This Month
4 Jim Myers: A Tough
Man Writing
Tenderly
7 The Altered Reality
of Brett Davis
9 Remember
Scrapbooks?
12 Escape from
Capitol Hill
14 Pamela Hairston:
Waging War with
Wo rd s
16 Floor to Ceiling
Vintage Books at
Capitol Hill Books
D e p a rt m e n t s
Vo i c e M a i l . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3
Ask Judith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 0
Spencer Says . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 2
Business Bits . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 3
Business Serv i c e s. . . . . . .2 6
D o w n L o a d . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 8
Capital Kids. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 5
S p o rt s. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 6
Kids’ Calendar . . . . . . . . . . . .3 7
In The Stars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 8
Community Calendar . . .3 8
C l a s s i f i e d s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 2
Vol. 2 No. 4 July 21 2000
o f
T h e
H i l l
It was a d a r k a n d
s t o rmy night…
In a recent ANC meeting it was suggested that my firm actively
solicited the Boys Town move to Capitol Hill and further, was
actively involved in the zoning considerations to make sure
that they could do what they wanted to do as a matter of right.
I’d like to take this opportunity to set the record straight. First,
as a business person that operates in the public domain, I am
governed by the laws, federal and local, that regulate the real estate
industry. A number of such laws dictate, and rightfully so, that I can
not discriminate as to whom I chose to do business with. We can split
hairs as to whether or not these laws apply to commercial properties
and whether or not you are in violation of the law if you chose to discriminate
against organizations that provide support services to various
groups of citizens in need. The only thing that I can do is to instruct
my agents that, when requested, they are to show every property that
we have that meets the needs of a prospective purchaser. To do otherwise
opens my company up to significant risk.
That said, we don’t actively go out and solicit organizations that are
providing social services in our neighborhood. In the case of Boys
Town, we were contacted by a member of their acquisition team who
happens to be a long term client of our firm. The request was to identify
any property that might fit their needs. Specifically, price, zoning
and size. After much research my agent reported that the only thing
that was on the market that remotely fit their needs and that they had
not already looked at was the Bogan site at 14th and Pennsylvania Ave.
and the price for that was significantly above their price range. They
asked for the details which we provided. As was our obligation to the
seller, we facilitated the contract negotiations but we did not hire, or
even recommend, zoning attorneys. Once the contract negotiations
were under way, we would have breached our fiduciary responsibility
to the seller to discuss this matter with anyone other than the principals.
I would like to point out at this juncture that it is my understanding
that Boys Town had made offers on a couple of publicly
owned properties in the District and failed at least in one case due to
lack of response by the DC government. Had the system functioned
more efficiently, Boys Town would never have come to us.
While making no statement as to the merits of this project, I am comfortable
that we are not the cause of any community disappointment
over the disposition of this property. It has sat fallow and in full view
for all to see since I came to the Hill in the early 70s. If our political
leadership had “a better idea” then it should have surfaced a long time
ago. It’s easy to say that you’ll put together a package of enticements
for a prospective developer but it’s quite another to deliver. A case in
point is a local project that should be supported by all that was promised
a letter of support from the Office of Economic Development last
March. As of this date, they haven’t been able to even generate a letter
much less a package of financial enticements.
This particular site was going to be developed commercially over 20
years ago. It is my understanding that the neighborhood opposed the
design and the project collapsed. As a result, the owner put a car wash
on that site. Zoning allowed this as a matter of right with no further
community input. For the next 20 years, this site, which could
have contributed to the progress of the neighborhood through the
last two recessions, has been nothing more than a large dumping
ground.
During that 20 year period this site has been off and on the market.
However, we, and apparently everyone else, have not been able to
interest anyone in developing the property. Most recently, we tried
to put together a mixed use development that would have included
an anchor store. However, the store operator had no interest in that
location. A popular refrain over the years. Located next to a Metro
entrance and on Pennsylvania Avenue, one would think that this
property would have been snapped up years ago. But it wasn’t.
Why? The perception is that that site is unattractive to prospective
customers and employees. The reasons are mostly rooted in public
policy and neglect. Years of failed housing polices that have given
the residents of the nearby public housing developments and their
immediate neighbors a substandard quality of life have contributed
to an image that has held prospective developers at bay. Believe as
we might in the commercial viability of the site, we are not the
ones that have to be comfortable with a multi-million dollar investment
in bricks and mortar.
Sites like this one, usually much smaller, dot our Capitol Hill landscape.
What most people don’t realize is that while zoning laws protect
against many uses without community input, they allow others
as a matter of right. When a matter-of-right user decides to purchase
one of these properties then we have no choices. Conversely,
when a developer wants to develop one of these sites in a fashion
more acceptable to the neighborhood, then it is critical that the
neighbors work constructively with that developer, get the best that
they can and move on. The collapse of the St. Coletta’s deal farther
up the avenue is a good example of something that should not have
happened. Now, that site sits ripe for a matter-of-right user that
may bring a use to the community that we may find less desirable.
Most difficult for me is that if I am actively marketing that property,
then I have no choice but to show and sell it to any organization
that might be in our marketplace. There is currently a major debate
raging at 7th and Mass Ave over a proposed residential develop -
ment. The issue, as usual, is parking. I don’t want to belittle the
parking issue because it is real and it strikes a chord within each of
us. However, remember two things: first, it is difficult for developers
to make these smaller sites work financially and second, that
when a seller wants to sell, it is his right to sell and if it’s not to this
developer it will be to the next developer/user.
Don Denton
An open letter to Capi tol
Hill about BOYS TOW N
To the Editor:
I appreciated being interviewed by
Ms. Curran and enjoyed the article she
wrote. I would like to add that for the
craft program on Wednesdays at 4PM,
I need parents to call ahead of time to
register their kids. This way I know I’ll
have enough materials. It was my
oversight for not mentioning this when
I spoke with Ms. Curran, but I would be
grateful if you could run this addendum
in your next issue or online.
Thanks,
RACHEL MEI T
Children’s Librarian, Northeast Branch
Library
See the Kid’s Calendar for more sum -
mertime events at the NE Librar y
To the Editor:
Just wanted to thank you about putting
the information about the fundraiser for
Mary Leonino up on the Voice website.
Bruce was very responsive, and got the
picture scanned in right away. You all
are wonderful!
SUZANNE WELLS
To the Editor:
Merci Beaucoup for Kristen Hartke’s
well-written article on “Opening A
Restaurant.” [So You Want to Open a
Restaurant, June 16, 2000]. It was a
pleasure to be interviewed by such a
professional.
Numerous patrons have given quite
complimentary comments on the article,
in particular and on your newspaper,
in general. The “Hill” is really reading
the “Voice.”
LYNNE BREAUX
Tunnicliff’s Tavern
To the Editor:
Somehow your
web site story on
the sign and its
removal at Lincoln
Park UMC got gremlined in the hard
copy [Was it Adam and Eve, Or Adam
and Steve, June 16, 2000] that hit my
steps this morning, and the church
became Capitol Hill United Methodist
Church, which of course is not on
Lincoln Park but on Seward Square.
It is particularly unfortunate, since
Capitol Hill UMC has been for more
than a year in the process of examining
the possibility of becoming a reconciling
congregation, the Methodists’ designation
of a UMC congregation that is
publicly open and welcoming to those
who identify themselves as gay, lesbian,
bisexual, and transgendered.
Such a transformation is not necessarily
a public process, but there are
any number of CHUMC members who
are going to be dismayed by the error,
given the delicate and time-consuming
nature of the congregation’s delibera -
tions.
DEAN M. WA K E F I E L D
Vice chair, Board of Trustees
Dean, and several others, were quick
to point out this er ror. The cor rection,
and Dean’s letter, were posted to the
web. Apologies to all.
www.voiceofthehill.com 3
Vo i cem a i l
The Voice of the Hill is published and
distributed monthly to Capitol Hill
residence and business locations.
The focus is on the community and
includes contiguous neighborhoods
from Gallaudet University to the
Navy Yard and from the Capitol to
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Publication and distribution is the
third Friday of each month.
Advertising deadline is the first of
the month preceding publication.
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Staff
Stephanie Cavanaugh,
Editor
Bruce Robey
WebMaster
Adele Robey
Graphic Design and Production
Jill Silva
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Advertising
Gene Miller, Church Editor
Larry Kaufer, Sports Editor
Patty Curran, Kids’ News Editor
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Phoenix Graphics, Inc.
T/A Voice of the Hill
and Stephanie Cavanaugh
Publishers
Contributing Writers
Judith Capen
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Duncan Spencer
Memberships
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Printing Industry of America
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Washington
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VOICE o f
T h e
H i l l
Celeste McCall
Rick Weber
Dear Voice of the Hill,
My name is Christopher Byrne. I am a
boy scout in Troop 500 here on Capitol
Hill. I am doing a service project this
month to become an Eagle scout. I am
collecting books for the library at
Watkins Elementary, part of the Capitol
Hill Cluster School. We are looking for
good used or new books for early readers
in first and second grades. My goal
is 200 books, which librarian Cathy
Pfeiffer tells me would exceed the yearly
number she can buy with her DC
Public School budget.
I will be collecting at Capitol Hill
Baptist Church from 9-10, and at St.
Mark’s Episcopal Church from 10:30
until 11:30, on Sunday morning July
23. People can also drop books at my
house, 641 E St., SE, any time before
Saturday July 29, when we will be sorting
and fixing up the books. I or another
scout will pick up books from anyone
giving at least 10; just give me a
call at 543-8852.
I hope you can help me get the word
out about this project. I’ll let you know
how it goes. Thanks!
CHRIS BYRNE
Hi Voice of the Hill,
Just a note to say how much I enjoy
reading Voice of the Hill each month.
The web site is fine for quick research
but the hard copy, as we now say,
always feels special.
And it’s too informative to scan, so I
set aside time and a cup of tea to read
each month’s issue.
Thanks for providing a real service to
us all.
LOU IVEY
This second annual poetry and fiction issue was a tough one for us. Voice
readers submitted an amazing volume of poetry and fiction, many sending
half a dozen or more submissions. As you can imagine, the selection
process was torturous. What we looked for—beyond good writing—was a
variety of rhythms and tones, and an emotional balance. Some of the
pieces are funny, some are sad; each tugs the heart in a different way. We
wish we had space for more. Perhaps next year we will.
R E AD ER S
W R I T E
This symbol
indicates a
submission in the
annal poetry and
fiction issue.
4 www.voiceofthehill.com
during the ’70s, and the rising tide
of black student activism was leaving
a particularly high water mark. Jim
found himself up to his waist in it,
first as a reporter and then as someone
simply trying to get black and
white people to talk to each other.
