Change Is Clear
A Cafe Opens a Window Onto the Nature of a Neighborhood's Evolution

By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 3, 2007

It wasn't that long ago that Windows Cafe & Market was a corner store like so many corner stores in this city, with that ugly, milky, scratched plexiglass that divides you from the person selling. Ominous glass that says you are in one of those neighborhoods that may look benign in the sunshine, but the people behind the plexiglass know better. The bulletproof glass separated you from the tuna cans, the pork rinds, the rolling papers. The glass said you can't be trusted; put your money in the little slot, take your items and go.

Hunegnaw Abeje bought the store on Rhode Island Avenue when it was like that. Worked six years behind a glass that split him from his customers. "Now there is no barrier between me and my customers," Abeje says as he puts away wine bottles. "If there is a barrier, there is no trust."

His store is just one of the corner stores in the Bloomingdale neighborhood. Visit them, the ones now closed, the others hanging on and those like Windows, that are in the process of becoming something new. They hold on their shelves the story of a neighborhood. And, ultimately, of a city. The first stop is Windows Cafe.

Abeje left his country, Ethiopia, when it was under military rule. He was 24. He sought political asylum in Canada, where he went to school and worked. He met his soon-to-be wife and came to the United States and bought this store where he worked behind the glass until a neighborhood renewal grant project inspired him to remodel and expand. Turn the store into a cafe and the storage room into a finer grocery market with goods to match the growing spending power of the neighborhood.

He wanted people to feel at home here, so he asked his neighbors in Bloomingdale for decorating help. The cafe would become the first sit-down eatery in the neighborhood in years. The neighbors were thrilled and they obliged. "They planted plants," Abeje said. "They brought in frames. They suggested what kind of color the walls should be. I asked what they like and they suggested. . . . When we first opened, they brought 70 people. We had a party."

And the store became home.

"My store is not high-end," Abeje said. "It is not low-end. People who want to grab small things come here."

The glass had come down.

Then came the robberies, six in the last year. The first robbery occurred in November 2006. Two months passed, then another robbery. After that, another. "The last one was very scary," Abeje said. "He was fully covered. Hood and all that stuff. I saw the video of him pulling a gun at my wife. That was devastating. Cruel. She gave him what she had.

"I felt bad when I saw the video. What they did to my wife."

The mayor came to visit the store. "He promised to keep an eye on the store," Abeje said. Since then a police car and a police officer sit at the store in a community policing program aimed at reducing crime.

Then the neighbors came. "They encouraged me to stay," Abeje says. His wife quit, but he has not.

"I can't leave my business and go," he says. "I won't go back to the glass. I don't like it. . . . Everybody is not a bad person. And I am not a bad person also."

A black man walks in. He buys red Vitamin water. "Amesegnaleu," he says, which means thank you in Amharic.

Abeje smiles: "Oh, you speak my language."

* * *

Inside the Windows Cafe, a white man in black unplugs his laptop, switches tables and moves to the window seat, where the sun is pouring in. Under a van Gogh print of a Paris cafe, a black woman talks to a white woman about self-fulfilling prophecies.

* * *

Undeniable, change is running by once forbidden places, building over crime scenes, taking neighborhoods and painting them, sweeping them, cleaning them, planting them, scraping them. Making them home.

Change, something the black and white pioneer gentrifiers who moved in dozens of years ago worked for, has emerged, welcoming the new newcomers. Invites them to come sit on the manicured lawns in the hidden gardens, where they can seem oblivious to the history of the place.

Change watches from these windows. Watches the nanny pushing a child down the street with the blank expression saying she would rather be somewhere else. Watches a woman descend those church steps in a dress too short. Takes a peek inside the open house priced at $699,999, where the owner has left but forgot to put away her high heels that lie scattered in the upper chamber. Change watches from the cafe on the corner, watching the way artists do, studying each movement, sketching change, pressing their lips together to see how it is all going to look when it is finished.

* * *

It is early morning when the air is clean, holding possibility for the day. Here comes Joe Levesque, 51, a white man who paid $114,000 to buy the most expensive house in the neighborhood 21 years ago. He is carrying a shopping bag full of color samples and magazine clippings he is using to help a building owner down the street with painting. He wants the neighborhood to look vibrant, beautiful. He has helped homeowners choose their paint colors, suggesting contrast here and there, and helped plant their gardens. Levesque chose the lavender walls in the Windows Cafe. "It had yellow ceilings and cantaloupe-colored floors and the walls were beige. I said, 'This does not look good.' " He talked to Abeje.

"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."

* * *

Simple sounds of change on this side of the window.

The barman is beating eggs with a fork.

* * *

Down First Street, a woman is sitting, barefoot, on her porch. She has lived here 35 years and watched all kinds of change come and go. "The neighborhood is all right," says Cornelia Felder. She went to Windows before it was Windows and goes there now after its change. "All I do is run in and get a few items and that is that. A little variety of things you want to pick up in a hurry. It's a nice store."

What kinds of things do you buy?

"That's my business," she says.

Lawanda Johnson, 16, a junior at Cardozo, rides by on an orange bike. "I go to the store sometimes," she says. "But they only sell coffee." She is next door at the Chinese-Dragon restaurant. She has just bought a jumbo cheeseburger, french fries and sweet iced tea. She pushes the door open, climbs aboard the big orange bike, clutches the plastic bag containing the cheeseburger and rides up First Street, passing the corner house, owned by Samuel McLemore, 40, and James Brathwaite, 43.

