chewing on the down-low. No one had yet served up the bowl of garlicky mussels and frites that the newcomers were craving. Hip retailers had already opened south on 14th, Home Rule being the first in 1999. On the southeast corner of 14th and T was the red-brick glory of the former Sunny South Market from the 1940s. Benson became interested in the space in 2002 when it was occupied by an Ethiopian restaurant. He approached the owner about buying his lease. So perilous were the racial sensitivities about white interlopers taking property that Lawrence Guyot, a community activist, went to see the restaurant owner. "I wanted to make sure the black man was not forced out," Guyot recalls. "I got that in writing. He was not forced out."

Using his house as collateral, Benson borrowed $200,000 and strung together a group of investors, including a handful of bartenders, some pitching in as little as $5,000. They dug out the basement and worked around the clock, going seriously over budget renovating the building. Benson wanted his place to look like one of the old cavern bars along the Seine River in Paris and would name it after the French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery. On opening night, their assets drained, one investor ran across the street to Paradise Liquor to buy four bottles of Stoli and four bottles of Absolut, maxing out the last available dollars on his credit card. Opening night was a smash.

Now one of the developers for the Church of the Rapture loft project has approached Benson about opening a bar in the ground floor of the condo.

Benson shrugs. "I'd rather that be the case than another Starbucks."

One night at Saint-Ex, someone leaves a flier on a table that says "Save Our Black Neighborhoods." The flier calls Ward 1 council member Jim Graham "Gramzilla, the black business killa" and says Graham is trying to "destroy our beloved Black neighborhoods and families."

The next afternoon, the flier sits on the bar in front of bartender Demetrios Tsiptsis. "Cities cannot be ghettos anymore," Tsiptsis says. "It's not feasible. I always tell people, 10 years ago this was a ghetto. Years before that, it was a thriving black community. Years before that it was occupied by whites, and before that, Indians."

"Gimme two Stella Artois," a guy says, pulling out a platinum United Airlines credit card. Liz Phair's "Whip-Smart" is playing on the iPod mix. A large chalkboard displays the handwritten names of epicurean beers: Tilburg Dutch Brown, Coniston Bluebird Bitter.

The flier just sits there, unnoticed among the clink of glasses inside Saint-Ex.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.