In 1978, he moved up to Gannett’s
flagship paper in Rochester, NY, the
Democratand Chronicle. There, he
and a colleague collaborated on a
major piece on the history of the
black settlement in Rochester, and a
second piece on “Being Black,” a
report on the lives of black folks in
Rochester.
That city’s street corners provided
a springboard for a series he started
in the mid ’80s called “Walking
Rochester,” in which he simply
strolled the neighborhoods of
Rochester and wrote about what he
saw and heard.
After the series s tarted, Jim began
to get warnings about how dangerous
it would be for a white man to
walk through the black sections of
town. He listened, but kept on walking.
Not only did he survive and
continue to get good stories, he met
BY GENE MI L LER Jim Myers is a bear of a man
who writes of his life in the
15th and C SE neighborhood
of Capitol Hill where
he’s lived since the early
’90s. Part of the power of
his work is that the pocket of the Hill
where he lives is mostly black—and
he is white. Part of the tenderness
and humanity of his writing comes
from the fact that his wife is black.
T h rough his wo rds white fo l ks
eavesdrop on an intimate conversation
about race that a brother has in
his heart, under his roof, and on his
street corners.
“I’ve always thought that there is
a good story on every corner, if only
you can find it,” Jim says. He started
his hunt on the street corners of
Ithaca, NY, where he grew up. After a
brief try at Ithaca’s Cornell
University, where his father was a
professor, Jim took off for the street
corners of southern Spain. That’s
where he really started writing about
what he saw. His first book was
about bullfighters. He didn’t want to
be Hemingway, he says, “but I wondered
what bullfighters were thinking
about. What was going on in
their heads.”
After ten or so years in Spain, he
returned to Ithaca in the mid ’70s
and started writing for the local
Gannett paper. “I wrote news, features,
columns, craziness: everything,”
is the way he describes it. It
happened that Cornell was something
of a hotbed of student activism
ries were more compelling and more
important than what he was writing
for the newspaper.
He left USA Today in 1996 to work
on what he now calls the best story
he ever wrote. It appeared in the
March, 2000 issue of the Atlantic
Monthly [read it on the web at
http://www. theatlantic.com/
issues/2000/03/myers.htm]. “Notes
on the Murder of Thirty of My
Neighbors” documents the violent
deaths that have been part of Jim’s
life since he and his wife moved to
the neighborhood at 15th and C.
The documentation is careful: dates,
places, and names. He even has the
places plotted on a map of the Hill.
The heart of the piece, though, is
not a detached catalogue of horrors,
but the embodied grieving at the
loss of friends and neighbors, the
bewilderment, fear and anger at the
harm that is being done, and ultimately
the struggle of a deeply car -
ing man to hang on to his humanity
and to help his family, friends and
neighbors hang on to theirs. “When
I was first on the Hill,” Jim relates,
“We used to go around the neighborhood
in the summertime with
some kids pulling a wagon and sell -
ing lemonade and watermelon. One
of the kids I met back then was just
shot last month. He’s still in bad
shape...” and you can hear the mingling
of sadness and anger in his
voice.
He’s received responses to and
compliments on the piece from all
Deborah Stith, a Rochester activist
and businesswoman whom he
would later marry.
Gannett had meanwhile started its
national paper, USA Today, which it
staffed in the early days by bringing
people in from its smaller papers
around the country. Jim came down
in 1986 as a “loaner” from Rochester
and ended up staying on.
At first, he wrote cover stories, but
then the cover story writers were dispersed
to the various departments of
the paper. He ended up in the sports
section, where he first wrote about
race and sports and later, as the section
drifted away from serious topics,
straight sports. By then, he and
his wife had taken up residence in
the Car Barn. Later, they bought the
house they now live in across from
Payne Elementary.
Meanwhile, Jim kept his eye on
the Hill’s street corners, focusing in
on what he was walking past while
he was on his way to USA Today to
write about batting averages and
yards-per-carry. What he saw were
shattered people—even dead people
—and he decided that these s to-
I fit ta kes a tough man to make a t e n d e r
ch i cke n ,h ow tough a man does it
ta keto write t e n d e rlyabout the m u rd e rs
of th i rty or so of his neighbors? Talk to
Jim Mye rsa little and yo u’ll find out.
Activist/Author Jim Myers T
According to Jim, a main part of the problem
for white folks is that there just aren’t
enough black folks to go around.
www.voiceofthehill.com 5
over the world. He wondered
about the reaction
of Capitol Hill residents
—particularly those
in the more gentrified neighborhoods
west of 13th St.—but found
them largely thoughtful and supportive.
“I’ve got a much broader
view of Capitol Hill. I see a lot more
clearly now that it is not one-dimensional.”
The Atlantic article was part of a
larger story that Jim had also been
working to tell. This year, Lawrence
Hill Books from Chicago published
Afraid of the Dark: What Whites and
Blacks Need to Know About Each Other.
This book is the outg rowth of all the
street corners he has visited, and the
stories he has heard on them. It’s
about how we need to learn to talk
and to listen to each other, how little
we really know about each other,
and about how much we think we
“know” that just isn’t so.
According to Jim, a main part of
the problem for white folks is that
there just aren’t enough black folks
to go around. Many whites go
through their lives without ever really
knowing anything about blacks
beyond gossip, or the sensational
news stories they read in the papers
or see on TV.
This chimed true for me. My
mother told me that the fir st time I
ever saw a black person, I walked up
to him and rubbed his arm, and
then announced, “It doesn’t come
off!” I had no experience of—or
frame of reference for—black people.
It’s dramatically different for the
black community. You can’t live as a
black person in the United S tates
and not be aware of the majority
white culture and how it impinges
on you. It’s everywhere: radio, TV,
newspapers. You’re constantly being
measured against it.
Just how subtle yet powerful this
influence is first sank in for me when
someone pointed out that “flesh-colored”
Band-Aids meant bandages
that matched the skin colors of
white folks. By now it is of course a
commonplace, but I simply had
never paid attention before. It obviously
hadn’t occurred to Johnson
and Johnson either—or, worse, it
had occurred and they decided to
ignore it.
Jim’s book looks at these issues
and more. He explores how we
divide ourselves, and particularly
how we ignore what we really do
have in common—wanting safe
neighborhoods, rewarding careers
and healthy families—in favor of
half-baked or entirely false notions
about our supposed differences:
“White folks are cold; black folks are
warm. White folks are rational; black
folks are emotional....” and so on.
Throughout, his voice is calm and
low-key. He’s not selling magic dust
or easy answers. He knows it’s going
to take a lot of work; he believes it is
worth it.
Jim not only writes about the need
for understanding and change, he’s
one of our most powerful local
activists. Right now, he’s working on
the Kentucky Courts Neighborhood
Task Force. “We did some agitating
some years ago,” he says in his
understated way, “and that helped
to get Kentucky Courts closed down
as a public health hazard. We’re
working now
to get it redeveloped
as
mixed-income
housing. Sort
of like the
Ellen Wilson
project, only
on a much smaller scale.”
His agitation isn’t without a sense
of humor either: some time back, he
caused a stir by putting up posters
around the neighborhood proposing
the Capitol Hill Crack House and
Alley Tour as a means of drawing
attention to the lack of police interest
in the drug trafficking in his
neighborhood.
He’s got his eye on some future
projects, too: He’s been brought in as
a “technical consultant” to the new
CBS police show The District, “a new
little adventure that evolved off my
Atlantic article,” he says.
And he’s thinking about expanding
that Atlantic piece. “We thought
we had it right in the ’60s when we
abolished Jim Crow laws and passed
the Civil Rights Act. But something
went wrong.” He hopes that tracking
the history of his neighborhood
since then will help show what happened.
And it will be with an eye
toward, as he puts it “...making my
neighborhood a place where it is a
reasonable proposition to try to raise
a kid. And where the kids who go to
Payne School would not be at risk .”
Gene Miller is the Religion Editor of the
Voice of the Hill
ns the Corner for Inspiration
Near right: Myers’s
book which is an out -
growth of all the
streetcorners he’s
visited and the stories
he’s heard. Far
right,one of Myers’s
provocative posters.
While Washington may be a place
of stranger-than-fiction occurrences,
local author Brett Davis continues to
push the envelope of what even
jaded politicos would accept as plausible.
From his mind springs altered
realities, where bloodthirsty ghouls
or mischievous elves are accepted as
part of everyday life.
The 35 year-old author has published
four novels since1995, has
completed a fifth, and is beginning
work on his sixth. His fir st book,
Faery Convention, is set in Washington
and is the story of a par t
human-part elf congressional staffer
whose job on the Senate Super -
natural Affairs Committee places
him at the center of a budding political
movement that culminates in a
homeland for his brethren elves and
other paranormal creatures.
Any similarity to a neighbor, living
or dead, is coincidental and no t
intended by the author.
His second novel, Hair of the Dog,
pits werewolves and their compatriots
against the forces of greed and
misguided hatred in a battle to eradi -
cate the wolf men. Bone Wars, Brett’s
third and fourth “novel,” is a twopart
series set in the Wild West of
the late 19th and early 20th centuries
where world-renowned paleontologists
struggle with space
aliens in a hunt for dinosaur bones.
A sort of Louis L’Amour meets the XFiles,
he says.
He’s currently looking for a publisher
for his fifth novel, which is the
story of a James Bond-like character
that happens to be a zombie.
Surrounded by the down-to-earth
ambience of Jimmy T’s, Davis recently
explained how living on Capitol
Hill offers him the time and
resources to conjure up bizarre
worlds of supernaturals and extraterrestrials.
Between bites of a grilled
cheese sandwich, he notes, “Being
close-in is helpful because I can find
reference material” at the Library of
Congress or various museum bookstores.
Brett and his wife live in a
condo near Eastern Market, so “I
don’t have to fool with a yard,” he
says. He doesn’t fool with much of a
commute either. Instead, he spends
45 minutes to an hour writing each
evening, churning out two or three
pages—which adds up to a novel
over the course of a year.
When Davis is not engaged in the
struggles of werewolves and zombies,
he is a full-time Washington reporter
for the Huntsville Times in Alabama,
where he grew up. His experience as
a hard-nosed journalist provides fodder
for much of his strange tales.
Brett’s novels allow him to combine
his professional interest in realworld
events with his fascination
with the bizarre, blurring the line
between fact and fiction. His journalistic
training enables him to
frame the puzzle, but then he gets to
simply make up the missing pieces.
The main characters in Bone Wars,
are named after turn-of-the-century
paleontologists Othniel Charles
Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope.
Davis draws on the well-known
rivalry of Marsh and Cope in the
early days of dinosaur discoveries,
but throws in meddling space aliens
that bring the fossil-hunting scientists
together in a battle to protect
the ancient reptilian bones from
extraterrestrial export.
