By 14th and Harvard I Sat Down and Wept
July 13th, 2006
July 13, 2006
Maybe it’s the flâneur in me, maybe it’s the American Studies major, but I get a kick out of living history—as in live, direct, up close history: Roman ruins, Druid stones, old theatres. I feel the same way about personal history—worn, common, and un-trumpeted. Which is why my native Washington, D.C. thrills me. I walk it for miles, finding spirits in sticks and stones, greeting new ones in concrete and tarmac. Gordon Parks also felt this way. He walked the same U Street corridor in the 1940s documenting ordinary life, as I walk today. I get a kick out of the interconnectness of people, places, and things. I guess I’m just a simple girl in love with nouns.
But I’m obsessed with verbs. I’ve been reading Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, And What We Can Do About It (2005, Mindy Thompson Fullilove, M.D.), about the palpable disquiet that develops once neighborhoods are destroyed, once the city power structure has its way with the territory. A meditation on the interconnectedness of global urban pillaging, it is also an oral history of those on whom these terrible wrongs are wrought. Terrible wrongs like much of Urban Renewal. Terrible wrongs like destroying community. Dr. Fullilove weaves seamless historical analogy between Paris and Pittsburgh; between poor French people and working class Americans (It is poetic retail justice that I bought the book at the National Building Museum after seeing the “Newer New Orleans,” and “Washington: City and Capitol” exhibits).
In the heat and humidity of Monday afternoon I walked around Columbia Heights in Northwest D.C., checking on the progress of the old Powell Junior High School where my father used to shoot hoops. Last year I’d wanted to shoot it for my mini documentary but it was razed the year before, so I’m resigned to 1948 black and whites that an unnamed photographer thought fit to make. I feel a connection to that photographer for capturing time and place for one moment so that I can use it in the many moments on screen. I was curious what went up in Powell’s place, what might serve the community better today. It is now a curvaceous, salmon bricked multicultural institute with new basketball courts. Better than I had expected.
Between the construction all around 14th Street and the bustle of people at Columbia Heights Metro Station, it feels like a lot of life has returned. But underneath, below the surface of a short row of façades preserved, is the sensation that not all of this demolition and re-construction is meant for them. How many upscale live/work shopping temples can Columbia Heights support?
I walked toward my father’s old house. I’d shot it last year for documentary B-roll, and walking along the even numbered side of the street, I noted nothing much had changed. Apartment buildings, sturdy row houses and trees line Harvard Street, privy to the boom of Gordon Parks’ day and the devastation of crack cocaine. My grandfather sold it for a song to the Davis family who’d stayed through the crack era, at least until 1998 when I took the last photograph of my father on the porch. It’s the house I hoped to one day buy, to restore, to glory in its ghosts.
But I couldn’t find it.
I paced back and forth in the brightness of mid-day, like a caged animal, searching for the numbers “1461.” I found “1458,” and “1463.” What lay in between sent me reeling, cursing, shaking my head in the heat.
“Root shock is the traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem…Just as the body has a system to maintain its internal balance, so, too, the individual has a way to maintain external balance between himself and the world.”
In the midst of Harvard Street’s unified dark red brick, in between 1458 and 1463, lay nothing short of a monument to Beige—a love affair with a non-color, jutting out of the street like a broken bone. There was nothing left of the old house; not one brick, not one stick, not even a stone.
Extracting my head from my hands I found Miss Pat, a longtime resident. As we walked toward her bus stop, she said, “It’s sad, it is. I could have bought that house from the Davis’s. Kick my behind. Go on! But…after you fall you got to pick yourself up again. Can’t stay down there forever.”
Her bus came. I took mine to U Street and ducked into a mom and pop for some homegrown, bootlegged, old school Go-Go.
Gonna drop a bomb on the Northwest crew/ Drop the bomb! Drop the bomb!/ Yeah, Northwest crew, now what ya gonna do?/ Drop the bomb! Drop the bomb!
A lot of percussion and a little brass…goes a long way to verb a broken noun.