80’s/90’s DC vs 2020’s DC-Biggest Similarities, Biggest Differences?

[Anonymous]

The biggest difference is that I've become a grumpy, middle-aged guy. Would not recommend!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In the 1990s you did not go east of 13th Street in the CBD. The area around what is now the Verizon Center was a pedestrian mall (F Street was closed) that was filled with addicts, dealers and the homeless. On the Hill, no one went north of E Street on the NE side or south of G on the SE side or east of Lincoln Park. What is now Union Market was the Eckington warehouses where you could go get wholesale flowers. 8th Street SE had a lesbian bar called the Phase and a decent Salvadoran restaurant and the street was really rough to walk down. The city government was exclusively Chocolate City and Marion Barry controlled. City services were abysmal. Tony Williams did a LOT to improve the DC bureaucracy by getting rid of all the people who had gotten patronage jobs and did no work. The school system was so, so much worse. The schools did not start on time in the fall because DCPS was incapable of getting books out of warehouses and delivered to the schools. There were no crazy white progressive politicians on the Council like there are now.

Even though there was a lot of petty crime, and shootings among drug crews, carjackings were not a thing and violent juveniles were locked up more frequently. So there was not the overarching sense that juveniles could commit crime with total impunity like there is now. Also, while there were homeless people you did not have the tent culture that proliferates now.

+100 Tony Williams was amazing and the best mayor the city has ever had. The carjackers, tent cities, decline of Union Station and weed smoke EVERYWHERE adds a certain pervasive type of negativity to the city that did not exist in the past.

When you consider the crime, the increasingly dysfunctional DC government, the lawlessness, graffiti and trash not cleaned up, it's beginning to feel a little like "Barry Time" again.

It's not remotely close to that but it does seem to be worse than 10 years ago

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In the 1990s you did not go east of 13th Street in the CBD. The area around what is now the Verizon Center was a pedestrian mall (F Street was closed) that was filled with addicts, dealers and the homeless. On the Hill, no one went north of E Street on the NE side or south of G on the SE side or east of Lincoln Park. What is now Union Market was the Eckington warehouses where you could go get wholesale flowers. 8th Street SE had a lesbian bar called the Phase and a decent Salvadoran restaurant and the street was really rough to walk down. The city government was exclusively Chocolate City and Marion Barry controlled. City services were abysmal. Tony Williams did a LOT to improve the DC bureaucracy by getting rid of all the people who had gotten patronage jobs and did no work. The school system was so, so much worse. The schools did not start on time in the fall because DCPS was incapable of getting books out of warehouses and delivered to the schools. There were no crazy white progressive politicians on the Council like there are now.

Even though there was a lot of petty crime, and shootings among drug crews, carjackings were not a thing and violent juveniles were locked up more frequently. So there was not the overarching sense that juveniles could commit crime with total impunity like there is now. Also, while there were homeless people you did not have the tent culture that proliferates now.

+100 Tony Williams was amazing and the best mayor the city has ever had. The carjackers, tent cities, decline of Union Station and weed smoke EVERYWHERE adds a certain pervasive type of negativity to the city that did not exist in the past.

When you consider the crime, the increasingly dysfunctional DC government, the lawlessness, graffiti and trash not cleaned up, it's beginning to feel a little like "Barry Time" again.

The 13 clowns on our DC Council have been feverishly working on a time machine to take us back to 1985. Everybody on board and let's hit 88mph already!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Half the city looked bombed out. The difference between then and today is amazing.

I remember the giant hole that eventually became DC USA.

Yep, and the Tivoli building went unused for decades. And the incredibly bad Giant at 14th and Meridian that was replaced by the incredibly bad new Giant.

Strangely, I felt safer living in Columbia Heights then than I do now.

That Giant is gone. Why did you feel safer in Columbia Heights than you do now? What has changed?

Back in the 90s, streets like Fairmont or Chapin were really dangerous.

CH was better for awhile, but there's been a resurgence of gun violence there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The people who moved here in the 1990s (as I did) knew that DC had a serious crime problem and handled ourselves accordingly. The people who move here now think DC will be the same as Hartford or Omaha or Westchester or whatever whitebread area they come from and are shocked to find that DC still has big-city problems.

You can find these nitwits in the Popville comments section.

Hah. Expect Capitol Hill area homes [attached dwellings-row homes-townhouses] to have the same degree of issues as a townhouse complex in Mclean.
From the "80's to today there has been massive deterioration for Union Station. WaPo and others focus on renovations etc but some people who recently rode to DC from NYC were shocked. That includes people who ride the NYC subway etc. Had been here winter 2022 and was even worse in 2023.

Bring back riders? People who don't have to use it for business or personal try to avoid it. Some people who have a carless lifestyle in NYC discussed renting a car or flying.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All the Black neighborhoods are white and ridiculously expensive now. But safer, too. Obviously.

(Cue sarcasm)

Kinda like Crestwood.

Was so violent before the racial demographics changed.

Eyeroll.

There's also Penn Branch, Hillcrest, Eastland Gardens, and Fort Dupont/Davis neighborhoods. All black majority neighborhoods and all safe.

[Anonymous]

I bought a new car in 1997 at a dealership in Rockville. As a DC resident, they would not do the vehicle registration and get plates for me. Said I was on my own. When I got to the DMV I learned why.

