A Bittersweet Renaissance

Vanishing Culture

On a cool morning, Lofton stepped outside and strolled along his street, pointing out familiar sites. The bubble-gum pink house across the way, home since 1960 to a teacher, a black woman with whom he gossips about who's moving in and who's leaving. The storefront checkers club in the next block, where men have long congregated behind scratched and weathered glass for late-night games. Over on Seventh Street is Gregg's Barbershop, where the owner has been clipping since 1959.

Lofton stopped going to Gregg's years ago -- he shaves his head now -- but he finds comfort in the shop because so much else is gone: the peddler who sold pints on Sundays when the liquor stores were closed; the Wonder Bread factory, with its sweet aroma; the old Key's restaurant, where the cooks served up grits for breakfast and steaks for dinner; the Howard Theater, where he saw James Brown in the 1960s.

Turning onto U Street, Lofton said he views the neighborhood's transformation with a mixture of excitement and sadness. "All of this used to be black," he said, his hand extending toward a horizon that includes the Starbucks where he drinks drip coffee three mornings a week, designer boutiques, sleek condominiums, Ethiopian restaurants and Ben's Chili Bowl, a neighborhood institution that has evolved into a tourist attraction evoking a vanishing culture.

Sliding into a booth at Ben's, Lofton recounted that after leaving Greyhound in 1990, he taught fourth grade at Janney Elementary in Northwest until he retired. He has no problems with whites, he said -- Janney was mostly white -- and he appreciates Shaw's newfound diversity. He's just sorry blacks are leaving.

"I have to hold up the banner," he said. If others sell, what would he see if he drove through Shaw in five or 10 years? Would only whites come out of those front doors? As long as he's around, he said, people will say, " 'Oh, there are still black people here.' "

Not everyone shares his concern. Confident that they can sell for far more than they paid, they say there is nothing to discuss.

A former neighbor, Neval Featherstone, is one. He was a D.C. firefighter in 1979 when he paid almost $60,000 for his rowhouse in the 900 block of S Street. By 2002, Featherstone had retired, and that year he sold his house for more than seven times what he paid, then spent less than half of it on a condominium in a gated community in Orlando.

His house sold again for $1 million last year. Featherstone has no regrets, because "you could stay until you're 80 and get $2 million, but then you take it to the grave." As a third-generation Washingtonian, he said, he knows neighborhoods change. Georgetown once had a large black population. Whites lived in Anacostia.

"What goes around, comes around," he said.

'Cash Rules'

Norman Wood, a retired accountant for the Veterans Administration who has spent virtually his entire 81 years on Eighth Street between S and T, chuckled as he recalled the gripes from neighbors about whites moving to Shaw.

"They were here," he likes to tell them.

Until the Civil War, the area was largely undeveloped; Washington was mostly concentrated downtown. During the war, streetcars began traveling on Seventh and 14th streets, and by 1900, black and white professionals, laborers and government workers had settled north of Rhode Island Avenue. Two decades later, the area was overwhelmingly black, mainly because whites left for new neighborhoods that didn't allow African Americans.