By Sadie Dingfelder
Special to the Washington Post
Saturday, May 3, 2008

Matthew Nguyen, 34, and Sergio Quintana, 32, had been house-hunting in the District for more than a year before they learned the name of their new favorite neighborhood.

"We had been looking in Shaw, but we didn't know the name, other than 'not quite Dupont, Logan or Thomas,' " Quintana said.

That's not unusual, as real estate agents and new residents started renaming sections of Shaw starting in the 1990s, said Alexander Padro, a Shaw resident and advisory neighborhood commissioner. "Some people think the name will harm their property values," he said. Perhaps that's why people at the north end of Shaw often refer to themselves as U Street residents, while those toward the south may say they live in Mount Vernon Square. And right in the middle of Shaw, there's Logan Circle -- an increasingly prestigious name many people are eager to claim, Padro said.

"The longtimers and the people sensitive to the neighborhood's history will still call it Shaw," he said.

Shaw, which stretches from about 15th Street NW to North Capitol Street, and from Florida Avenue to M Street, according to boundaries that planners set in the 1970s, is far from being an anonymous stretch of rowhouses sandwiched between better-known neighborhoods. Rather, it's an area with a rich history and relatively low prices, as well as burgeoning development and vocal homeowners.

One longtime resident, Lillian Gordon, 81, experienced some of the neighborhood's history firsthand. "Shaw was an old, established African American neighborhood," she said. "Shaw was called Black Broadway."

Under the name Lillian "The Body" Tillman, she said, she worked with choreographer Cholly Atkins and shared a stage with Nat King Cole. She performed at many of the neighborhood's venues; Crystal Caverns (now a jazz club called Bohemian Caverns) was her favorite spot.

"When you went downstairs, there were icicles," Gordon said. "It was a beautiful place; it had beautiful lights."

Just down the street from Gordon lives another dancer, Boris Willis, 40. Willis moved to Shaw a year ago to be near performance venues as well as his downtown day job. But Shaw soon offered him something he hadn't expected: inspiration. "I was surprised by how much black history there was right here," he said.

Guided by street placards, Willis learned that his former neighbors included the poet Langston Hughes and Carter G. Woodson, an educator known as the father of black history. The dancer also discovered that two tiny alleys he passed every day had held a 300-person shantytown beginning in the Civil War.

Moved to share his newfound knowledge, Willis visited a historic site every day in February, gave a short lecture on it and then performed an interpretive dance. His roommate taped the performances, and they posted them on a Web site called Dance-a-Day.

Willis isn't alone in his drive to spread the word about Shaw. Last year, Shaw was named one of the nation's "bloggiest" neighborhoods by the Web site Outside.in, which analyzed the volume of online posts and responses about the area. There are at least six sites devoted to Shaw.

Jason Beard, 29, started his Shaw blog to drum up interest in cleaning the neighborhood. At TreeboxVodka.com, he posts pictures of debris he has found around his condominium: couches and far more needles and crack bags than you want to see in front of an elementary school. Once a month, he gathers about 15 of his neighbors, and they walk the neighborhood's streets, picking up trash and erasing graffiti.

While Beard's blog is about garbage, other Shaw blogs tend to focus on neighborhood identity, Beard said. "Shaw has a lot of different divisions of people. . . . There's the new residents, the old residents, the church people," he said. "Figuring out what Shaw is all about and what's the character of the neighborhood has driven a lot of conversation on the Internet."

There's also avid interest in new development, particularly a spate of construction near the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. In recent years, abandoned buildings have turned into yoga studios, art galleries and a doggie day care center. And a $250 million deal was recently struck to build a grocery store, condominiums and affordable housing at Eighth and O streets NW. The addition of affordable housing to the deal was largely the work of activist residents, including bloggers, Padro said.

But construction in Shaw isn't limited to multimillion-dollar projects.

Marie Maxwell has been renovating her two-story house since moving in about eight years ago. Built in 1874, Maxwell's home, like many on her block, had been neglected and needed structural help, she said. "The floor was uneven, some beams were not in great shape . . . some bricks were nothing but wet clay, sandy mortar, all sorts of fun things," Maxwell said.

Even with its imperfections, Maxwell is a fan of her petite, Federal-style house. She also said she loves that her neighbors' homes, which once were nearly identical to hers, have been painted different colors over the years, from restrained taupe to peacock blue. "It's so darn cute," she said.

Adam Isacson, who lives around the corner from Maxwell, said his neighbors have turned out to be equally colorful and surprisingly friendly. "In our old apartment in Woodley Park, we hardly knew any of our neighbors; everyone moved every six months there," Isacson said. "Our next-door neighbor here has been here for decades."