They had a reverse Jim Crowe system in which I, as a white person, was expected to stand to the side and wait while black people behind me in line were serviced. When it was finally my turn, the clerk refused my valid DC driver's license as appropriate ID to register the vehicle. I had to pitch a fit in front of a supervisor to get plates.

You can't make this stuff up.

[Anonymous]

One big difference is that the commercial downtown is still in far worse shape now than in the 80s or 90s. Residential areas may have been worse decades ago but post-Covid the core of DC has never looked worse in terms of commercial vacancies, open drug use, and mentally ill people constantly making nuisances of themselves.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The people were much realer, not as many country bumpkins from the middle of nowhere south or midwest coming here and thinking DC is Disneyland. A positive is it's safer

I guess this is supposed to be a jab at white people (which I understand is socially acceptable), but how do you think DC became Chocolate City? It was the "country bumpkins" moving up from the South. But they were Black.

I can tell you didn't live here in the 80s or 90s because if you did you would know that black people who have newly moved up from the south are called bamas, not country bumpkins

Thank you.

[Anonymous]

True story:

Circa 1995 there was a big snowstorm that paralyzed the city, (it later came out that Barry had sold all the plows). I walked to work for a couple days. One evening I came home and right in front of my house is a Fox 5 News remote truck, with its satellite antenna up. So I go inside and turn on the TV to see what's going on, and the reporter is saying, "We're live in Northwest DC, where the plows are out clearing the street." And on cue, a plow comes down the street. The camera cuts away, the plow stops, and everyone packs up and leaves.

They plowed half a block, and then left a pile of snow in front of my house. That pile took two months to melt.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The relative newcomers just don't know how insane the taxi system used to be with the zones, where you knew where to get dropped off to avoid crossing a zone line and the driver would always argue with you (or take you on some cockamamie route that crossed a number of zone lines). And that the taxi lobby used to be massively powerful in DC and successfully blocked meters for years.

Other than coming home from National, where cabs truly are a better deal than Uber (easier to catch a cab from there, too), I'm not sure I've taken a cab in decades, but they still seem to be all over the place.

In the 1990s the metro actually ran on time and without daily breakdowns.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:True story:

Circa 1995 there was a big snowstorm that paralyzed the city, (it later came out that Barry had sold all the plows). I walked to work for a couple days. One evening I came home and right in front of my house is a Fox 5 News remote truck, with its satellite antenna up. So I go inside and turn on the TV to see what's going on, and the reporter is saying, "We're live in Northwest DC, where the plows are out clearing the street." And on cue, a plow comes down the street. The camera cuts away, the plow stops, and everyone packs up and leaves.

They plowed half a block, and then left a pile of snow in front of my house. That pile took two months to melt.

Or the time in 1987 when Mayor Barry was in California to watch the Super Bowl when a huge snowstorm hit DC. Instead of trying to return, he decided to stay in California to watch the game and then stayed a few extra days as DC was hit with a *second* snowstorm:

https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/468000/today-in-d-c-history-marion-barry-the-super-bowl-and-the-blizzard-of-indifference/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:One big difference is that the commercial downtown is still in far worse shape now than in the 80s or 90s. Residential areas may have been worse decades ago but post-Covid the core of DC has never looked worse in terms of commercial vacancies, open drug use, and mentally ill people constantly making nuisances of themselves.

In the '80s the downtown core still had lots of large surface parking lots, not sure those looked better than a few vacant storefronts in actual buildings do.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The relative newcomers just don't know how insane the taxi system used to be with the zones, where you knew where to get dropped off to avoid crossing a zone line and the driver would always argue with you (or take you on some cockamamie route that crossed a number of zone lines). And that the taxi lobby used to be massively powerful in DC and successfully blocked meters for years.

Other than coming home from National, where cabs truly are a better deal than Uber (easier to catch a cab from there, too), I'm not sure I've taken a cab in decades, but they still seem to be all over the place.

In the 1990s the metro actually ran on time and without daily breakdowns.

Yes, but not on the Green Line from downtown up to Fort Totten.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In the 1990s you did not go east of 13th Street in the CBD. The area around what is now the Verizon Center was a pedestrian mall (F Street was closed) that was filled with addicts, dealers and the homeless. On the Hill, no one went north of E Street on the NE side or south of G on the SE side or east of Lincoln Park. What is now Union Market was the Eckington warehouses where you could go get wholesale flowers. 8th Street SE had a lesbian bar called the Phase and a decent Salvadoran restaurant and the street was really rough to walk down. The city government was exclusively Chocolate City and Marion Barry controlled. City services were abysmal. Tony Williams did a LOT to improve the DC bureaucracy by getting rid of all the people who had gotten patronage jobs and did no work. The school system was so, so much worse. The schools did not start on time in the fall because DCPS was incapable of getting books out of warehouses and delivered to the schools. There were no crazy white progressive politicians on the Council like there are now.

Even though there was a lot of petty crime, and shootings among drug crews, carjackings were not a thing and violent juveniles were locked up more frequently. So there was not the overarching sense that juveniles could commit crime with total impunity like there is now. Also, while there were homeless people you did not have the tent culture that proliferates now.

+100 Tony Williams was amazing and the best mayor the city has ever had. The carjackers, tent cities, decline of Union Station and weed smoke EVERYWHERE adds a certain pervasive type of negativity to the city that did not exist in the past.

The stench of decay did exist in the past, but both Williams and Fenty worked hard to air DC out. Vince Gray was elected to waft it back in and the stench, now celebrated, pervaded everything once again by 2020.

+1