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A Southeast Spot Blossoming With Charm
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The two communities are collaborating on a chili cookbook to raise funds for the Francis A. Gregory library on Alabama Avenue SE and developing a DVD to guide other neighborhoods in establishing similar partnerships.
Hillcrest instituted an annual garden tour in 1992 to publicize the community. This year's tour, on June 14, will highlight about 15 gardens, including that of Gary Duke and Chris Lowery, the second owners of their 1937 center-hall Colonial. The greenery meandering around the perimeter of their property is primarily from family members and neighbors who exchanged plants, shared cuttings and offered tips while showering kudos on one another's green thumbs.
"We know so many more people who we consider good friends here than we ever knew [in their previous residence] on Capitol Hill," Lowery said.
Jarrin Davis and Dan Olds's yard, also on the tour, was an overgrown mess when they bought their 1926 cottage seven years ago. It soon became their "garden of discovery," Olds said, as they uncovered a brick walkway and created several cozy spaces out of gardens that had encroached on each other. They also shored up a dilapidated detached garage, converting it to a graphic-design office.
Hillcrest's residents do grumble about having to spend their shopping dollars in the suburbs or on Capitol Hill. The pickings of nearby grocery stores, restaurants and stores are slowly improving, though.
A Harris Teeter grocery is opening about a mile away, across the Anacostia River on Capitol Hill. The run-down Skyland Shopping Center, where Good Hope Road, Alabama Avenue and Naylor Road converge, has long been slated to become a mixed residential-retail complex.
"They built a whole baseball stadium in less time," Michelle Phipps-Evans said of that endlessly delayed project.
Although residents seem to like what they hear about redevelopment plans, "we just wished it would come sooner," she said.
