U-Turn on H Street

Before it was the Rock & Roll Hotel, where those in Generation Me come to party, listen to bands or just chill, this space was a funeral home. Before that, it was a furniture store. Upstairs there are flying guitars with metal wings, golden crushed velvet sofas, mannequins with skulls hanging above the bar.

Englert steps back onto the street, headed for another bar he owns a block away. His vision for H Street is "to bring back the period of H Street," its cultural heyday when it was a thriving business thoroughfare. "What is truly amazing, what's unusual about this place, is it was so shuttered. What is striking is how desolate it was at night."

Outside, he doesn't slow down, walking between his establishments. There are still 85 boarded-up buildings on H Street NE. But he doesn't seem to see them as places of despair; instead he has visions of kid-friendly restaurants and high-end shops that might sell $2,000 sunglasses. You don't see what he sees, but that's why you are not a millionaire.

"We'll have brick sidewalks and a new street trolley," Englert says. "The residents say they want restaurants. We've given them taverns first. You need feet on the street first, then they establish a market and they pave the way for older, more sedate businesses to succeed."

Still you wonder about the split in the neighborhoods between people who rode out the crack epidemic and those just moving in. Englert, who lives in Glover Park, boils the dichotomy down to this: "Some neighborhood people are incredibly welcoming. Other neighbors are like, '[Expletive] you. I'm black. I'm white. I'm old. I'm gay. Some say, 'I've been here three months. Some say, 'I've been here 30 years.'

"If you are friendly, you won't have a problem. But some people want to change things in their way and it is not well received. In a public meeting, whenever there is a disagreement, race comes up. There is a segment of people who are so sensitive. It's so raw."

You ask him: What makes white people move into an area they dared not go for many years. What is the tipping point?

"It's kind of like a field of dreams, 'If you build it, they will come.' It's my yoke," he says. "People are looking for an excuse to go out." The city is where life happens, he says.

"The choices are you live in your car and deal with the blandness of suburbia or you live in a place you can walk and you know your neighbors," Englert says. "If more people lived in the city, it would be safer. It's become such a mind-numbing thing to live in the suburbs. It makes me sick to think about going shopping out there, the strip malls and endless lights. It's so depressing, the sameness. You don't know where you are but it looks the same: the Bennigans and Applebees, the fake made-up restaurants.

"You live here and you have Dickie's and the Italian Market and you can get your hair cut at a place like Smokie's, which is not -- for God's sake -- the Hair Cuttery."

In the Line of Fire

The stakes are still high. The mysteries of the neighborhood are never really conquered by the pioneers. Sometimes the street jumps up and bites a newcomer. And the question becomes whether the newcomer will stay or go.

At the end of a misty night in September 2006, Quike (pronounced Key-kay) Morales, a bartender at the Argonaut, toasted James, another bartender.