Caine Blog

Went home for a few days, and during that time had a chance to see some wicked condo-fication, of the same sort that’s going  on here in Brooklyn.  Or was going on, I should say.  The New York Times Magazine real estate supplement just came out, and actually published a piece about the DC market, focusing there on the condo to rental conversions going on out by U Street and 14th Street.  When I was growing up around DC, the U Street Corridor was always sorta dodgy; it’s where the rock clubs were, yeah, but it was depressed, a shadow of its heyday as D.C.’s Harlem.

Now?  Condos: all glass, as tall as the law allows, lobbies furnished with chain tapas bars and mega-thai restaurants.  But also: cool design shops, a few nice cafes (I went to Saint Ex on 14th Street and enjoyed it - their menu is reminiscent of DuMont’s), and a multiracial, fun-seeking crowd.  A mixed bag, as all such demographic (and infrastructural) changes inevitably are.

Also went to the new “cool spot,” the H Street corridor in Northeast DC.  It was a bummer - a row of empty bars on a forlorn street - and reminded me of, say, Bushwick at its most faraway and desolate.  Glad to be back here.