fedward, tumbling

Fireworks 2010 (by me)

Thanks to a hard drive crash I’m only now able to do something with these.  I’m pretty happy with the way they turned out.

Another problem with that damned Post article about the Columbia Heights Target is that by moving out of Columbia Heights I’m apparently just adding another statistic to some sloppy reporter’s next article about living in a trendy neighborhood.

I moved into Columbia Heights ten years ago, within two weeks of the opening of the brand new Metro station. The location of the Target was an empty lot with a facade held up by I-beams, except for a grim little strip of stores on the corner of 14th & Park.

Whenever I walk down to 14th between Irving and Park now, I don’t recognize it as the neighborhood I moved into, but I don’t see this as a bad thing at all. We’re moving out of Columbia Heights (in one sense, at least) not out of any hipster dissatisfaction with the debodegafication of the neighborhood (in fact, we’d love to stay, and we’re not moving far), but out of a desire to have a nice place, where we are quite literally getting in on the ground floor. We shop at the Target almost weekly. We were members at the gym before it even opened. We’ve earned uncounted free treats at Rita’s. Count us among those who are happy to have DCUSA and the rest of the new construction that rose up around the Metro.

In fact, we’re so happy with all that that we’re doing it all over again, moving into a building with emtpy space on the ground floor where the retail will be, with an empty lot across the street and another across the corner, with a crappy grocery store just down the street, and so on.  We know it worked out well in Columbia Heights, and we expect it to work out just as well in Petworth.

Hipsters and lazy newspaper writers be damned, we like all that stuff, and always have.

The plot thickens!

I had always assumed that the neighborhood names “Old City #1” and “Old City #2” that show up in the MLS were just vague realtorisms, but it turns out that they are, in fact, actual DC tax (aka Real Property) neighborhoods. That they are unknown as city neighborhoods is just one of those strange things about the District.  The gubmint here defines tax neighborhoods and neighborhood clusters [PDF] with actual boundaries, but usually appears just to handwave over the outlines of the specific neighborhoods themselves.

In some neighborhoods it just doesn’t matter, but in others there can be virtual fisticuffs about what’s what. I’ve been curious, though, about what neighborhood the new apartment is in.  Going by the original plats it’s not actually in Petworth (which was bounded by Georgia Ave); it’s not in Columbia Heights the way I know it; the land wasn’t ever part of Pleasant Plains (everything I’ve found indicates that the Holmead property that became Pleasant Plains, Park View, Columbia Heights, and Mt. Pleasant was bounded on the north by Spring Rd). In local use, however, the immediate location is known as “Petworth” if for no other reason than the fact that the Georgia Ave/Petworth Metro station is located there — despite the fact that it’s on the opposite side of Georgia Ave from Petworth.  Until the Metro station opened, however, the realtorism might have been Columbia Heights, but it might also have been Park View, or 16th Street Heights. It depends on the whim of the realtor.

Today I found, however, that the tax neighborhood of 16th Street Heights (distinct from the realtorism) is bordered on the south by Upshur St NW, which sent me looking again. And this is where things get really weird.  The DC Citizen Atlas Real Property search (not to be confused with the “Where You Live” search - and whatever you do, don’t just try the Citizen Atlas home page, because the web server isn’t set up right and thus there isn’t one) says that the new address is in the Columbia Heights tax neighborhood (despite that address being outside the land that became Columbia Heights in the first place), and in the Petworth city neighborhood (despite being across Georgia Ave from historic Petworth).

I think I need to lie down now.