UPDATE: another old house lost?

update #2: here are two pictures showing today's work towards creating the extra room on top of this house:


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the original post is still below, but here's an update. i spoke to a man outside of the house on my way to work this morning, and he says the turret will be put back on the house. they are raising the roof 4 feet behind it in order to create another livable floor (this is a big house that's just getting bigger, but that's fine with me). he said emphatically that it will NOT be like the house across the street.

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is another house losing its top in bloomingdale?this is 100 seaton place nw (the southwest corner of 1st and seaton nw). there's been a little bit of work done on the roof in the last week, then yesterday, the turret was taken off. i hope this is just temporary, and that the frame gets placed back where it belongs and gets reskinned. it's a great octagonal turret, and losing it would be a shame. the house across first street, on the southeast corner, already lost its turret a few years ago.

southeast corner of 1st and seaton nw

cleaning up dc's streets

yesterday, i participated in the shaw neighborhood monthly clean up sponsored by treebox vodka and shaw main streets. here's a picture of jason and ethan (let me know if i messed up names!) prepping a tree box in the 1900 block of ninth street for liriope planting.
we picked up trash in the 1500 and 1900 blocks of ninth street and planted liriope in the treeboxes (added mulch too). lots of people from shiloh baptist church and other neighbors came out to thank us for the work and comment on how good things looked. the positive response we got from nearly everyone who walked by made us feel great (the great weather yesterday didn't hurt either!)

then, when i got home, i found this:
the whole east side of first street between seaton and t street had been weeded and mulched! i'm not sure who did it, but it looks a lot better than the two-foot high weeds that had been hiding plenty of malt liquor and vodka bottles beforehand. if someone wants to take credit for the clean-up of first street in the comments, go ahead and take a bow! good job!

so much for the met branch trail

the metropolitan branch trail, the bike trail that is supposed to someday parallel the red line from silver spring down to union station, looks like it just took a step backwards, at least temporarily.

those are construction trailers for the new marriott hotel up there on the stub part of the trail that's been already completed. (this picture was taken from florida avenue looking south-southeast towards the new york ave. metro station.) it's a nice view of town from up there, especially at sunset, but i guess it's been taken out of commission for at least a year while this hotel gets built (which, incidentally, given its proximity to the trail, will obliterate said nice view....)

mpd all over the place

the last couple of nights, there have been MPD cruisers all over the place, tearing up and down 1st street and seaton place. there have been police staked out on the corner here, both in their cars and out on foot. and you know what? i'm reeeeeallly happy to see them. while i hope this recent show of force is actually doing what i think it should be (cleaning up the mess at north capitol and seaton and north capitol and t street), it's good to at least see that we've gotten the city's attention with regards to the recent uptick in violence. with that in mind, i hope not to see the officers around here in such force too much longer, because i hope we can get to a point where it's not necessary for them to have to be...

signs of life

remember the trolley fire in logan circle? there was a small willow oak that got torched by the conflagration, but it's trying its damnedest to survive.


one little branch sticking out there. does anyone know if the tree will be able to kick new sprouts out of the old branches in the fall, or did the fire damage them beyond the point where they could come back?

updated DC government website

check out www.dc.gov.

it looks like the site has been given a little bit of a facelift, with an animated feature on the front page touting the main news stories, along with cleaner-looking headers for the some of the other sections and a new banner across the top (just a stylized DC flag instead of the scenes of things around town).

it's an evolution, not a whole new page, but it looks nice.

crime on our street

living on seaton place has led to a lot of good-natured joking from some friends lately, as people from bloomingdale and beyond have heard about some of the troubles we've had with the thugs at the end of the block near north capitol. at the pig roast/concert/farmers' market/neighborhood party on sunday, my roommate and i got a chance to talk to john salatti of the ANC about the meeting that took place last week about what's being done to stop this uptick in crime.

(i would have linked to the anc 5c webpage here, but the site seems to be down.)

he told us about a future meeting involving the mayor and the chief of police, and told us about some of the things that the MPD is planning to put into place to help catch the drug dealers and other scofflaws up that way. it sounds like there is some serious effort being put into draining that swamp.

i have noticed a lot more police cruisers heading up and down the block the last few nights. i don't know if this is directly related to trying to tamp down street crime on seaton, but it sure seems like it is, and i say bravo! no one should have to worry about their safety while walking their dog or sitting on their stoop in this neighborhood.

pictures from the 'haitian invasion'

here are some pictures (taken by my roommate) from the concert given by the haitian students today at the bloomingdale farmers market. click on each one for a larger image:
some bloomingdale neighbors lounging in the park before the concert begins.

people getting some bbq from the pit outside big bear.

here's the bbq pit.

and here's the operation that was set up to distribute the bbq. it was amazing, there were literally hundreds of sandwiches being handed out to anyone who came up and asked for one.

les petits chanteurs are getting ready to sing.

here's some of the crowd taking in the show.

another shot of the crowd watching the children sing.

and here are the children singing.

i don't have any pictures from the string ensemble that played afterwards. my friends and i hurried up at that point over to adams morgan to get a little bit of am day fun in as well. all in all, a great day for hanging out in the city!

another business complaint

i don't want to turn this blog into a better business bureau-type rant thing here. but i have to give another rant in a follow-up to the note about giant last week.

i went to merchant's tire in college park this morning to get an oil change because they sent me a coupon for a $12 oil change and tire rotation. i thought "good deal" and, since i needed an oil change, i thought i'd head up there. now, i don't drive my car much anymore, but it was overdue for new oil, so i figured it was worth it.

ugh.

go elsewhere if you can. don't be attracted by the low prices. the service there was terrible. they didn't even rotate my tires properly. they only did the driver's side tires. i let it go because i'm going to get a proper alignment and probably 2 new tires soon anyway, but i sure as heck am not going to get that done at merchant's.

all in all, there have to be a hundred other places inside the beltway that can change oil and rotate tires. i'll be checking them out in the future, as the indifference and laziness i saw at merchant's just isn't worth my time (or yours, i would wager).

i'd hate to think what it would be like if giant wasn't on my side.

i had to stop in the shaw giant on the way home tonight, and it was about 6:30. you know the drill....12 checkout aisles in the store, and six were open. it's ALWAYS busy in there for a couple hours at the end of the workday, and there are never enough cashiers. you'd think the management would have figured that out by now, but i doubt they ever will.

i'm really looking forward to the new giant being built into the old O street market, but unless some new management is brought in, i fear it'll just be an example of a sow's ear being sewn into a silk handbag.