Davis also drew from news
accounts in describing the rivaling
extraterrestrials in Bone Wars. He
says some of the earliest sightings of
space creatures following World War
II involved tall blonde Nordics or
lizard type aliens. Brett’s novel places
those celestial beings at the turn-ofthe-
century in a race to capture prehistoric
fossils.
6 www.voiceofthehill.com
Gnome Is Where the Heart Is
Hill Author’s
A l t e red Reality
BY RICK WEBER
T h e re ’s a place on Capitol Hill where elves and faeri e s
c o e x i st peacefully with va mp i res, where we rewo lve s
a s s e rt their civil rights for social acceptance, and where
zombie inve st i ga to rs solve crimes and myst e ri e s .
Three of Davis’s fanciful (to say the least) movels.
www.voiceofthehill.com 7
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202/544-4386
hillhouse@erols.com
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Playing Bridge
BY TOM HAMILT O N
Jack and Jan and Bruce and I were playing bridge in the
farthest, darkest corner of our freshman dormitor y
lounge. No one else was stir ring. It was late, or very
early. We should have all been studying for midterms, or catching up on
needed sleep. We were not the best of students. We were also not the
best of friends. But we shared a common passion, for hearts and spades
and clubs and diamonds, for the excuse they gave us not to concentrate
on anything important, like solving equations or conjugating foreign
verbs or understanding Kafka. “Four hearts,” I said, staring at my hand
and overreaching. “Jesus,” Jack, my partner, East to my West, muttered,
almost gasping. I thought he was reacting to my bid. Could it have really
been that bad? Had Jack my partner once again deceived me by his careless
bidding? Did he not possess the king? Jan then, who was North, patted
my sleeve to get my attention. He pointed South to Bruce, his partner,
who was convulsing. “Jesus,” Jack repeated, not in prayer.
Now Bruce, it can be safely said, was always something of an odd one.
He wore his pale hair short, in military style, exposing scars where twenty
surgeons failed him, leaving the part of Bruce’s brain intact where he
played bridge, but saving too the part that gave him headaches, dizziness,
and seizures. Jan had heard about the seizures. He told Jack about them.
Jack told me. But none of us had ever seen one. It was pretty interesting,
truth be told, like an accident can be if you’re not in it. “Jesus,” Jack said,
rising, “guys, I’m outta here.” “Me, too,” Jan said, pushing back his chair.
And so they left me there with Bruce, who didn’t know or care that I
remained. Or so I thought.
I checked Jack’s hand and saw he had the king. We would have made
the contract. “Damn the luck,” I said, and looked at Bruce to see if he’d
respond, which he did not. I dealt myself a game of solitaire. I never
had much luck at solitaire, but I kept at it. What else was there for me to
do? In terms of Bruce, God knows, I didn’t have a clue. And yet I didn’t
think that I should leave him there alone, and I thought less of Jack and
Jan for doing so, and leaving me. I played a dozen games at least, never
making any headway. Until, at last, he stirred. He came to, slowly. I
wondered how much he could see. How much he understood. He rolled
his eyes in a kind of goofy way that, had he done it purposely, would
surely have been comical. Then suddenly his eyes cleared up, and darkened,
and came into focus. They were focusing on me. He stood with
effort, and overturned the table. Cards skittered over the linoleum. He
started to walk like a B-movie zombie. He was not steady on his feet.
“Don’t slip on the cards,” I warned. “Do you want any help?”
Bruce stopped and, still with difficulty, turned to face me. He had
something to say. “You are a snake,” he said. “You’re a snake in the
grass.” And with that he was satisfied. He had said what he’d wanted to
say. He walked away and it seemed to me, as I righted the table and
picked up the cards, that his gait was gaining confidence.
Tom Hamilton is a playwright, with plays produced in DC, Chicago and
Seattle, a painter with one-artist and group shows in Chicago and DC, a former
ANC Commissioner, and the founder of the Saturday Achievement Academy.
R E A D E R S
W R I T E
Davis has just begun work on his
sixth book, which is based on actual
news reports of cow mutilations in
Alabama. Local residents were said to
be up in arms about “black helicopters”
and fearful of global conspiracies.
Undoubtedly Davis’s version of
accounts will include supernatural
heroes in a tangled struggle between
good and evil.
The quirkiness of Davis’s stories
straddle or contain elements of several
genres, from fantasy to science
fiction, to historical novels, and even
westerns. Davis says he doesn’t think
about how a book will be classified
when he’s writing, he just writes
what’s interesting to him. But he
does acknowledge that having a
book listed as mainstream helps
sales.
A story with aliens and spacecraft
has a chance of getting labeled
mainstream, but a book with faeries
and other supernaturals in it is aut omatically
pegged for a smaller niche
audience. “If it has elves in it, it’s
fantasy,” Davis says a little wistfully.
Yet in this information age, an
author has options for marketing
himself. Davis has his own web site,
www. foto411.com/brettdavis/,
which features a “fantasy” photo of
the author with stranger-than-fiction
characters President Nixon and
Elvis. His web site also offers a
“bonus” short story that laments the
clean up of New York City, and
describes an official program to
release criminals back on the stree t
to restore the metropolis to its natu -
ral state—like the reintroduction of
wolves to the wild.
Davis had
his first
novel published
at the
same time
and by the
same publisher,
Baen
Books, as
former
House
Speaker Newt Gingrich’s sappy story
about lovers struggling in the midst
of World War II. Davis says he once
pointed out that fact to the thenspeaker,
but Gingrich only feigned a
response. There’s a joke around town
that Gingrich’s book sold so well
that overstock was turned into pulp
for toilet paper. Whether the joke is
true or not, Davis went on to publish
a total of four novels with Baen, so it
appears that Davis got the last laugh.
Baen Books has its own web site,
www.baen.com, which provides the
first six chapters of Davis’s latest two
books, Bone Wars and Two Tiny
Claws, free-of-charge so that you can
entangle yourself in the fossil-hunting
yarn while you wait for the post
office to deliver your online purchase.
Faery Convention, Davis’s first
book, is out of print, but a quick
search on Amazon.com produced a
bookseller offering the novel for $5.
Rick Weber is a long-time resident of
Capitol Hill and a full-time journalist
with Inside Washington Publishers. He
is a science fiction fan and an occasion -
al contributor to the Voice. Our thanks
to reader, Preet Kang, for suggesting that
we profile Brett Davis in this special
issue.
Davis’s web page
Log on!
Join in!
The discussion
is ongoing.
w w w.
v o i c e o f t h e h i l l . c o m
8 www.voiceofthehill.com
mind). I think that what it all comes
down to is the fact that there is no
way to run away from yourself or
your past. Sure, in the beginning
this was all a big wonderful adventure
for the two of us...star crossed
and forbidden love always is...but I
don’t know what made us think that
we could outsmart the fates.
I’ll never forget how handsome
you looked that day. Thinning
blonde hair tumbling over your
brow, green eyes flashing (even the
glass one), and that decades old high
school letter jacket you wore in a
desperate attempt to hold on to the
fifteen minutes of fame you used up
making the winning touchdown
your junior year. You just stood
there, in front of my cage, staring,
plunking in quarters one after the
other until Dirty Bob chased you out
of the tent with that nail-spiked
board he called Ol’ Pumpkin. The
reality, my love, it that you are a joe
with a heart of gold (which I’m sure
the doctors will figure out sooner or
later) and a wonderful future ahead
of you at the canning factory. I am
just some poor, dumb kid who misses
her home. You can take the freak
out of the circus, but you can’t take
the years of isolation, force feeding,
cattle prod electric shock training
silly crying —my back is getting
soaked.
Love,
Martha, the Amazing Salamander
Girl (and Her All-Tadpole Orchestra)
Tom Avila is an extremely nomadic
writer/artist residing, for the moment,
on Capitol Hill. His mother would like
people to know that he had a very nor -
mal childhood and she has no idea why
he writes the things he does.
and unsanitary living conditions out
of the girl. By now I’m safely back
on the midway having breakfast
with Four Armed Suzy and Gimpy
the Snake Boy. I’ve missed them so.
I hope that you don’t mind, but
I’ve taken your bowling ball and
tackle box to remember you by. I’ll
never forget that crazy night trying
to get bowling shoes to fit over the
webs in my feet!!
I’ll miss you...I better stop all this
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You leave with a picture
that’s ready to hang!
www.frame-of-mine.com
Darling,
If you are reading
this you know that I
am gone. It also
means that you managed
to chew through the ropes,
shimmied out of the leg manacles,
unlocked the closet door from the
inside, got past the dogs and worked
your way back to the main road.
After that you somehow flagged a
ride to the filling station, more than
likely with one of the lonely, sweaty,
overweight truckers of undiscriminating
sexuality who drive that
stretch of highway, and then caught
the bus that passes through every
other day and are now safely home
after only twelve hours—thirteen if
you stopped in Saddler Springs to
shop at the Day Olde Doughnutz
Outlet...I hope it was a pleasant trip
for you.
I don’t know that I can tell you
with words why I needed to leave, so
I left a tape in the VCR of a multimedia
modern dance performance
piece that I developed to show you
the emotional turmoil that I have
been going through over the last few
months (p.s. the llama, donkey and
team of weightlifters were charged to
your Mastercard—I hope you don’t
R E AD E RS
W R I T E
Cradled by the City
I am cradled by the city.
I am wrapped in a blanket
of distant intimacy, carried
away and left where I s tand.
Horns bleat, garbage trucks growl,
footsteps keep a passing rhythm.
People go by,
faces hidden in the pavement,
fearing the burst of emotion
captured in a stranger’s eye.
Thankfully they do
for the end of silent yearning,
weaving the city’s fabric,
would leave me naked and cold.
Drew McCarthy wrote this while drinking coffee on the sidewalk at Le Bon Cafe
one morning
R E A D E R S
W R I T E
www.voiceofthehill.com 9
It’s ironic that while technolo -
gy hastens the arrival of a
paper-free society, the hobby
of scrapbooking has experienced
a meteoric rise. You
remember scrapbooks—those black
construction paper pages your mom
bound together to display your
report cards, awards from school,
your Boy Scout badges and the dried,
faded flowers from your prom corsage?
That was then—today scrapbooking
has become a 300-million-dollar
industry that employs materials and
techniques as sophisticated as those
used by archivists and conservators.
Scrapbooks are no longer just a
binder for photos—here’s an excerpt
from the mission statement of
Creative Memories, a 13-year-old
consultant-based business at the
forefront of the scrapbooking renaissance:
“We believe in the importance
of preserving the past, enriching
the present, and inspiring hope
for the future. We strive to re-establish
the tradition of the photo historian-
storyteller and the importance
of photo preservation and journaling
for future generations.” Pretty
heady stuff.
