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U-Turn on H Street
Elisa Bernard, Anthony Leonard and Robert Mana-Thompson hang out at the Pug on H Street NE, where gentrification has brightened the area, and spotlighted a divide.
(By Melina Mara -- The Washington Post)
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So how, the bartender is asked, are people getting along on H Street? What is the real story? Rawls says most nights, things are cool. But she hesitates. Then she tells a story. She was serving some white patrons. They began writing on the table and she asked them to stop. They ignored her. She repeated: "Please, guys, quit writing on the table. Nobody wants to rub their elbows in chalk."
The customers laughed. They picked up the chalk again.
Exasperated, the bartender yelled: "Come on, ya'll grown people!"
A white woman at the table mocked: " 'Ya'll grown people!' What kind of language is that?"
Bartender: "What?!"
The woman: "You ought to be glad I bought a $500,000 house in your black ghetto neighborhood. "
Bartender: "I can't believe she just said . . . that. Hold me back."
And somebody did. And she didn't do anything she regrets. The unruly people left, called the police claiming they were victims of racism, and the next day they posted a bad review on a Web site.
Several months later, the bartender's anger still simmers. Can't explain what happened that night, why the chalk writer's words stay with her. Why the gentrifier had a need to assert herself, spew her thoughts of superiority and let the bartender know that it is she and others like her who are changing the neighborhood, and for that, the bartender should be grateful. "You ought to be glad I bought a $500,000 house in your black ghetto neighborhood."
The bartender, whose stepfather is white, a "sweet" man, refuses to break the whole thing down into a race issue. "What bothers me is it seems like the average person can't afford to live in D.C. anymore," she says. "I have two jobs. I'm not going to say it's a black-white thing because it is not that simple. But there is a pattern of young professionals moving into neighborhoods changing things."
The Squeeze
Scott Magnuson, 28, a white man who manages the bar, only heard about the chalk incident, but he believes he's seen enough to understand the tensions around race and class on H Street.
Gentrification is such a "strong word," says Magnuson, who lives on Linden Place. He is at ease here, he says. He gets his hair cut at the Perfect Cut. He says the men from the shop go into the Argonaut. "We laugh about the same things, football and video games.
