I'd heard the rumors.
"Watch yourself around the Columbia Heights Metro late at night." It had become a standard admonition among DC's new gentry, the pioneers too broke to live the downtown dream closer to areas suitable for The Gap and Ann Taylor. These were the folks hoping the successful turnarounds of the Logan Circle and U Street neighborhoods augured well for their new homes, in "transitional" zones called Mount Pleasant and Petworth, atop the lowlands to the south.
"It can be dangerous," they'd occasionally add, looking at me but also past me, as if I were purposefully blocking a street crime now in progress.
I considered myself immune to such thoughts - I'd moved to Washington nine years earlier, before the flood of homebuyers bouyed by the tech and then defense spending booms, and later insanely low interest rates, drove real estate prices through the roof. Back then, my neighbors were working class Latinos, hardscrabble non-profit types, and holdovers from DC's long gone era of prosperity. The streets of Adams Morgan were dirty, the bars dingy; out-of-towners, from heartland America and inside the Beltway, sniffed at the prospect of walking its sidewalks.
"What a shithole," they'd say. "Is it safe there?"
Of course it's safe, I thought. My housemates and I shared a crumbling a row house and strolled around town, at all hours, with an abandon familiar to Opie Taylor and the Mayberry crowd. Sure, we ran into some kooks now and then, but they were the eccentric kind, known for aggressive panhandling and not much else. And as they disappeared, replaced by upscale coffee shops and users of ubiquitous MP3 equipment, I thought wistfully of the early days, when I was an Urban Trendsetter.
Now the newcomers, those on the Northwest frontier, were complaining of their dangerous neighbors, sounding an awful lot like the suburbanites I disdained years before. Columbia Heights, dangerous? No more than the Adams Morgan of not-so-long ago. I knew that kind of danger; Columbia Heights is nothin'.
That's what I figured when I bought my condo at 16th and Columbia Rd., a 5 minute walk from the Columbia Heights Metro. I'd only used that stop on my morning commute, but my travels last Friday brought me to the steps of the subway platform at 2 AM. I walked a friend there on my way home, then headed toward my apartment building after parting ways.
Enroute, I approached two men lurking in the shadows, conversing in low tones before parting ways. I passed the first man and was fast approaching the second, walking in the same direction as me. He was a small man, with the wacky hair of a comedian counting on general craziness to compensate for a lack of good material. Within moments, we were walking abreast, and then...
"Hey man, what's goin' on?" he said, angling toward my left side. I bolted into the street, less fearful of the oncoming car than my new little friend. I struggled to summon some appropriate small talk, but he thankfully relieved me of the responsbility when the oncoming car veered away from us.
"I don't want to hurt you. Give me your wallet." He sounded like my accountant.
I checked him out as if assessing the attributes of a seventeen-year-old cheerleader, substituting my tits and ass scan with a quick search for guns and knives. I could only discern his fists, so, looking him dead in the eyes, I replied in the manner of a seventeen-year-old cheerleader: "Whatever." I wanted to give him a second chance to brandish his weapon. I could always give him my wallet later.
With this my foe abruptly changed tactics: "Can you give me a dollar?"
My database of incredulous put-downs provided numerous suitable responses, but in the end I chose the simplicity of Nancy Reagan's anti-drug campaign: "No." With this we were approaching the floodlights of 16th Street, so my friend, sensitive to bright lamps, receded back into the shadows, offering an olive branch before disappearing for good...
"No offense, ok?"
Referring back to my database, I shouted back: "Enjoy it while you can!"
My scream provided a satisfying release, but it didn't dispel my new suspicion that maybe, just maybe, this Columbia Heights place, beyond being a little dangerous, is nothing quite like the Mayberry I knew when I first moved to Washington.
