Busboys and Poets Books Presents SHAW, LEDROIT PARK, AND BLOOMINGDALE IN WASHINGTON DC: AN ORAL HISTORY

This conversation took place at Busboys and Poets at 14th and V Streets NW in Washington, D.C. on December 1st, 2021. You can watch the event on YouTube here.

The transcript below has been lightly edited.

Shilpi Malinowski:

Thank you so much. I want to also introduce Helena Andrews-Dyer. She’s my wonderful moderator. Helena is a Washington Post reporter, the author of several books, and a neighbor.

Helena Andrews-Dyer:

Just a little bit about each other. We met in Crispus Attucks Park, your younger son was the same age as my older daughter. Shilpi had this baby, was wearing a Panama hat and flowy pants, and I was like “Who is this person! Teach me how to have a child.” And we become friends, neighborhood friends. ever since and I like that term, neighborhood friends

Tell us about the project. What, what was the impetus, what was the drive?

Shilpi:

I saw this article about how 20001 was rated as one the most gentrified zip code in the whole country — it was number two on the list, according to change in housing price. I had lived in the neighborhood for about 10 years at that time, and I noticed that when I was reading about gentrification in newspapers, it was boiled down two groups — existing black residents were being pushed out, and wealthy white people were coming in. But my observation was that it was much more layered than that. Because the rate of change of prices was so steep, somebody who bought a house in 2002 for $300,000 was still in the neighborhood, even though their neighbor bought for $500,000 and their other neighbor bought for $1.3 million. People are still living alongside each other.

So, this is not in the book, but this is the actual reason that I started this project. There was an argument on the Bloomingdale Mamas Facebook Group about LeDroit Park. Somebody was playing with their child and someone else was smoking pot right near there. This mother got into a very heated argument and it just kept escalating. She started recording video with her cell phone and called the police. And someone else, an earlier gentrifier, chimed in to say: “You have a choice, you can either escalate or de-escalate in a situation like that.”

I thought that was fascinating. It made me think about how expectation differ, what people expect of the public spaces really differs. If you’re a wealthy person, you paid $1.2 million for your house, maybe you do expect that your public spaces be pristine.

So, I originally wrote this book for people who read and write gentrification articles to sort of complicate what they were doing. They were simplifying and I wanted to make sure that they understood the complexity.

But now the book has been out for a couple of months, the happiest people who come to me are our neighbors, especially newer neighbors who are like: “thank you so much for this book, and for giving me a chance to understand the people in this neighborhood.” So, I think its secondary purpose or maybe larger purpose is teaching the people who live in the neighborhood about the neighborhood. People walk around, they bought their house and all they know is what happened in the last two years. People don’t talk to each other.

Helena:

So, let’s talk about the format. Why oral history as opposed to a straight nonfiction? When I read it, you hear people’s voices. And as you say, we don’t talk to each other. It’s the voice that you would hear if you sat on the porch of someone and asked them their story, but that makes folks uncomfortable. So, why oral history?

Shilpi:

I had these conversations one-on-one with everybody and I sat with them for one or two hours, we had these long, almost like “life story” conversations. Basically, what I was asking them was, what is your life story as it relates to the neighborhood? So, I really want the readers of this book to have that feeling that they were in a conversation.

I also didn’t want to narrate. The whole point of this book is that there’s so much complexity that the story can’t be easily summarized. So, I stayed away from journalism because I knew that if I used a journalistic voice, I would want to summarize.

At some point in this project, I discovered Studs Terkel, an oral historian from the middle of the 20th Century. His very first book was called “Division Street America,” and it was about Chicago and he took a similar concept, a cross section of people from Chicago, of different classes and different races, and his voice is not in the book. The book is really remarkable. I think once I discovered that, I realized that this is a legitimate format, and I could actually do it this way.

I spent a lot of 2020 learning about oral history. I went to the oral history conference, I met an oral historian in D.C. who taught me about the ethos. It’s interesting field, people come from all different fields to do it — artists, journalists.

It’s about telling this person’s story. So, you’re listening, you’re giving them the opportunity to change their stories, it’s much more of a back and forth. Whereas with journalism you can go into a mode where you take the quote that you want and run with it. I still love journalism, but for this project oral history felt right. I never wanted my narrators to feel like I was using them for their quotes.

Helena:

So, let’s talk about narrators. How did you choose them? Were they people knew you knew previously? Did you know them through just your jaunts around the neighborhood or through friends? And what made a good narrator?

