DOWN AND OUT IN SOCO

For a few days now I've meant to follow up on a post from this past week, whence I conceded my failure to share lurid stories from my neighborhood in northwest DC. Well, I think I can make up for it.

This neighborhood isn't quite as sketchy as the one surrounding Frank's Brookland/CUA Metro stop, but only a few years ago it certainly was. It still is "sketchy," on occasion.

Southern Columbia Heights is a neighborhood-in-transition, which is sort of a P.C. way of saying it's being "gentrified." This is a mixed neighborhood — mixed racially, economically, architecturally, even elevationally. The hill below my apartment is the steepest climb in the city from here all the way south to the Anacostia waterfront, where the Nationals' ballpark will eventually be built.

The identity of my immediate surrounding area is somewhat unclear: I'm too far west to be part of the Howard University neighborhood. I'm too far east to be part of Meridian Hill. I'm one block north of Florida Ave., the official limit of U Street, and I'm just south of the area typically referred to as Columbia Heights.

So where the hell do I live?

This area might well be Cardozo. The high school across from me is indeed named that. The nearest Metro stop is U Street/African American Civil War Memorial/Cardozo (try saying that five times fast). But I've never seen or read or heard that word applied to the neighborhood as a whole — or anything else around here, now that I think about it. What "Cardozo" refers to — a cursory Google search is of no help — I haven't the slightest clue.

This confusion persisted until a month or so ago, when my neighbor and fellow DCist Scott Reitz suggested to me a name he'd seen on a community organization flyer: SoCo.

SoCo. Get it? Like SoHo. Like the drink. Like Southern Columbia Heights. (Wouldn't that make it SoCoHe? —Ed. That sounds horrible.) The only problem is that it doesn't seem to be in wide use; according to Google, about the only people who seem to use it live in ... SoCo.

So, let's leave this aside. Perhaps I should actually get around to following up on that post.

Ahem. It's not so bad where I live, but it does get interesting from time to time. For example, here's the crack house on the diagonal opposite corner of my block:


Pretty cool, huh? Even better, that mostly-obscured large brown building visible at the end of the street is Cardozo H.S., aka Mercury Central. And only a half-block up the other direction, you've got million-dollar homes with gated driveways and multiple rooftop decks. Take this one, for instance:


And you can't quite see the corner there, but I'll show you what's there, or was, as of a few weeks ago:


Curious to know what happened? Here's the Post's lead on what happened:

A 9-year-old boy was shot in the face and critically wounded last night as he played with other children on a sidewalk outside an apartment building in Northwest Washington, D.C. police said.

Do you still have an appetite for interesting stories from around the neighborhood? (FYI, this was two blocks up from me, visible from the front door of my apartment building.)

Speaking of kids, there do seem to be a number of schools around here, including one that seems to have a dumpster on the roof:


Not a few churches, too:


To further prove my mixed-neighborhood argument, how about this:


What do we have here? It appears that the owners/renters of the red unit own a Jaguar. Pretty nice. And yet it also appears that they are using two-by-fours to prop up the roof on their front porch.

You can't tell from here, but across the street is a day-glo orange townhouse with white trim. And just a few blocks away, in the neighborhood behind Howard University, is a depressing reminder of nature's indifference to human life. Next to it, we have a huge man-made lake:


The reservoir. The McMillan Reservoir, to be accurate.

One of these days, I swear I'm gonna swim out to that island. Hop the barbed wire fence and just swim. Not sure if I can bring the digi out there, but you'll know if I do.

I'm serious.

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posted by WWB at 2:44 AM |