“I think there is an increasing
need, a desire, for people to touch
the things we communicate with,”
says Hill resident Maureen Graney,
whose company, Blackberry Press,
Inc., produces a line of books for
Creating Keepsakes magazine, the
largest circulation magazine on
scrapbooking. “It’s a very tactile
medium,” she says. “Scrapbookers
use embossed paper, mulberry paper
with frayed fibers, and techniques
like layering to create three-dimensional
images on their pages.”
The array of products available to
scrapbookers is vast—and growing.
First, the all-important pages. Both
Graney and Kathleen Wiegand, who
is a Hill-based consultant for
Creative Memories, say that scrapbook
pages must be both acid and
lignin free. These harmful sub -
stances will cause yellowing and
deteriorate photos and other memorabilia
you are trying to preser ve.
It can’t be stressed enough that all
materials used in scrapbooking be
“photo-safe.” Creating Keepsakes
magazine even has a seal of
approval, the “CK-OK,” which is
awarded to products that meet their
standards. Beyond the proper paper,
the plastics used for protecting pages
and photos should be PVC free and
made with polypropylene, polyethylene,
or polyester. Adhesives should
be odorless and colorless when dry,
non-toxic, and acid-free, and it’s better
to use photo corners on photos
rather than adhesives. Finally, inks
should be waterproof, fade resistant,
permanent, quick drying, and nontoxic.
Scrapbooking has spawned an
industry of accessories. For mounting
photos and other items, there is
photo tape, photo mounting corners,
or acid-free glues. Pages can be
protected from fingerprints or other
accidents of nature by enclosing
them in plastic sleeves. Pocket pages
hold memorabilia that won’t lie flat.
Then, pages are collected and
bound in an album. Hallmark offers
both simple and decorative, themed
three-ring binders in large and small
formats; Creative Memories sells an
album with a flex-hinge binding
that allows pages to lie flat, and
pages can be easily removed and reinserted
into new albums.
Now the fun begins. Scrapbooking
isn’t just about preserving
photos…it’s more like creating a pictorial
history. Scrapbookers use
“journaling” to document circumstances
surrounding their photos.
“Lots of people get really hung up in
the beginning with journaling,” says
Wiegand. “They ask me, ‘what
should I say? I’m not a writer!’ But
it’s a really important part of preserving
the memor y.”
Creative Memories offers these
hints on journaling:
• Include meaningful documentation
—the who, what, where and
why, of the photos;
• Add quick captions and comments,
which can be quotes from
the subjects of the photos; and
• If writing a nar rative seems
daunting, try bullet journaling,
where you present a bulleted list of
details about the photos on the
page.
How journaling is presented is a
matter of personal preference. For
those more concerned with the look
of their page, Creating Keepsakes
magazine sells CDs with fonts specially
selected for journaling. Those
who regard handwriting as an
important part of history can write
with gel pens, callig raphy pens, and
markers.
Wiegand has experienced firsthand
the value of handwritten journaling.
“We lost my dad this past
spring,” she says, “and I have a few
scrapbook pages where I asked him
to do the journaling (see photo).
There’s one with some pictures of
me as a little girl, and I asked him to
write down, for my girls, what I was
like. That is a very precious page for
us.”
Beyond photos and journaling
there’s a whole world of embellishments…
stickers, die-cuts shapes,
paper punches, templates for cropping
photos and colored papers into
decorative shapes, scissors that yield
wavy, scalloped, and deckled edges,
ink and rubber stamp sets.
If you’re thinking of creating a
scrapbook, Graney says to start
small. “Don’t think of it as scrap -
booking your whole life! And don’t
think you have to do things chronologically.
You could do a book each
year of ‘My Favorite Photos’ where
you write down why you love those
shots.”
She also says to keep your first
layouts simple, with no more than
three photos per page, and give
yourself time to develop your own
style. “This is a hobby, not unlike
cooking or gardening, that takes
some inspiration. You may have a lot
of great photos and supplies, but it
takes seeing others’ pages and doing
a few of your own before you start
hitting your stride.”
Supplies for scrapbooking, as well
as idea books and magazines, are
available at area craft stores like
Michael’s. Graney says the best place
for scrapbook supplies in our area is
My Scrapbook Store in Oakton, VA.
Creative Memories consultants,
like Wiegand, sponsor “crop parties”
where you pay a fee up front, arrive
with a group of photos, and work
alongside other attendees to create
scrapbook pages. “It’s a great way to
start,” says Wiegand,” because you
get immediate feedback about how
you’re doing.” For serious devotees,
there are “Crop ‘till You Drop”
workshops sponsored by Creative
Memories where scrapbookers create
as many pages as they can during a
one-day workshop.
According to a recent Time maga-
E-books.
Palm pilots.
Digital photos,
on-line magazines,
e - m a i l .
Does
anyone use
paper
anymore?
BY PATTY CURRAN
10 www.voiceofthehill.com
If all this seems time-consum -
ing…well, it can be. But Wiegand
says the rewards are worth it. “It
might take an hour to do a page, but
you’ll feel so good when it’s done!”
Graney says that scrapbooking takes
her back to a time when she was
more likely to let her creativity flow.
“Scrapbooking materials are like toys
for grown-up girls. Remember how
we all had our diaries with the little
lock and keys and our autograph
books—well, this is a return to the
fun we had with scissors and paper
when we were little girls.”
Our resident expert scrapbookers
have lots of summer scrapbook
ideas. Graney’s just given birth to
her second son, and her cronies in
the scrapbook field have sent her
oodles of supplies for a baby scrapbook.
Luckily for her, one thoughtful
friend sent her an already-for -
matted scrapbook for the first twelve
months of her baby’s life—all she
has to do is insert a photo each
month (what a great baby shower
gift)! Wiegand and her family soon
depart for a three-week trip to
Ireland, which is sure to yield quite a
few scrapbook pages—I wonder how
many shades of green acid- and
lignin-free pages she’ll find?
Patty Curran is the editor of our Capital
Kids section
zine article, women make up 99% of
scrapbookers, and it’s a safe bet that
98% of those women are making
scrapbooks of their kids. But many
of them are also creating book s
whose subjects are the past—photos
of their parents and grandparents
that have been lying neglected in
shoeboxes in their mother’s closets.
The advent of machines that can
replicate, reduce, or enlarge photos
means those old pictures can live on
for generations to come. Here on the
Hill, both MotoPhoto and CPI Photo
have machines that can copy exis ting
prints. Graney says that making
a color copy of a photo works well
too, as most color copiers, like the
ones at Kinko’s, are stocked with
acid-free paper (ask to make sure).
Another popular product for
working with older paper products
(think marriage certificates, newspaper
clippings) is Archival Mist, a
spray that renders all papers acid
free.
For more advice on preserving
family heirlooms, look for Caring for
Your Family Treasures, to be published
by Harry Abrams this fall.
Authors Jane and Richard Long, who
are parishioners at St. James
Episcopal Church here on the Hill,
offer pages of tips from professional
conservators on caring for scrapbooks
and all kinds of other family
keepsakes.
Fine Dining in an
Elegant Victorian Atmosphere
Dinner Specials Sunday through Thursday
$18.74 Pre-Theatre menu
5:30pm –6:30pm Daily
Far left: Handwriting
is history—Kathleen
Wiegand’s father
writes about her as
a little girl.
Left: A page from
Kathleen Wiegand’s
scrapbook. Every
day events made
special—this is a
Beanie Baby birthday
party.
www.voiceofthehill.com 11
A page from Kathleen Wiegand’s scrapbook.
666 Pennsylvania Avenue, SE
Washington, DC 20003 • 202 547-2100
Mon-Fri 9-7 • Sat 9-5
dinner, as well as accommodations
and very accurate directions. The
rest was really our own explorations,
based on the things we like to do.”
Holly’s job was to convince readers
to do the things they suggested:
“It’s persuasion writing, to sell this
day and its itinerary. The narrative
format is designed to provide a nice
day for people who don’t have the
luxury of time.”
So, after a week in the office—
John is a political science professor
at George Washington University,
while Holly works for Physicians for
Human Rights—they packed up and
took off pretty much every weekend
were a couple traveling on our own.
Now we really have to slow our pace
down and consider the girls.”
Luckily, the bulk of the work was
done before Holly and John had to
worry about car seats and port-acribs.
“Boy, we were flyin’,” says
Holly of the travel required to put
together the first edition.
“I spent two months on the initial
research,” says John, “mapping out
where we were going, how we would
get there, where we would stay,
where we might eat, what different
kinds of activities were available. The
editors asked us to provide itineraries
that included breakfast, lunch, and
12 www.voiceofthehill.com
BY KRISTEN HARTKE The premise for the book
sounded like a good one: A
Perfect Day in Washington
would give its readers a
dozen or more “narrated
itineraries” of how to spend an
absolutely wonderful day exploring
the capital of the free world, as told
by long-time Capitol Hill residents
Holly Burkhalter and John
Fitzpatrick. They wrote several chapters
and sold an agent on the concept.
While A Perfect Day didn’t get a
nibble, the agent did get a bite from
Globe Pequot Press, publishers of a
travel book series called Quick
Escapes, who were looking to do a
book about short excursions from
the Washington, DC area.
First Holly said “No way!” and
then John talked her into it. “It was
daunting,” says Holly, “because we
were expected to produce this book
in a very compressed time frame and
it seemed like too much to me. But
John really wanted to do it and he
thought we could make it work.”
That was in 1995, when Holly and
John had been married more than
10 years and were in the process of
adopting their first child, Grace,
from China. “It did help take our
minds off the adoption process,”
says Holly. “We started working on
the book in June and we finished in
November, just a few days before we
left for China to pick up Grace.”
The history of Quick Escapes provides
a timeline of their g rowing
family, and evolving priorities. The
first edition, published in 1996, was
dedicated to Grace; the second edi -
tion came along in 1998 and was
dedicated to their second daughter,
Josie, who arrived from Vietnam earlier
that year. The third edition,
which is expected in September,
does not herald the arrival of another
child, but, rather, for Holly and
John, the completion of their family.
“In the beginning,” says John, “we
for about four months during that
summer of ’95. “We’ve always liked
to travel around the area,” says
Holly, “so we actually knew several
of our destinations quite well. But we
got to go to some new places like the
Brandywine River Valley in
Delaware, which we just love.”
Of course, even the most happilymarried
couples might find it tough
to write a book together. But Holly
and John seem to have found a way
to make it work out, based on their
individual talents.
