Georgia Ave. Awakening

At African Hairbraiding, Arlette Canel danced to a song by Guinean artist Sekouba Bambino blaring from a portable stereo. Originally from Ivory Coast, she and Fatu Dembaga, a native of Mali, have found a steady business in braiding hair.

The Avenue is not one homogenous street. It twists and turns out of the upper- and middle-class neighborhoods of Takoma Park and Shepherd Park, into the middle- and working-class community of Petworth, into the dicey alleys and walkways of the Park Morton housing complex. It rests at the red-brick sidewalks near Howard University.

Georgia's only true constant is the screech of the crowded 70 bus.

"Race doesn't matter here. Socioeconomic status doesn't matter here," said Robb LaKritz, who owns the Temperance Hall bar, which opened early last year just south of the Georgia Avenue-Petworth Station.

His bar, which replaced an abandoned house that had become a heroin den, was seen as one of the first signs of gentrification. But Temperance Hall is gradually becoming part of the neighborhood. It's the place that sells fancy mini-sloppy Joes and shiraz.

Georgia is not the suburban-inspired Connecticut Avenue, it's not the new faux-Manhattan U Street, LaKritz said.

"It's so much more raw. This is much more real," he said.

Georgia can be dangerous. Robberies, sometimes at gunpoint, are listed in weekly crime reports. District police have identified three areas of Georgia as "hot spots," meaning the neighborhoods are known for open-air drug sales and other crime. A combined 139 robberies, assaults and other violent crimes made Georgia as dicey as hot spots in Southeast last year.

A better Georgia Avenue would be without guns but would keep its grit, LaKritz said. It would be clean but not sanitized.

Chris Donatelli and Larry Clark, developers on the Park Place project, stood one day last year on the roof of a high-rise and looked out at the Georgia vista and talked about what could be.

"I just love this view," Clark said as he looked into the distance at the Washington Monument to the south, a spire at Catholic University to the east and the clouded high-rise buildings of Rosslyn to the west.

The city originally planned to put the Department of Motor Vehicles on the site, but residents, with the help of Fenty, who had just become Ward 4 council member, intervened. They picked Donatelli to develop it.

"My mother grew up here," Donatelli said. "She lived on Varnum Street. She remembers when there were shops and then it went into sort of a decline," he said as a homeless man approached him for money on the sidewalk in front of the Metro.

The developer is reserving 20 percent of the condominiums for low-income residents, and some of the units will be limited to residents earning 30 percent of the median income or less.

"Do you have a buck to give this guy?" Donatelli asked Clark, reaching into his wallet and giving the man a dollar.

In a planning department sketch of Park Place and its future surroundings, there are families, couples, a blind man, people eating at a sidewalk cafe and others crossing a fancy brick walkway.

No one looks homeless.