--{ neighborhoods and neighborhoods }------
So on Friday, I walked through my old neighborhood, the U Street Cardozo neighborhood, where I'd lived for two years in law school, where I'd spend my nights avoiding other law students and drinking beers at the Black Cat or at Saloon.
Boy it's changed a lot. It's gotten much swankier now, and hipper. I mean, it was hip back then, too, don't get me wrong. Black Cat. 9:30 Club. State of the Union. Republic Gardens. Chi Cha (which I hated). But it had its neighborhoodey elements, too, like Islamabad and Saloon and Ben's Chili Bowl. And it wasn't hip in an expensive kind of way.
Now it has...it has all this stuff. Like this new restaurant (I forget the name of it) around 16th and U that's got huge flat light sculptures up front. Like fancy new housewares stores. Like a Starbucks with a roofdeck. Like Fresh Fields.
And I don't know what to make of it. I mean, when I walked down U Street last Friday night, I felt like screaming "Motherfuckers!" The neighborhood felt too different. It felt too upscale. It felt too...gentrified.
But that's what happens to every neighborhood I move to, a few years down the line. Because I'm one of those people. I am, you see, a Gentrifier of Neighborhoods.
It sucks, being a Gentrifier of Neighborhoods, because I don't want to be. When I move to a neighborhood, I move to it because I like the neighborhood the way it is. Usually "the way it is" means a bit more run down, a bit more urban, a bit more neighborhoodey but not yuppie-neighborhoodey. I like things that way, they make me feel comfortable.
But, as has been pointed out to me, I'm a yuppie, at least technically. I'm young. I'm urban. And now I'm a professional. Ugh.
And I even like Fresh Fields.
So I must be bringing it with me, this yuppiness, like some terrible Stephen King shadowbeast. I'm always one of those first to move in, before an area gets really recognized as the "next new place," before they get written up in Utne Reader as a great neighborhood (as two of my former neighborhoods have), while everyone around me is still saying "you sure you want to live there? aren't you scared?" I hate those comments, but I have to admit that on some level I like them too. Because I like being first. I like finding the place.
I just don't like bringing the change with me.
I am, you see, one of Those People.
But this time, this time it'll be different, I tell myself. I love my roommate, I love my apartment, I love my neighborhood, I don't want to move for a long long while. This neighborhood, I tell myself, will not become the next new place in a few years, this neighborhood will stay a comfortable little neighborhood with diverse fambilies, run-down corner marts, and the occasional hooker.
But who am I kidding. The new convention center is projected to be finished in the spring of 2003. The developers will be here soon, with their hotels and restaurants and galleries and shops. They will be here, with their razing and their landscaping and their much-too-high rents. And I will have to move again.
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