“I develop the itinerary,” says
John, “and plan the trips, figuring
out the scenic routes and how to get
from here to there, and Holly essen -
tially writes all the text. The description,
the narration, is, for the most
part, her work.” He laughs, “I want
to be a travel writer and I can’t
write,” and Holly joins in, “And I
want to be a travel writer and I can’t
get to Peabody School without a
map!”
Good humor helped them survive
doing the second and third editions
with children in tow, and the World
Wide Web made an enormous contribution
to the necessary research.
“John was able to do an extraordi -
nary amount of updating on the
Internet,” observes Holly, while John
adds that the new edition is expanded
to include web addresses as well
as new locations.
They have found, too, that parenthood
has caused them to view their
travels differently; John remembers
that the first trip he and Holly took
to Pittsburgh involved visiting the
Carnegie Museum and eating out in
an elegant restaurant, but “this time
we went to the Children’s Museum.
And it was great!”
Not surprisingly, Holly and John
are now quite interested in the idea
of travel writing from a child-friendly
angle. “One of the things you
notice when you have little kids,”
says Holly, “is how many of those
fancy bed-and-breakfasts don’t take
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www.voiceofthehill.com 13
kids, and you start to look at restaurants
with an eye to how they welcome
children.”
One thing they’ve learned is that
their family membership to the
Capital Children’s Museum includes
a reciprocity agreement with children’s
museums across the countr y,
allowing them free entrance at nearby
facilities in Philadelphia,
Pittsburgh, Richmond, and in
Pennsylvania Dutch country, to
name a few. “We’ve also gotten quite
interested in amusement parks and
resorts that are family-oriented,”
says John, “and it would be fun to
write some articles about those
places.”
The kids are now veteran travelers,
with their own opinions and
favorites. “One of our friends,”
laughs Holly, “refers to these weekend
trips as “The Forced March to
Fun.” Sometimes, with the pressure
of deadlines, they really do feel that
way. But, Holly adds, “we are seeing
things now through our daughters’
eyes. We took them to this resort,
Willow Valley, near Lancaster (PA),
and they talked for weeks about the
ride they took in a horse-drawn carriage.
It’s interesting, because that
was such a small part of the whole
trip, but it was obviously a big memory
for them.”
Which is exactly what travel writing
is all about. Holly and John ’s
itineraries are mapping out memories
for future travelers—as well as for
themselves. And what about the
original travel book idea, that
“Perfect Day” in Washington? “Well,
let me put it this way,” says John,
“We haven’t thrown away the disk.”
Quick Escapes: Washington, DC by
Holly Burkhalter and John
Fitzpatrick will be published by
Globe Pequot Press in Fall 2000 and
should be available at Trover Books
(221 Pennsylvania Ave., SE) and B.
Dalton Booksellers (Union
Station).You can also check local
used bookstores for Holly
Burkhalter’s lovely memoir and
cookbook, Four Midwestern Sisters’
Christmas Book, which was published
in 1991 by Viking Penguin and is
currently out of print.
Freelance writer Kristen Hartke recently
traveled to one of Holly and John ’s rec -
ommended quick escapes, Bethany
Beach, Delaware.
Let Thom put a S O L D
sign on your house.
Thom Burn s Thom Burn s
Serving Capitol Hill for 22 years and counting.
202 547-5805 Office
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The National Capital Bank has become a
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14 www.voiceofthehill.com
In its “Close to Home” section,
The Washington Post published
Hairston’s compelling account of the
murder of a young man two blocks
from her house—an event that
recalled the shooting of two
teenagers right across the street from
her house earlier that year. Under
the headline, “God Knows What
Tomorrow Will Bring,” Hairston
wrote, “…I live in a drug zone. I live
in a murder zone. I live 15 blocks
from the Capitol.”
If her clarion call about the violence
in a neighborhood in the shadow
of the Capitol sounds familiar, it
is because she is a neighbor and
friend of Jim Myers, who is also profiled
in this issue. Myers is the
author of an article that was published
in the March issue of The
BY PAT TY CURRAN
Interviewing Pamela Hairston isn’t
easy. One minute, you’re sticking to
your outline, asking about her letters
that appear with increasing regular ity
in the pages of prominent newspapers
and magazines; the next
you’re having an impassioned discussion
about her dismay at the likely
presidency of “W,” her idea for
shoes with interchangeable bows,
the blight of “hoochie mamas in the
‘hood,” and Oprah.
Perhaps it’s because her thoughts
and emotions are not so easily contained
that Hairston feels compelled
to share them—and not just with
your intrepid Voice writer—but with
presidents, pastors, neighbors, and
publications ranging from the
Charleston Gazette & Daily Mail to
The Washington Post. Hairston’s got
opinions, but she doesn’t see it that
way.
She Writes Letters
“I just have to tell the truth,” she
says. “People get angry with me, but
what I write about—it’s the truth!
And it’s got to be told.”
The Martinsville, Va. native says
she didn’t set out to be a writer of
letters. “I’ve always been a militant—
I’m not talking about hate, I’m talking
about standing up for what’s
right. I remember when I fir st moved
here, I was at a party, giving a speech
about something, and when I was
through, this young man looked at
the group around me and said, ‘You
know, she’s got something—she’s
like a prophet.’ And I never forgot
that.”
Hairston’s lived in DC for 22 years.
She bought a house at 15th and D
Sts., SE six years ago, where she lives
with her teenage son Justin. “I call it
my little doll house,” she says. “I
never would have bought in this
neighborhood—but it was all nicely
renovated, and I could afford it! So I
moved in and I started looking
around and I said, ‘Gosh, what have
I gotten myself into?!’ But I was
determined to make a change.
Because I have a son, and I love
Washington!” The tragic and alltoo-
common events of “life in the
’hood,” as Hairston calls it, have
fueled many of her profound and
outraged commentaries.
affair, the Tulsa Riots, and the
Amistad are stories and events with
which most of us were not familiar
before recent attention was paid to
them. If white America would stop
being, as Courtland Milloy put it,
‘deliberately dismissive’ when it
comes to race, then maybe we could
put some sort of closure to our race
problem. This is America’s greatest
challenge.”
In the weeks after Hairston’s letter
was published, the Post reported that
the museum had been put back on
Montgomery County’s list of
approved field trips—with a mor e
carefully explained consent form
going home. A compromise, yes, but
also a victory. “First, and foremost,
and finally,” Hairston says, “we need
to deal with this race issue.”
Recently her letters have tackled
the issue of reparations for the
descendants of African-American
slaves. She is a researcher for the
Congressional Research Service, and,
as part of her work, has been reading
just about everything written on the
subject in the past year. Her letter to
West Virginia’s Charleston Gazette &
Daily Mail reveals Hairston’s passion
on this issue. “History buffs out
there, are you familiar with the
Homestead Act of 1862? Congress
gave away over 250 million acres of
land to over 2 million Americans—
160 million acres of land per family.
…Now tell me, honestly, how many
of these homesteaders do you think
were African-American freemen or
slaves?” she asked.
“I’m not due for reparations, but
my mother is,” says Hairston, who
adds that her mother is one of the
main inspirations for her writing.
“I’m writing her life story now. If it
never gets published, it will be our
[private] memoir. My mother daydreamed
of simple things: finishing
high school, going to college, travelling.
But because of the sy stem she
couldn’t—and nobody can tell me
the system didn’t hold her back.
You don’t have to go back to slavery
—just go back to Jim Crow!” In
her letter to the Charleston newspaper,
Hairston wrote, “My mother is
still waiting for her 40 acres and a
mule, still waiting to succeed! This
country can grant reparations to
Atlantic Monthly titled, “Notes on the
Murders of Thirty of My Neighbors.”
The two are active in their neighborhood
association, whose most
recent victory was the closing of CK
Liquors on the corner of Hair ston’s
block. She’s reluctant to take much
credit for the store’s demise, but she
did—surprise—write some letters. “ I
wrote the mayor, and I know someone
who works in his office who got
the letters to him directly, and I did
get a call from the mayor’s office.”
CK Liquors was officially closed on
Hairston’s birthday, which was “the
greatest birthday gift I could have
received,” she says.
In the conclusion to her “Close To
Home” piece, Hairston asked rhetorically,
“Why do I even bother to
write the Post? This isn’t Columbine
or Kosovo—just one more black male
statistic. I guess that I am wishing
that Michael or Oprah or Cosby
might read this and invest some of
their millions in our inner city.”
She’s yet to be published in O,
Winfrey’s new magazine, but it’s not
for lack of trying. “I wrote Oprah
about her new magazine. I didn’t
like it too much—and I asked her,
‘Do you want to be remembered as
an entertainer, a publisher—or, you
could be a savior—like Martin
Luther King. Jr.’ See I’m on a mission,
I think these well-off blac ks
like Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan, Tiger
Woods—we’re talking multimillionaires
—they could make a difference
if they invested in our kids.”
Kids are at the heart of much of
Hairston’s concern and copy. She’s a
devoted reader of another Hill resident,
Post columnist, Courtland
Milloy, and joined the fray surrounding
a March column he wrote
about the decision to remove a field
trip to the “Great Blacks in Wax”
museum from the Montgomery
County School System’s list of
approved trips. Parents of white students
felt the images of slavery in
the exhibit were too disturbing for
their middle-schoolers.
Hairston weighed in, calling the
moratorium on the museum “…an
injustice for our children, black and
white.” She added, “More and more
of America’s untalked-about history
is surfacing. The Jefferson-Hemings
Hill Activist Waging WA R—
with W O R D S
www.voiceofthehill.com 15
Japanese-Americans, Native
Americans…but alas, why not
us?”
“I buy postage like crazy!”
Hairston says. “I keep all my letters
—I have maybe 100. I’ve been
writing to The Washington
Times—but they haven’t published
me yet. The Wall Street
Journal is one I haven’t written
yet, but they’re on my list. I
want to get into the main -
stream, influential publications.”
But Hairston knows it takes
more than letter writing to
affect change. She’s full of
ideas for programs to help
inner-city youth. “I want to
sponsor a talent search—arts,
poetry, storytelling. I’d like
to do a web site for the kids
at Payne [the elementary school in
her neighborhood]. Call it ‘Straight
from the ‘Hood.’ There is so much
talent in the ‘hood! I’d like to do an
‘Elegirls’ program—like ‘elegant girls’
to teach these young girls there’s an
alternative to being a ‘hoochie
mama’! Teach them how to dress
and speak like ladies.”
We haven’t heard the last of
Pamela Hairston—indeed, she has
just begun to fight. “My friends and
family think I’m obsessed—but I say
to them, you live in the suburbs—
live in the ‘hood and see what it’s
like. And I’m not going to move.
Because I’m a valuable citizen and so
is my son. I’m a good neighbor.” Not
to mention a helluva’ letter writer.
Patty Curran is the editor of our Capital
Kids section.
