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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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"I don't personally see color. My dad was in the Navy, so we moved around."
But he has heard things from both sides of the fault line. There are some whites, he says, who "try to put people down, the way people speak, how they dress." He doesn't want to repeat the words, for to say them aloud would allow them to pass through him.
But the words come from the other side too, thrown with equal force.
When he is walking home at night from the bar, sometimes he is confronted, mostly by high school boys. "They say, 'Hey, get out of my neighborhood. . . . You are not welcome in it.' "
Magnuson doesn't respond. "It has nothing to do with race," he says. "It's just boys trying to impress the pack. I'm not scared. I acted the same way when I was growing up in Virginia Beach."
Agent of Change
A man with a cane and purple leather cap stops at the House of Prayer -- for All People, which sits behind locked black iron gates. He pulls the gate. And searches the space between the bars, as if the space itself held something valuable, held some knowledge. The man pulls a laundry cart behind him. He walks west on H Street, passing the Joy of Motion Dance Center, Dazzles Unisex Salon, Phish Tea Cafe, with its red curtains in the window and green chairs outside.
A man drinking milk out of a water bottle emerges. And he is asked how people on H Street are getting along.
"Everyone gets along fine," says Travis Englert, 21. He says he lives in Pittsburgh but travels to Washington because he is working here for his uncle.
Who is his uncle? That would be Joe Englert, 46.
Englert, a frustrated writer, doesn't like to be called "a developer." But he is credited with changing the way Washington partied, more than a decade ago. Credited with resurrecting neighborhoods, opening up clubs in Adams Morgan and U Street, surrealist clubs, cultlike dark places with neon signs and spider webs. He's an impresario who goes into partnerships with his cooks and bartenders, and is called by some partygoers the King of D.C. Nightlife. Now he has turned his attention to H Street, has a vision that it too will become a chic place to live and party and shop.
He is walking east on H. A light snow is falling.
He opens the groovy doors of the Rock & Roll Hotel. Its motto, he says: "You can play here, but you cannot stay here."