Shilpi:

All of the narrators, I either know them or am 2 or 3 degrees separated from them. I started talking to people about the project and people would recommend subjects. And I think that the fact that either I knew them or they knew somebody who knew me helped with the trust.

I really wanted people to talk about these touchy subjects that nobody likes to talk about — race, belonging, disrespect. That trust was really, really essential. And I wanted to choose people who were reflective, especially the gentrifiers, people who question their own assumptions a little bit. So that they can observe and also be reflective about what they were doing, and where they were placed. And I did frame it for them. They knew I was writing about different waves and was clear that “you are of this wave.”

Helena:

And what in all the stories as you collected them, what was the most heartbreaking story?

Shilpi:

I think Mr. Greg Mason’s story. I met him the first week that we moved into our house. He was very friendly, always had a huge smile and was almost like The Godfather of the block, he was always on the block. But I wasn’t sure what his relationship was –I knew he didn’t live on the block.

So, I came to find out that he grew up in a house right across the street. He was born in that house. He lived there for 50 years. After his parents passed away, he lost ownership of the house due to the splitting of inheritance between different descendants, and he ended up homeless for a while. He talks in the book about how he has struggled ever since he lost the house. His parents bought that house so he would always have a place to live, and it was totally paid off. So, that was really hard to hear.

But the interesting thing is that he has a relationship with every owner of that house, I think there have been three or four owners, and every time somebody moves in, he introduces himself, he maintains the rose bushes that his mother planted. But he will not step foot in the house. I think it’s really too painful. Nick and Christina, the new owners of the house, they are friends with him and I think it is a classic gentrifier-guilt situation. You know, they live in this house that used to be his, is a little bit of an uncomfortable feeling, because I’m sure on some level he wishes that he still lived there. But at the same time, they’re not responsible for that. And he doesn’t blame them.

Helena:

I mean, I knew you were going to say the Mr. Mason story, because it was one of the many that really stood out. Because there wasn’t this animosity, there was more generosity of spirit that he still maintains, and the fact that he’s allowed to. It seemed like he just continued to have such a personal connection with that home and the people inside and the people inside are open to that. I think was really, really instructive of how we could be, which I thought was really just special.

Shilpi:

I’ve known Mason for 10 years, but I’d never heard that whole story before. So, talking to him was satisfying. The book gave me an excuse to have these conversations with people, which, we don’t talk to each other and this was a way to do that.

Helena:

Yeah, absolutely. This sort of provided you with the platform, but also, again, everyone who reads it gets to sit in on that conversation as if they were there. People are waiting to tell their stories, they are waiting for someone to ask.

Shilpi:

Mr. Mason was so happy. That was a hard conversation because it was such a painful time in his life, but he walked away so happy, he was bouncing. To be able to tell the story to someone — it was great. That was a good feeling.

Helena:

Gentrification — is it good or bad? If someone asked you is it good or bad, what would you say?

Shilpi:

I think it’s complicated! Especially in the last chapter, I try to lay out how all the different people feel about that. There’s harm that comes from gentrification, there are renters who are pushed out and displaced from their community. There are people who feel disrespected. There’s some real harm that comes with gentrification, for sure.

And there are also other systemic reasons I go into in the beginning of the book, like the relationship between wealth and race, these systemic forces that are very unfair, and I think that unfairness is where some of the feelings of white guilt of being a gentrifier come from.

I also think there is some inevitability with gentrification. In the 1990s and 2000s billions of dollars very specifically for real estate development started coming into D.C.. When a neighborhood gets nicer and the amenities get nicer, more people will want to buy, and if more people want to buy, the prices are going to go up.

The narrator Leroy said that — once the Convention Center went up, he was like, “this is happening, all the prices are going to go up and we need to buy right now.”

There are different actors in the book who are trying to counter that, like MANNA’s homeowners center which is educating residents on how to stay.

Helena:

It’s funny we started our conversation saying that the idea is rich white people displacing poor black people is too simple. I’m a gentrifier, I’m not from DC, I’m from South Los Angeles, which is currently being gentrified. I’m a black gentrifier. And you know, we, my husband and I and our two kids, we love the neighborhood. But we also know that it’s really hard to buy and we also know that a lot of black neighbors treat us much differently than they treat the new white people who move in, even though we’re just as culpable. We’re just as bad as everyone else. And so, it is very complicated.

