A fun quiz, via Apartment Therapy.

I do not think Kevin Drum is “a weird sociopath.”

Other post-Austin thoughts: I’d only been there once before, on a very abbreviated stop during the Howard Dean Sleepless Summer Tour in 2003, so didn’t have much of an impression of the place. Now that I have a bit of a better sense of it, I’d say that it seems a bit like a cross between Santa Fe, N.M., and Los Angeles, with a dash of Berkeley, too.

The one thing I did not expect, and which I have since been informed is something not specific to Austin but has in fact been going on for two years all across America and we just missed it living here in sartorially conservative D.C., is the short-shorts trend. I have never seen so many women in hot pants and heels in my life.

Someone once told me I was “the Lois Weisberg of Washington, D.C.” (Minus the gold tights and the smoking, of course.) That hasn’t felt very true over the last six months. Today, it’s felt more true than in a while. Read this great Malcolm Gladwell piece if you want to know what I mean.

When I first started to really get to know the U Street area, there wasn’t much retail here. The apartment building in which I now live was a vacant lot hosting a weekend flea market that had moved over only because its old location, on the parking lot where it used to be held on U Street, was slated for development for what would ultimately become the Ellington apartments. Since then, so many shops and restaurants have opened the neighborhood has become like what Adams Morgan used to be like back before it turned 18th Street into DC’s version of Bourbon Street.

But this year I’ve started to notice a growing wave of something new: shop closures. Maybe it’s the economy, maybe it’s the usual business turnover — lots of small businesses fail within their first few years — and maybe it’s, in some cases, a legacy of the impact of the ongoing construction that’s continuing to transform the neighborhood but also block a lot of sidewalks. Anyway, so far I count the following as having closed, along with some hypotheses as to why:

Candida’s Books — possible construction casualty, plus too early to the neighborhood, and too narrowly targeted as a travel bookstore
100% Mexico — overpriced and doomed from the start
Sparky’s (replaced by Cork) — gentrification
That Spanish food store near Pop that sold the good avocados — gentrification
Pink November — I’m guessing over-expansion to a second location coupled with a bad redesign of the original store, making it a dark unwelcoming space
Viridian — restaurant too formal and large for younger, more casual neighborhood; great food but bad design
Fusebox — replaced by new gallery when owners moved to Calif.
Maison 14 — weird selection of excessively expensive European furniture
Wild Women Wear Red — owner decided it was time to do something new

And that’s not even counting those cheap rug places that closed and gave way to the present shops on 14th, or the closures of some of the second-hand furniture shops. That was first wave gentrification; what I’m talking about is the disappearance of some of the neighborhood pioneers in what perhaps heralds or is a sign of a coming second wave.

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