H a n d y m a n
on the Hill
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Relict
BY RUTH RIDDICK
I’ve seen this,
Time and again,
In the wives of poets:
Self-effacement,
And anger;
A child pulling at the hem.
Enraptured early
By his dreaming words
By his charm, never doubt that
Ready and willing—oh, yes!
To abandon cheap ambition
And skivvy for a more selfish
Muse.
To retreat into drudgery
Down among the women
Where no birds sing.
But that’s not the end of it—oh,
no!
Again and again
To be faced, yet again
With the other ones
The fawning and flirting ones,
The walking, talking mirrored
ones.
To come to know,
To live—Goddamnit—the bitterness
At the heart of the poem.
Ruth Riddick works on the Hill and
has lived “twice in as many years—
on 3rd Street SE.” By the time this
issue hits the streets, she says, “I’ll be
back in residence.”
R E AD E R S
W R I T E
16 www.voiceofthehill.com
Hill dweller Tom Kelly. As the men
rib each other, we explore endless
shelves of wonderful chaos. Later, we
learn a little about the business;
Toole is a tough bargainer. For example,
if you want to unload any books
on “self-help,” computers, psychology,
law or business, you should take
them elsewhere. “And,” Toole adds,
“if there’s one phrase that I really
hate to hear, it’s ‘I’ve got this really
old bible...’” The bookseller explains
that, a century ago, bibles were pub -
lished by the truckload, many printed
in German. Back then, bibles
were most people’s primary reading
material.
The Used Book Lovers’ Guide to the
South Atlantic States places Toole’s
inventory at 10,000 books, but it
seems he has even more. He sells
about 100 books a week. A few, such
as 19th century publications displayed
on a top shelf and a 1930 edition
of Robin Hood, are valuable and
could fetch three-figure prices. Most,
however, go for $2 or $3. “I have to
sell a lot of $2 books to make my
$32,000 annual rent, “ Toole laughs.
His biggest sales days are, naturally,
Saturdays and Sundays. Best sellers?
“Good, modern fiction and the classics.”
He adds that people are partial
to mysteries, especially in paperback,
as something to read on Metro or at
the beach.
Toole’s domain will soon get even
bigger. “Still under construction” is
the upstairs section, which will
include a vastly expanded fiction
department as well as a wide selec -
tion of “cultural biographies.”
From Here to Cyberspace
Capitol Hill does offer other sources
for second-hand books; foremost
among them is Eastern Market’s
“book man.” Almost every Sunday
for the past dozen years, Hillites
have seen this amiable, native
Washingtonian displaying his myriad
wares—garnered mainly from
estate sales—at the Market’s
“farmer’s line.” He declines to reveal
his name, but everyone knows him.
His inventory’s broad; you can find
entire sets of golf clubs, baseball bats
and gloves. One time we saw a handsome
antique mirror. But books are
his specialty: novels, lots of children’s
books, encyclopedias, dictionaries,
religious tomes, books on
weapons and warfare, sports (especially
baseball), American history
and even the 1976 Motor Auto Repair
Manual.
One fun item is If Elected:
Presidential Campaigns from Lincoln to
Ford, as Reported by The New York
Times. The coffee-table size tome has
reproduced the Times’ front page
reports from a century of presidential
campaigns. The prize, however,
is a small hymnal, printed in
German and designed to be taken to
THERE’S NOTHING
QUITE LIKE BROWSING
IN AN ANTIQUE BOOKSTORE
FOR COZINESS.
No one is ever in a
hurry, there’s no sales
pressure, and customers may pass a
rainy afternoon breathing deep the
comforting smell of yesterday while
poring through works by James
Michener, Leon Uris and Taylor
Caldwell.
Occasionally, you’ll come upon a
cat curled up and purring on a sunny
windowsill or behind a stack of
Ellery Queen paperbacks. Sometimes
you even come across a long out-ofprint
treasure.
Though Capitol Hill offers several
sources for previously-read books, it
claims only one such bookstore:
Capitol Hill Books.
Ensconced in a townhouse at 657
C St. SE (544-1621), next to Bravado
beauty salon, Capitol Hill Books lit -
erally oozes with—well—books.
Visitors are greeted with open cartons
of books outside, some of them
freebies. Once inside the two-story
shop, they’ll find every corner,
much of the floor space, and even
the bathroom, crammed with mysteries,
biographies, science fiction,
cookbooks, travel guides, foreign
language books, classics and dictionaries.
As customers climb the stairs,
they might notice hand-lettered
signs—arranged at foot-level—that
read “no running,” and “hold onto
the rail.” As if they would want to
run: there’s so much to see!
Capitol Hill Books has a brief,
albeit interesting, history. William
Kerr founded Capitol Hill Books in
October, 1990. Four years later, Kerr
died of a heart attack and “the Hill
lost a good friend as well as its only
used bookstore!” (A sign on the wall
describes all this.) That ’s when
retired Naval officer Morton (Jim)
Toole, stepped in.
“I’ve always read books,” says
Toole, 63, a retired Rear Admiral who
lives on Fifth Street near Jimmy T’s.
He served in the United States Navy
for 30 years, “almost 20 of them
afloat.” How did he wind up selling
books?
“I’ve always loved reading about
American history,” he says, pausing
with an armload of paperbacks. “I
figured since I was defending my
country, I might as well learn about
it, so I enrolled at UCLA as a history
major.” Toole later earned his masters
in foreign relations at American
University. He recalls finishing his
thesis in Saigon while waiting for
river patrol boats to arrive at the
Mekong River. He operated the boat
patrol for a year.
Other people—customers, friends
and colleagues—are targets of Toole’s
somewhat acerbic sense of humor.
We hear him joking with life-long
B l ow i n g
the Dust
O f f
V i n ta g e
B o o ks
BY CELESTE MCCAL L
www.voiceofthehill.com 17
church. Published in Philadelphia,
the little gem is dated 1890.
Another way to find cheap, used
books is to haunt yard sales. Hint :
Get there early; the good stuff is usually
snapped up quickly. (From personal
experience: Just mention that
you’ll have cookbooks for sale, and
customers will be pounding on your
front door at 8 AM!) And-on most
Saturday mornings—one of many
non-profit organizations will set up
shop at the corner of Seventh Street
and North Carolina Ave. SE, in front
of Antiques on the Hill. There you
will find everything imaginable—
clothes, dishes,
plain old kitsch and
lots of used books.
Most are paperbacks
and old textbooks,
but you just might
uncover a treasure.
One of the best
books I’ve ever read,
The War Lord, by
Malcolm Bosse, was
a paperback I
bought there. Price?
25 cents.
Yes, there is a vir -
tual bookstore on
Capitol Hill—The
Book Annex. The
brainchild of John
“Jack” Borhman,
the service deals in
rare books online at
www.abebooks.
com/home/dhl/.
Jack pretty much
sticks to big-ticket
items—books going for $100 and
higher—which he finds on eBay and
other Web sites. He carries first editions
by such luminaries as Ernest
Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Henry Miller, Ian Fleming (James
Bond books are his hottest sellers)
and cult figure Jack Kerouak. His
favorite is D.H. Lawrence, author of
Women in Love and the infamous
Lady Chatterley’s Lover .
Borhman especially loves authors
who spent time in Paris. “What
shaped my life was visiting Paris
with my parents at age 10,” says
Borhman, who is now 58. He started
selling fancy cars like Porsches on
the Internet, then took the money
and invested it in rare books.
Borhman will gladly answer questions;
his phone number is 547-
6436.
And Hill activist Steve Cymrot
offers an off-the-Hill possibility with
his Riverby Books at 805 Caroline
St., Fredericksburg, Virginia. It’s
worth checking out. Not only does
Riverby have a good selection, but
Fredericksburg is a delightful town,
chock full of antique shops and
restaurants. But you need not journey
off the Hill if you’re looking to
sell a prized volume or two, Cymrot
is always on the prowl for “quality
used books;” call 544-1925 or click
on riverby@erols.com.
Celeste McCall is a regular contributor
to the Voice of the Hill
TO SE L L YO U RHO U S E CA L L…
T H E
“ SP O U S E SWHO SE L LHO U S E S”
Curious what your home would sell for?
Do you have dreams? Is it time to move on?
TOM & ALICE FAISON
“SPOUSES WHO SELL HOUSES”
ASSOCIATE BROKER, GRI
REMAX CAPITAL PROPERTIES
FAISON@Realtor.com
202.255.5554 or 202.546.5881
Top: Capitol Hill Books gives a preview of what’s inside. Above: Tom Kelly checks
out owner Jim Toole’s math.
Slipping
BY MALCOLM SHUTE
(First line by Edith Wharton)
She was “as easy as an old shoe”—a shoe that too
many feet had worn. She strolled through the
break in the weeds, her gum a waxy block in her
mouth, which she stubbornly chewed. In her ear, a
wilted white rosebud sagged. Her plump thighs
resisted her tight cotton skirt, a sheath barely concealing
a dagger.
Her man held her hand and followed behind. He
had the swagger as distinctive to a drinker as the
mating dance of a bird; they left the stand of trees
empty, but they had gone in packing. A leaf
slipped from under his shirt collar, his palms were
brown, his tie still dangled from his neck—his wife
probably didn’t even know he wasn’t at work. He
grinned wisely.
In our lives we always shuttle back to this
moment, after the act: crumpled clothes lying
around us, under us; breathing heavily; trying to
save that instant’s joy, as if we could keep it forever
if we just didn’t move.
The trees never rustled; there was no wind. He
handed her her white shoes and patted her back.
She took her gum out for one last kiss. The gleaming
scoop over the ice cream stand rolled sweetly
forever above them. He watched her go, taking one
last sip with his eyes, pretending he might never
see her again. She dumped her gum in the weeds.
Malcolm Shute is the director of the Writer’s Way
Workshops
Avalanche at Disappointment Clever
BY DAVID CRANOR
The worst part isn’t the cold, though it is cold. It’s
the kind of mind numbing cold that seeps into
your bones and begins to seer your nerves, the
kind of cold that makes your mind fog over into a
state of painful confusion. It’s everywhere and for
the entire time. In your pack is an arctic parka
that might help, but you can’t reach it.
The worst part isn’t the inability to move.
As the flood of snow encased you and your climbing
party, freezing, in seconds, into a tomb of
concrete—like ice, you were clear-headed enough
to place your hands over your face and push yourself
a little room before the ice froze, so that you
can move a finger or maybe even a hand. Still,
basically you feel paralyzed. The trapped feeling
causes panic to well up inside you as it becomes
difficult to even expand your chest to breath. If
you’re good, you calm the panic, realizing you
must conserve your air.