You’re asking these big questions here like “what is a home?” “What is a community” “Do we belong?” And that’s on the bad side of gentrification, it’s making people feel like they don’t belong, that is obviously bad. Of course you belong here. But then, who doesn’t want a nicer park? Who doesn’t want the crack house to get shut down?

Shilpi:

We did put this question on the cover — Who Belongs Here? It’s a very provocative question, because I think that people are looked at like they don’t belong, but I think that white gentrifiers feel that guilt and also question whether they belong. But the answer to the questions is that they all actually do belong here.

Audience Question:

One of the things I’ve noticed as we were driving back home a couple of weeks ago was that the 7–11 had closed. And every time I think about gentrification, I think about provision of basic needs, food, food deserts, water, and how that can ebb and flow, like you’re talking about the good and the bad of gentrification. And I would just love to hear both of your perspectives on how gentrifying neighborhoods are or could be better addressing those aspects.

Shilpi:

That’s a really interesting question! So, one of the earlier residents in the book was talking about the old Giant that used to be in that neighborhood. And she told the stories about rat droppings falling on her, she called Giant headquarters and complained about it and her mother would actually drive to Adams Morgan to find grocery stores to go to. And there are stories about how someone said “the first time I walked to a restaurant to go to a restaurant, that blew my mind.” But then the flip side of that is making sure that those places are welcoming to everyone. I feel actually right here at Busboys and Poets, you open up in gentrifying neighborhoods, but create this place where everybody really feels welcome no matter what color they are, they honor black people and people of color.

There used to be a corner store in Bloomingdale, and he also would sell like lamb and whole chickens like real food, and as the neighborhood started gentrifiying people wanted more prepared food, or snacks and he didn’t like it, and ended up closing.

Audience Question:

Can you talk about how you feel that the pandemic has changed some of the dynamics around gentrification in the neigborhood?

Shilpi:

Yes, that’s a great question. It’s a question that would have complicated my whole book. The neighborhood got a lot more dangerous during the pandemic. A lot of my narrators came back to me — Gretchen said “I don’t feel safe walking around anymore!” And Preetha said “all my neighbors moved away and I don’t know everyone on my block anymore.” It really drastically changed the neighborhood. So, I wanted to just end the book in 2020 and have it be a history.

But I think it would be really interesting to observe how many of those changes are permanent. I did touch on homeless encampments in the neighborhood, which increased in 2020. It became a really fascinating discussion within the neighborhood. On the one hand, these are our neighbors and we need to serve them. On the other hand, there are assaults going on in encampments. If you decide not to enforce one law, do you just not enforce any laws in that zone? It’s this really complicated question. So, I did include that a little bit.

Audience Question:

I haven’t read the book yet, and I appreciate that you talk about how complex gentrification is and I recognize that it’s not clear cut, but what is the responsibility to make sure that issues of gentrification don’t support institutional race-based and class-based displacements? And just in terms of like, violence and safety, you know, that those are mostly attributable to lack of resources, resources in our community. So, I feel the neighborhood has gotten safer, but folks who need resources are being pushed out. So just wondering about that broadly.

Shilpi:

Yeah, thank you. That’s such a great question. I think you’ll find that some of those things are addressed in the book.

One is that I do frame the book by thinking about: what is a house? Is it a home, or is it an asset? I think everybody in the book thinks differently about that. For some people, they never touch money. They inherited the house, they’ll live in it until they die, it’s a total home. For some people, like a developer going into a gentrifying a neighborhood and who sees the prices rising, it is 100% an asset. And I think everybody falls on that spectrum somewhere. Maybe they’re coming in as a buyer and they know they are going to sell in a few years, so they go to a place where the prices are going up and the come out with some equity.

And I found that the most harm came when people were only thinking about that house as an asset. That’s when people start getting displaced. That was really clarifying for me to think about.

I think the other thing is thinking about “how do we keep people from getting displaced?” There is an organization called MANNA that I interview in the book, and that is their whole goal, their whole mission. They do a lot in education — they hold people’s hands to go through these elaborate layers of paperwork to apply for programs. Because D.C. does have a lot of programs, like for first-time homeowners and for subsidized housing, but it’s a very arduous paperwork journey to get there. So, they’re helping people, and they are working all over the city.

Helena:

I think the first step is to view yourself as a part of the community, right, and not that the community should just be serving you in some way — that you should be serving it. And you talk about this in the book, I think some of your narrators are like “I was going to go Civic Association Meetings, but child, like, they’re going on for who knows how long!” But you have to show up.

