The reality I had known no longer existed....The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.
From "Place-Names: The Name" in Swann's Way, the Lydia Davis translation.
I missed the uproar surrounding the NYT article on the gentrification of H Street while I was away last week, and have been slowly catching up. Ta-Nehisi Coates (no surprise) touched on (I think) an under-reported aspect of gentrification, home-ness:
I grew up in West Baltimore at the height of the Crack Age. I spent more time negotiating violence than I did negotiating my studies. I got jumped by some project kids when I was nine, and until I my senior year I either got jumped or fought every year. But I loved West Baltimore -- so much so that when I went off to college, I was intent on coming back. My old middle school was shut down a couple of years ago, after a student was stabbed to death. The school likely needed to be shut down -- but I was still sad. The point isn't that violence is a good thing. It simply means that every day, normal human beings develop feelings for people and places that go beyond the work of economists, sociologists and self-styled reformers.
We all probably move through neighborhoods or towns or subdivisions that seem to us ugly or crime-ridden or desolate - places we call "bad" (as if geographies could be unsound or morally suspect) - and forget that each of these places is also a home. These are places where childhoods happen, where families reunite, where a memory is set. The Columbia Heights of my high school years is just gone, no longer there. People called it a "bad" neighborhood, and like TNC I don't mourn the bad things that did sometimes happen there, but it was mine. That Columbia Heights is the barbershop on Belmont, the newspapers and Rock Creek soda from Nehemiah, the Waffle Shop on Park, a mural that seemed to go on forever across Irving. It's not that these places are necessarily better or more deserving of the space than the retail and condo behemoths that have settled down along the neighborhoods corridors (well, excepting the Waffle Shop), it's that they together made up my home. The people who left Columbia Heights and the people that remain there have both lost something, lost that place.
It is the unlucky fate of urbanites that we live in places that by their nature are in flux. People move, cities change. I just hope we can all be good neighbors in the meantime:
@blackurbanist: DC Stop the race bait -churches, hair salons and wing joints DO belong with bike paths & #urbanism.
It's called Malcolm X Park.