The worst part isn’t the lack of air, though you
realize this is what will probably kill you. You can
last for twenty, maybe thirty, minutes before you
die of suffocation, long before hypothermia sets
in. Additionally, you can sense, even if it’s only in
your mind, the air becoming more and more toxic
with each breath. You can feel the carbon dioxide
filling your small chamber with its asphyxiating
presence. In vain, you try to hold back your
breath. If you’re lucky, help could arrive before
you die. They might find you with the radio transceiver
over your shoulder, but it will take at least
twenty minutes.
No, the worst part by far is the lack of a tug on
the rope that connects you to the next person in
your climbing party. You know that no tug means
that they too were caught in the avalanche.
Further tormenting you is the knowledge that this
person next to you on the rope is your fiancé, that
this is her first time to climb a mountain and that
surely she has not covered her face or calmed her
panic. You know that she will use up her air in ten
minutes, if not sooner. She’s no more than twelve
feet away, but you’re powerless to help. By the
glowing hands of the watch pressed against your
face you can see the minutes tick by, and still no
tug. After fifteen minutes, when you’re sure she’s
exhausted her air, you struggle to reach the radio
transceiver, and turn it off.
NASA Engineer David Cranor writes short stories when
he isn’t busy planning his next mountain ascent.
18 www.voiceofthehill.com
Shouts at the Square
BY DAYNE WA L L I N G
Stanton’s statue stands
Where rats run through refuse
And homeless ask for help,
Where sticks seem as snakes
And roots roll over red-brick reality,
Where poetry pretended to be prophesy
Yet words were without wisdom.
Dayne Walling can be found sauntering around
Capitol Hill in the evening after hectic days in the
Executive Office of Mayor Anthony Williams.
PIANO MUSIC
BY CONS TANCE SHADE
Red rose petals
coaxing music from snow,
Mother’s manicured fingers
stroke the ivory keyboard.
The piano her mother
had washed floors to buy,
now, beneath Mother’s touch,
transports me
as I sit on the s tairs
behind her and listen,
the green carpet of our living room
becomes a grassy field
beside the flowing Seine,
and I imagine
this must be France –
green fields,
ivory moonlight,
ebony shadows,
red roses,
love coaxed from snow.
Constance Shade is a freelance writer and artist who
supports her habit by working at Clothes Encounters
’60’s Redux
BY ROBERT STEVENS
You won’t believe this —
I’m wearing your love beads again!
And the copper bracelet.
You’re gone, of course.
Isn’t everyone?
I did it because I suddenly felt alone.
And afraid.
Please don’t tell on me.
They think I’m a cold intellectual.
And they’re right.
We weren’t afraid of anything then.
At least you weren’t.
I pretended.
Then I found the china frog you gave me, in the garden.
You should have kept it for yourself.
Did you give me everything?
What did I give you?
Actor, playwright and poet, Robert Stevens, has per -
formed at Arena Stage and other theaters, and served
as the Literary Manager for the Folger Theater. The 31-
year Hill resident also had a little side career in intelli -
gence.
R E A D E R S
W R I T E Re a d e rs wri t e .
www.voiceofthehill.com 19
WHEN
BY SHARON NEGRI
“And I told him: I’m reading all this Buddhist
stuff, and listen we don’t die when we die.”
—Marie Howe
Listen,
when you die
it won’t matter
that you spin off into pure light,
turn to a white iris, peacock or
piece of tinsel
like the one out this window,
lost and waving
from a mid-March tree branch.
The matter will be
that you won’t leave
your running shoes
in front of the front door,
leave a Donald Hall poem
on the refrigerator
with seven magnets:
w-o-r-d-s-4-u.
Maybe we don’t die when we die
but your bottle of shampoo
won’t be in the shower,
your one black sock stuck
in the dryer, I won’t hear
constant radio baseball,
Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde
at top volume.
I may see you come back
in a candle flame but
we won’t sit on the front s toop
with a bottle of champagne
the first warm night in April.
I will take up your task
of tending tarragon and dill
but think of you
with every fresh cutting,
will it be enough?
Will I summon
your heavenly opinion:
how best to dress the greens,
how to serve the sole?
Sharon Negri’s poetry has appeared in several publica -
tions and anthologies. Her first book, The Other Side of
Now, was published by Washington Writers’
Publishing House in 1989. Her chapbook, Ruby and
Other Lives, was published by the Argonne Hotel Press
in July, 1996. She is currently finishing a second fulllength
book, Disconnected Obsessions.
Wednesday
BY SHARON NEGRI
Slices of sun through blinds,
your note on the kitchen counter
asking the kind of apple we ate
with Havarti last night my memory
does not serve me well on this you say
and suddenly I see a cadre of waiters all
called Memory balancing huge silver trays:
bowls full of childhood, plates heaped
with adolescence, coffee mugs and
wine glasses overflowing with middle age.
But what of these occasions
when Memory goes on strike, pickets,
stirs up the bargaining table
with a sharp blend of demands: more
exercise, stronger vitamins, shorter hours?
The apple’s skin was flushed and flawless.
What will happen when Memory calls in sick,
unable to offer even small spoonfuls of past,
will we feed each other then:
finish sentences, pare down inaccuracies,
sprinkle in missing details?
And when Memory retires all together,
drifts off into its own dining room
and closes the door,
will we give each other names for things,
will we love each other namelessly?
Rome Beauty I write back.
Abandoned Sofa at Seward Square
BY SHIRLEY G. COCHRANE
One can see that it was once high style—
Great splashes of color resembling plumes.
You pause, thinking it would look great
on the sun porch back home but too
far to carry. Why was it discarded?
Good plump pillows—these disappeared
almost immediately.
After the holidays passersby filled
it with discarded garlands, Christmas
branches and wreaths. The first
blizzard turned it into an
iced-over igloo. The second one
transformed it overnight into
a dead body.
Valentine’s Day it was thrown like
the carcass of an uncertain species
between two parked cars, where it stayed
a week, then was taken to the boneyard
of the abandoned. Why now when I walk past
the place where it used to be, do I feel
this sadness?
Shirley Cochrane teaches at Georgetown University’s
School of Continuing Education and at the Writer’s
Center. She is the author of two books of poems, and a
founding member of the Capitol Hill Poetry Group.
Meditation
BY BLAIR DORE
Home can be a dull resplendence.
Afternoons of rakes and nails; g rasses
Charming the wind, cut by the asses
Of goats jealous of our evening séance.
I have come to wonder how in this
Soft rock, cut open to show
The red of an incoming light, low
And faint, a whisper of unending bliss,
We might find a triumph, subtle
As the sound of our spinning O
Breaking into the morning, slow
In wording a wordless rebuttal.
Blair Dore is a native of Montclair, New Jersey and
writes while cramped in the confines of
Washington’s red line.
20 www.voiceofthehill.com
Dear Judith:
My library—particularly the fiction and poetry section
—has gotten totally out of control. I don’t
know whether to buy lots of Ikea bookshelves, build
bookshelves in, or move. Any advice?
FOUR EYES ON F IF TH
Dear Four Eyes:
I’m so glad to hear that you have your books organized
so you can tell which parts of your library are
out of control. I can hardly think of anything more
distressing than when you just know you have a
copy of a book and can’t find it. Actually, more distressing
is when you know you had a copy of a
favorite once and have a terrible feeling that in a
moment of ill-considered generosity loaned it out.
To whom, you can’t remember.
Anyway, when it comes to books in the house,
there are several schools.
First, there are the “no books in the living room”
people. They believe the living room is about a
coherent design or decorating statement and that
books are too random and too personal to belong.
Second are the “I’ve read it so I don’t need it anymore”
people. They tend not to have your problem
since they move the books out about as fast as they
come in.
Third are the “I’ve never touched a book I didn’t
want to keep forever, including my college textbooks”
sorts. These people usually end up with a
lot of books in boxes.
Finally, there are all the rest of us who have lots of
books to shelve.
There are, of course, many subsets of the above—
but we won’t get into that.
A ny way, once yo u’ve det e rmined your book
style, you can figure out your storage style. You
pretty much described the two possibilities in your
question: lots of bookcases or a serious commitment
to book shelving. I don’t consider moving
into a bigger place as viable since you will have to
come to grips with the basic management issues
sooner or later.
Clearly you’re not in the second category or you
wouldn’t be asking about shelving. If you’re in the
third category, buying individual bookcases is not
going to work. Period. I believe that books do not
belong in boxes. Books in boxes are a symptom of
issues that must be dealt with. Either move the
books along (which I grant you can sometimes be
hard in itself as I discovered when I was trying to
find someone to take Uncle Bill’s Second World War
Officer Training books) or make a commitment to
them.
You can probably see where this is leading. Now a
bookcase here and there is an ok solution for people
with modest libraries, but as soon as the library
stops being modest, I say build in! When you build
in shelving you can extend it all the way to the ceiling,
all the way to the floor, and wall-to-wall, translating
to more efficiency and more books.
Now, your choice is whether to build in a little
shelving here and there in every room of the house
or to put the whole library in one place.
I’m definitely in favor of some shelving in each
room: cookbooks in the kitchen, bedside reading
in the bedrooms, magazine racks in the bathrooms.
However, I now feel that what we did in our house,
which was to provide fairly substantial shelving in
each room, was not such a good idea.
Basically, all the bookshelves in the house are
close to full and the collections have become fragmented
and scattered. What I’m thinking we
should do now is literally wallpaper our son Owen’s
room with shelves, all the way up to the ceiling.
Then we can add a rolling library ladder for access
to high shelves. Until Owen goes to college, he can
keep his airplane models and whatever on all these
shelves. When he leaves home: voila! We have a
library.
As for construction and design tips:
One size fits all doesn’t work much better with
shelving than it works with underwear. When we
work out built-in shelving with clients, we begin by
talking about what they want from their shelves—
and about their style. We inventory what they
want to shelve, actually measuring linear feet of
paperbacks, hardbacks, oversize books, and all the
“other” that finds its way to shelves: sound equipment,
CD’s, records, and video tapes. Then we ask
some tough questions. Do you hate to dust but dust
really bothers you? Maybe you should consider
glass doors. Do you seem to have as much “other”
as books? Then maybe you should work in cabinets
below the shelves.
It goes without saying that the shelves need to be
adjustable. You may not readjust the shelves for
years, or forever, but you’ll have the flexibility if
you need it. I have had holes drilled at all sorts of
intervals, but now favor close together: 1” on center.
Then, when you get pressed for space, you can
tighten up shelving to maximize eve ry ve rt i c a l
inch.