One of your narrators was talking about Crispus Attucks, which was an eyesore. All kinds of illegal activity was going on. Instead of being like, “Oh, well, don’t worry, I’m going to sell the house in 5 years so I’m not going to think about it,” instead thinking, “we should do something about this.” And we should do something about this that involves everyone in the community at every level, not just what all the rich people want. What is going to benefit all of us? And that was really interesting. In the conversation about Crispus Attucks, some people wanted a playground and some people wanted a dog park. And the older Black woman was like “a dog park? it’s a dog!” But the fact that she was there, that she was there to say that, I think that’s amazing, because these are huge issues. These are enormous issues.

Shilpi:

I think Gretchen makes this point, too, that this an integrated neighborhood, people don’t know how to talk to each other. So often when you have common causes like that, like trying to get the sidewalks widened, that’s an opportunity for all different people in this super diverse, integrated neighborhood to get together and communicate with each other and listen to each other.

Audience Question:

Hi, my name is Beat, I’ve been in this neighborhood as long as Shilpi has. I have a question concerning Mr. Thorpe. So, in the last chapter, he blames black people for what is happening in terms of gentrification. He said to “we, the black people, we handed over the city, to white people.” And I wonder whether you could sort of try to understand what he’s saying there.

Shilpi:

I really enjoyed juxtaposing Leroy and Gretchen in the book, and especially in that last chapter. They have very different takes on that. And that is his opinion.

I do think this book is about people’s feelings. Feelings are going to feel controversial sometimes, but feelings are never wrong. Feelings are always true. If he’s that’s what he’s feeling, that’s what he’s feeling. It’s another reason that I did it in this oral history style.

I think he saw this convention center coming up, and he was trying to convince his black community members to invest in the neighborhood, buy up houses when they could, so those people could stay. And I think he feels hurt that that didn’t happen. He says it many times, that “they didn’t follow my advice! and I followed my own advice and I’m still here.”

But then we have Gretchen on the other hand. She’s on Shaw Main Streets, she sits on the board of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, she is so involved in DC. And she has a quote, especially at the end of the book, where she says this kind of investment never would have happened in the neighborhood hadn’t integrated. And I’m glad I can walk around at two o’clock in the morning and feel safe.

I think those are two opinions that both exist.

Helena

I think it was one of the last chapters you said that “neighbors walk around carrying decades of history inside them.” And I wrote that down. I mean, it just made me stop in my tracks as I was reading because everyone carries their own history and their own views and their everything that’s happened to them in the neighborhood, and it completely affects how they view themselves there and I think that that really that’s the whole point of the book.

— — — — — — — —

You can purchase the book here.

“When Gretchen Wharton came to Shaw in 1946, the houses were full of families that looked like hers: lower-income, African American, two parents with kids. The sidewalks were full of children playing. When Leroy Thorpe moved in in the 1980s, the same streets were dense with drug markets. When John Lucier found a deal on a house in Shaw in 2002, he found himself moving into one of four occupied homes on his block. Every morning, he waited by himself on the empty platform of the newly opened metro station. When Preetha Iyengar became pregnant with her first child in 2016, she jumped into a seller’s market to buy a rowhouse in the area. Journalist and Shaw resident Shilpi Malinowski explores the complexities of the many stories of belonging in the District’s most dynamic neighborhood.”

Shilpi Malinowski is a reporter whose work has been published in the Washington Post, the New York Times and India Abroad. For the past two decades, she has been reporting on life in neighborhoods in D.C. and within the Indian American diaspora. With a background in anthropology, she investigates how people forge their identities and feel a sense of belonging as communities change around them. She lives in Shaw with her husband and two young sons and can often be found on neighborhood playgrounds. Shilpi received a fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities in 2021.This is her first book.

Helena Andrews-Dyer is a senior culture writer for The Washington Post, covering the intersection of popular culture, race, politics and art in the nation’s capital. In 2020, Helena was awarded two National Association of Black Journalists’ Salute to Excellence Awards for her longform feature “This Isn’t Another Horror Story About Black Motherhood.” Her third book, “The Mamas: Parenting in the Age of Everything,” will be released by Penguin RandomHouse in the spring of 2022. Helena’s work has appeared in Oprah Magazine, Marie Claire, Glamour, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Post Magazine, Essence, and OUT among other national publications.