Reply to Longterm dc area residents, have you noticed decline ?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]
Anonymous wrote:

The idea people did not set foot in Columbia Heights or the Navy Yard is wrong. There were a ton of clubs in the Navy Yard, now gone, where DJs and local bands played and they were packed. That was in the 80s and 90s. The only thing to go to in Columbia Heights was Black Cat in the 90s. It was pretty much the only place there and it was packed also. And both of those areas were underdeveloped and not considered the "safest" places, but people still went there regularly.

Black Cat was always further south on 14th Street than Columbia Heights is.

It's obviously true that a lot of people spent a lot of time in these neighborhoods long before they gentrified. I think the point PP was making is that many of the people who now live there or visit a lot would never have found a reason to go there before. Different demographics (in terms of age, income, and race), different expectations of safety, etc. It's a broad claim but doesn't seem wildly inaccurate...
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[b]White yuppies in the 80s and 90s did not have any expectation of walking safely from Capitol Hill to the clubs on M Street.  When I moved to Capitol Hill in the mid 90s, 8th street SE was not somewhere I would have walked alone at night and H Street NE (as well as most of 14th Street from Logan all the way up to Columbia Heights) was full of boarded up buildings from the 1968 riots.  On the Hill on 8th Street SE, we went to Las Placitas restaurant, and there was the lesbian bar the Phase, but walking alone was not something you did---though the strip of Pennsylvania containing the Tune Inn, Capitol Lounge, Il Radicchio and Burrito Bros. (roughly 2nd through 4th) was okay.  12th Street and Lincoln Park was the eastern boundary.  Downtown east of 14th Street was full of porn shops.  The area around the Verizon Center was a pedestrian mall filled with drug dealers and vagrants, but people took cabs at night to go to the old 9:30 Club, PollyEsther's (sp?), and some of the other clubs around F and G and 9th.

Nor did anyone regularly stroll from Dupont Circle over to the Black Cat.  You took a cab.  There are vast swaths of the city now filled with condos and Class A apartments where upper middle class white people (and a lot of upper middle class AA) simply wouldn't wander around in 25 years ago because of safety concerns.  There were clubs and the odd fancy restaurant (Ruppert's on 7th) but you had a cab drop you off and pick you up.  [/quote][/b]

This is all true.  I lived around 3rd street SE.  I did not go to 8th street alone after dark.  The Navy Yard was Tracks, a gay nightclub.  I didn't walk there at night  And, yes, I got mugged outside of Tune Inn.  So I left.[/quote]

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