On a recent evening, McLemore and Brathwaite are sitting outside the grand, meticulously restored mansion they have now made home. Restored with the kind of care that can put other houses on the block to shame. They paid contractors a pretty penny to scrape off old red paint and power-wash the house, allowing the original brick to reappear. McLemore, who is black, grew up in Boston. Brathwaite, who is black, in Trinidad and Tobago. They moved to this house from Capitol Hill in 1991. "We wanted to adopt a kid and we wanted a bigger house," McLemore says.

McLemore says the kind of change the neighborhood has undergone is evolutionary.

The evening sun is setting. The block is peppered with houses that are rundown and houses that are splendid. "How have we made this home?" McLemore asks. "I think the most obvious thing to augment a home is to not only make it livable but to do things to make it beautiful." They have recently upgraded their landscaping. "We took up the dirt that looked like that," he says pointing across the street to weeds. "We changed that to this." Tiny rows of green plants lined up perfectly.

* * *

A black man in gray polyester and gray shiny shoes enters: "Y'all don't sell cigarettes, do you? The counter girl motions to the back. He disappears. Returns. Speaks: "Y'all got matches?"

* * *

The "broken windows theory" can be shattered only by people who step outside their houses to sweep it up.

Vicky Leonard-Chambers, a white woman, moved into this neighborhood 15 years ago and made it her home.

"One of the first things I started doing was beautifying the tree boxes on the block because we had a lot of vacant properties," she said. "I wanted to make the block look good. My hidden agenda was if I made it attractive, maybe the drug dealers would move on and sell drugs elsewhere. It was that broken window theory. I took on the tree boxes to address crime through beautification."

One day while gardening, she noticed a drug dealer going into an alley behind a house with various crackheads. "I'm thinking he keeps going in the alley, he must have his stash back there." So she went to her house and got her dog and pretended to walk her dog in the alley. "I didn't realize the drug dealer had an assistant who was in the back yard. . . . The guy guarding the stash was this notorious drug dealer they thought had committed a murder and was known as the enforcer of this crew."

Leonard-Chambers stopped. "I was like, 'Oh, [expletive].' Hi there." She took her dog and walked away. I told my friend who was a U.S. attorney at the time. I said, 'Guess what happened?' She said, 'Vicky, you have got to stop following these drug dealers.' "

Ten years later, Leonard-Chambers is walking through the neighborhood. It is early evening, and if you walk with her she can tell you the story of this place by the neighborhood stores.

She stops first at the New Reservoir Market, a block away from Windows Cafe. A sign out front says it sells fresh meat, cold beer and wine, ice cubes.

The New Reservoir Market is not new. In fact, the owner, Tadesse Kasshaun, pulls out a black-and-white photo from 1957. The owners then were Jewish. The photo shows big bins of vegetables, a meat counter and shelves stocked with cans.

Kasshaun bought the store with his brother 15 years ago. They both had come from Ethiopia. Kasshaun is saying the neighborhood is changing. "Now, no crime."

Leonard-Chambers asks: "Well, wasn't the owner before you shot and killed?"

No, Kasshaun says, that was two owners ago.

"I have no fear," he says, adding he must face whatever comes. "I've never been held up. I'm a lucky guy."

He knows Abeje and he knows Windows has been robbed six times.

Kasshaun still has the plexiglass. "Maybe the glass helps," he says.

But soon the glass will be gone, and he, too, will join the legion of store owners throughout the city who have come from behind the plexiglass. "I'm thinking I will do that. The neighborhood changes. So I've got to change too."

Will you sell gourmet mustard? "I have mustard." He points to the shelf.

Leonard-Chambers: "We're talking about the fancy kind."

"When I remodel, I can get that, too," he says.

Leonard-Chambers leaves New Reservoir and crosses the street and stops in front of the A&L Market. The door is chained. The owner, Maurice Darnaby, was killed last year.

The chained door and the chilling story about Darnaby being gunned down around this time of the evening is reason for pause. The street seems so peaceful.

Some block matrons are still on their porches. Samuel McLemore and James Brathwaite, looking over their new landscaping, are discussing the Winter Blues Auction, a neighborhood association fundraiser. Levesque is scraping wallpaper off his entrance. His garden grows little orange buds. Young 20-somethings in spaghetti-strapped and cropped T-shirts are walking their dogs in Crispus Attucks Park.

"These are like all the new yuppie neighbors," Leonard-Chambers says. "They look so young. Like in their 20s or early 30s."

A girl with a ponytail is lying on the green grass. Her dog escapes from his leash and dashes off. She calls. The dog stops and turns to his owner. It is a lovely scene.

Leonard-Chambers moves on. She stops at the Flagler Market. Here the men on the sidewalk scatter as she approaches. Inside, the store is old.

"I've shamed the owners into painting the outside. I wrote a letter to [the owners], saying the neighborhood is changing. I don't think in the long run this will survive. I only come in when I'm desperate or I'm sick and want to make tomato soup or my husband, Jim, wants potato chips."

Leonard-Chambers steps outside the store and heads home. All the men on the sidewalk have vanished.