On the street where I live

I'm going to start my blog by gossiping about other people. But first, let me create the setting. I live on Capitol Hill in DC, a neighborhood which sprang up almost overnight from the cow fields and orchards that surrounded the Capitol dome. Construction began around 1890 and was finished by 1915; the townhouses provided shelter to a growing Federal bureaucracy that was just beginning to learn that it could be bigger than Standard Oil if it wanted and passed enough laws saying so. Because the housing boom forcibly displaced the farmhouses that had graced the land for generations, you can say without fear of correction that Capitol Hill was built on bullshit and is rotten to the core.

It's a beautiful neighborhood by any standard- late Victorian and Edwardian architecture, tree-lined streets, wide roads with picture postcard views of the halls of government, and lots of parks. Parks are everywhere. It must have been terrible for the farmers to be forced to sell their land to real estate developers, but having your field taken over for use as a public park had to have been particularly galling.

People who live on the Hill group themselves into two camps: BB and AB (Before Barry and After Barry.) Marion Barry was the mayor of Washington caught smoking crack in an FBI sting. He went to jail and if he'd been allowed to campaign he would have kept his seat as mayor even behind bars. As it was, he ran again after his release, won, and was caught snorting coke in the privacy of his own car, which everybody but congress looked on as real progress. Not long after Barry's reelection, congress took away DC home rule. From this we can learn that a sense of irony is the last thing to go among alcoholics. Barry was eventually voted out of office and was last seen wearing a dashiki over his Jos. Bank suit and pushing his way in front of any loaded news camera.

Housing prices on the Hill BB were cheap, and the people who lived on the Hill then were either very powerful state dignitaries or the kind who would wear buttless chaps on the weekend. Both sides lived in a state of bemused harmony and the neighborhood worked; the dichotomy created a resonance that was, overall, pleasing, even when you found yourself standing at a bar because you just couldn't bring yourself to sit on a stool recently vacated by a pair of ass cheeks.

Housing prices AB were not cheap. Prices doubled overnight, sometimes tripled, and the average time for a house to be on the market was less than an hour. People sold their houses in droves. Out went some of the dignitaries and almost all of the buttless chaps, and to the eventual dismay of everyone who stayed, in came a tide of upper middle management twits. They arrived by the SUV load, kids and garden hoses and golden labs in tow. Oh sure, everyone was glad to see them at first- lawns would be regularly cut, Dawson's Creek and a bottle of wine wouldn't turn into a block party, and you could finally sit down at a bar. But the new arrivals had the attitude that everyone does when they know they bought something a lot of other people wanted but paid too much for it: They were smug and they were pissed.

The people who had lived here when the Hill was euphemistically called a 'transitional neighborhood' (translated means 'you couldn't find a cop anywhere') began to fight back. Wars and the rumors of war where the norm, and everybody who lived in the neighborhood had to take sides, and that quickly. A disinterested observer would say that the BB people took a page from the Indians and called themselves Human Beings and the new tide of settlers where White Devils (Who Paid Too Much for their House). To be fair, the AB people looked at themselves as the Great White Hope, and voiced the opinion that the best old timer was an old timer tied up in litigation. Skirmishes and outright fighting broke out daily, over such things as the exact hour it was proper to put out your trash, parking spaces and the encroachment of one man's property by the hydrangeas of another. The War of the Roses had begun, would turn ugly, and eventually, as all wars must, will seem comic and petty. But not yet, as the battles still rage. If you asked an actual Indian about all this instead of just taking his page, he would say that the history of the world is the story of one group taking something that belonged to another, and there is nothing new under the sun. It's safe to say that for the Indian, the time has already come for what's happening on the Hill to seem comic and petty. I'm going to run with that.

Next time, I'll tell you about the crazy fuckers who live and fight around me, both BB and AB. To be fair, most of the genuine loons are BB, and most of the people you don't want to make eye contact with are AB. Mostly this is the case, but not always. I'll tell you about the Mean Olde Queen (BB), the Banshee (BB) and The Overcompensating Snobs (AB). And who am I in all this? I'm a ghost, an outsider, the disinterested observer mentioned earlier. You see, Gentle Reader, even though I'm BB, I'm a renter and held in suspicion by both sides. I'm your spy. Vade mecum, peeps.