Change Is Clear

"We had a meeting with the design committee and went into our attics and basements and found things we had not used and put them together," Levesque says. "We asked him what he would name it. It was an Ethiopian name. We thought, 'See, that won't work.' We got together. My partner said since you have all these windows, why don't you name it Windows Cafe?"

Abeje and his wife liked it.

"It was a community effort to help him create an atmosphere appropriate for the neighborhood," Levesque says. "If it doesn't look attractive, no one will go inside and the business will fail. There are black people, too, who live in the neighborhood who want those products. It's economics. Not racial."

When the plexiglass came down, things changed. Along with the robberies, Abeje says, have come new customers, new products, a new vibe.

Scott Roberts, a 52-year-old white man, announces on the neighborhood e-mail discussion group any new products Abeje puts on the shelves. The group is the domain that Roberts controls, his contribution to the neighborhood. "I kind of run the Listserv like a dictator," says Roberts, who has lived on W Street for 16 years. "Normally, you can sign up and post whatever you want on hot topics such as trash or rats. I kind of don't like that. People send me stuff and I put it all together in one big e-mail."

Realtors send some clients to him. "Because I will tell them the whole story," Roberts says. "They are not getting some candy-coated view of the neighborhood. . . . I can tell when people are not ready for true urban living. They've never seen people selling drugs out of the car in front of the house. Or people running down the street with guns in their hands. You will see that here. You will see grown men pull down their pants and take a poop in front of you. You will see that here. I hate to see people move in and get terrified. Maybe it is best you don't move here.

"I've been shot at, held up at gunpoint, assaulted, house broken into and I stayed. Some people got scared and ran off," he says. "If I had a family with children, I never would have stayed." But he did and now the neighborhood is home.

"The reason I liked the neighborhood is because there were mostly African American families," he says. "Now that is changing. . . . Down the street from me, I had the matron of the block. A retired woman with children. She would sit on the porch. She knew everything going on. Who was getting married, who was getting divorced. Who was going to prison. Who got yelled at by their parents because they hooked up with drug dealers. She died in the late '90s.

"The block matrons who would sit on the porch all day and knew everything and everybody. That role is vanishing. I don't know if they exist anymore. The character of the neighborhood is changing."

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Simple sounds of change on this side of the window.

The barman is beating eggs with a fork.