One of the most common mistakes people make
in their bookshelves is using shelving that is too
thin for the distance you want it to span. Then it
d roops in the middle, all the while scre a m i n g
“Cheap!” In our house we ’ve been using sta i r
treads, nominally 5/4, truly a full inch, in pine in
the basement and oak upstairs. We have some
spans as big as four and a half feet with no evidence
of deflection. Short of a solid inch of wood, you can
stiffen the front and back edges of thinner boards
or design a shelf look that is about lots of short
spans. Pa rt i c l e b o a rd, even cove red with plast i c
laminate, is about the worst stuff for drooping, with
plywood right up there.
Eight or nine inches of depth works for just about
all hardbacks. If you make all your shelves 12” deep
to accommodate your few oversize books you not
only lose 4” from the room but create shelves that
either have empty space behind most of the books
(bad) or display space in front of most of the books
(good or bad depending on how you feel about
dusting and getting at your books easily). If you
have a zillion paperbacks, you might consider some
very thin shelves of just six inches. (Six inches
accommodates standard-sized hardbacks, too, just
nothing bigger.)
Of course, once you really begin to customize
built in shelving and commit to making it out of
good materials (the real expense is in building the
shelving so why use junky particle board that will
tend to droop anyway) the whole thing starts to get
expensive.
That’s when you need one more reality check:
how much do I care about all these books anyway?
Enough to house them well so I can use them and
so they enhance my environment? If the answer is
no, I don’t care about them that much, be ruthless,
thin them down and head for Ikea.
Dear Judith:
My girlfriend and I have decided to live together
before we decide if we want to get married or not.
The problem is we have a lot of the same books, and
d o n’t have enough space to display th e m .
Suggestions?
HANNIBAL
Dear Hannibal:
I heard a real bibliophile answer this question on
Diane Rehm’s show one day. She said she and her
boyfriend created a hierarchy. Hardback books
t ru mped paperback books unless the paperback
was annotated or inscribed.
This is the one instance I would make an excep-
Ask Judith
www.voiceofthehill.com 21
Clothing Makes the Hear t
JOYCE E. PA L M E R
“Sweetie,” I said, “Would you please find a new shirt laundry?”
This, said on a glorious, sunny morning, repeated every morning, to a beautiful blue-eyed man, who
could not see his shirts without his bifocals.
This beautiful blue-eyed man insisted on re-ironing shirts for which he had paid dearly to have professionally
laundered. Every morning he erected the ironing board and, standing in his joc key shorts
and bifocals, performed the daily ritual of pressing his pressed shirts.
His pressed shirts did indeed require repressing. Often buttons were missing and mystery creases
would appear squarely in the middle of the body. Cuffs were missed entirely.
“Is this guy blind?” I once asked my lovely friend.
“Well,” he confided, “he is very old…a Chinese guy. I think he needs my business. I may be his only
customer.”
“I don’t wonder, my dear,” I murmured in reply.
So, my friend continued to re-iron his shirts in the interest of charity. (Five years now).
Yesterday, out of mingled curiosity and desperation (and because his shop was near the tea salon), I
took a dress to be cleaned at the shop of the old Chinese guy. The polite old man bowed to wish me a
good day. My heart relented.
“So sor ry Madam,” he said. “I’m too old to work. I just stay open to help blue-eyed man with his
shirts. You see, he needs me.”
Joyce Palmer, a long time resident of Capitol Hill, writes as a hobby.
THE BEST
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tion to my rule about no books in boxes. May I suggest
that you each keep a box of your own books
that are bumped from the joint shelves? In ten
years, if you’re still together, you’ll probably have a
bigger place so you can shelve two copies of some
books. Or, by then you may be willing to part with
some of the duplicates.
Dear Judith
We have really a lot of books, particularly poetry
and fiction. I’m a little worried about the weight of
them in our old house. Should I be?
TENNESSEE TESS IE
Dear Tess:
Maybe. Books are indeed very heavy. However,
most of us keep them in shelves along the walls,
putting the load at the ends of the floor joists where
they, the floor joists, are strongest. If, however, you
have your books organized library-fashion in stacks
out in the middle of the room, you should probably
either reconsider the arrangement or get a structural
engineer to do a calculation on your floor’s
capacity and compare it to the load from your
b o o ks. If the book load exceeds the floor load
capacity, and the floor hasn’t collapsed yet, you can
strengthen the floor.
Judith Capen, AIA, practicing restoration architect, is
the author of many of the Capitol Hill Restoration
Society’s award-winning guidelines for work on Capitol
Hill homes.
R E A D E R S
W R I T E
Amulti-million dollar development with a
resume to die for has unified the Eastern
part of Capitol Hill like few recent issues:
You’re either against Father Flanagan Boys
Town or you’re from another planet.
What’s not to like? Let’s take the positive side
first.
Loveable old Father F. from Nebraska with his
flock of frisky foundlings made a movie smash with
Bing Crosby and Mickey Rooney that folks still
remember. What’s more, the message went right
into the American lexicon with the phrase, “He
a i n’t heav y, Fa th e r … H e ’s m’broth e r.” Fa th e r
Flanagan, the firm but kindly padre who turned
young toughs into choirboys, founded Boys Town
in 1917.
Fast-forward many decades: Father F. is in heaven
(since 1948), but his non-profit organization is still
doing good works all over the world. Reaching out
to “troubled” youths (Oh why, why, can’t we just
call them punks, or rowdies, or hellions, or hoodlums,
or delinquents?) Whether or not they are
actually orphans, Boys Town sees Washington as a
perfect place to expand its operations.
Never mind the fact that Father F. reasoned that
rolling Nebraska farmland was the right place to set
the tykes on the correct course. Never mind that
the corner of Capitol Hill where the Flanaga n
organization has bought to build is a drug neighborhood
with a list of “police service calls” as long
as your arm.
Loaded with cash from sound investments, Boys
Town sees a large, long under-utilized piece of property
13 bloc ks from the Capitol dome—a property
formerly owned by retired realtor Beau Bogan, and
presently loafing along as an all-day parking lot
with a couple of buildings on it. It’s outside the
restrictive Capitol Hill Historic District, it’s on a
commercial corridor, and its $8.2 million price is
no deterrent to Boys Town.
Boys Town moves swiftly, securing the property,
h i ring famed land law firm Wi l kes, Artis, and
e n gaging the Hill’s pre-eminent architect, Amy
Weinstein, whose subtle interpretations of period
styles have won many admirers on the Hill. Top Hill
realtor Pardoe keeps the whole deal under wraps
until after settlement.
Boys Town announces it will build a campus-like
group of houses on the property, some to house residents,
some for daily activities, and one for administration.
All will attractively meld with the mix of
19 th and 20 th century house st yles that line
Pennsylvania Avenue, SE.
So far so good? Nah. Then all hell begins to break
loose as one by one important local players sour on
the idea of the project.
As it stands now, key Advisory Neighborhood
Commission members, the Wa rd ’s city
Councilwoman, plus her Republican ally in this
matter, David Catania (at Large), the Capitol Hill
Restoration Society and many private citizens are
p a s s i o n a t e ly aga i n st the project. Opposition is
strong in both black and white communities. The
only powerful community voice that is neutral is
Dennis Bourga u l t’s Capitol Hill Association of
M e rchants and Pro fessionals (CHAMPS), which
takes a cautious wait and see attitude.
A few individuals, such as longtime Soccer on the
Hill coach Brian Cassidy, ANC 6B member Kalimah
Abdul Sabur, and members of other youth social
service organizations have spoken in favor of Boys
Town. The organization itself has remained silent;
s p o ke s p e rson Sharon Robinson infre qu e n t ly
answers questions, but pumps out press releases
about “The outpouring of support from the Capitol
Hill community.”
What happened? The community—if such a
thing exists in a village made up of such disparate
elements—woke up one morning feeling it had
been swiftly had.
First, the secrecy of the deal was unlike others.
Capitol Hill brokers, including the well-regarded
Kitty Kaupp who brokered the purchase, made not
a peep. Usually brokers who net hundreds of thousands
on a deal (Kaupp probably got 3% of the selling
price, or $246,000) crow all over town, but no t
this time. With the deal inked, nobody knew anything
about Boystown USA.
But they soon found out, and the information
was a lot less comforting than the cozy spiel dished
up on WWW. B oystow n U SA, which speaks of a
s h e l t e ring, nurt u ring env i ronment for yo u th s
“whose lives are out of control” but who learn to
“get better” under the 24 hour tutelage of “family
leader” couples who live in houses with six to eight
youths. The kids get allowances, they are allowed to
have pets; they do a lot of chores, they go to school,
they get counseling.
What the antis found out was both historical and
speculative. Father F.’s Boys Town already has a unit
in Washington, not far off the Hill in Northeast at
4801 Sergeant Road NE, a far wilder part of town.
That facility has a long established reputation for
police calls, and neighbor complaints.
Researchers for the rump group that was quickly
formed by Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner
Will Hill and Capitol Hill Re sto ration Societ y
President Brian Furness told The Voice that one sex
assault, three suicides, one fugitive case, one kidnap,
and one simple assault are already on the Boys
Town blotter in Northeast. A police service report
lists 70 calls for service between December 1999 and
June 2000.
More outrageous to Sharon Ambrose, who vows
“It ain’t over ’til it’s over,” is the fact that public
money will be used to pay for the land purchase, for
a large part of the construction, and for the upkeep
of the client population once Boys Town is built.
“It’s federally funded,” she says flatly, “with our
money.”
Congress saw fit to give $7.1 million under the
leadership of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott,
who is on a Boys Town board. But that is only the
beginning.
Ambrose told a large audience at a July 13 Hill
forum on the project that the boys of Boys Town
would be re c e i v i n g — f rom public funds—more
than twice what the keepers of foster homes receive
for their work.
Researchers also found that Boys Town, though
an untaxed charity, has an endowment of about
$800 million, and an investment income of about
$80 million.
They also discovered important contradictions—
that Boys Town will, despite early denials, be
importing troubled youths from other locations.
That the youths will be virtually free to roam in off
hours, in spite of talk of a “gated” campus. That a
high ranking member of the Flanagan organization,
a Father Val Peter, flew east to meet with
Ambrose at her request, but refused to consider an
alternate site, only additional sites.
They also discovered that the “foster families”
hired to watch over the Boys of Boys Town won’t be
living with their charges, contrary to releases from
the Flanagan organization about “town house” living
arrangements. The yo u ths will live in one
duplex, the “families” in another.
The ANC voted in July aga i n st the pro j e c t .
Ambrose is sworn to oppose to the last. The Mayor’s
men, led by aide Patrick Kennedy, have listened to
impassioned witnesses blast the concept, the secrecy,
the public money—and remind Mayor Tony
Williams of his inaugural promises to make the city
responsive to community wishes and needs.
What’s next? There is no zoning angle, no environmental
angle, Ambrose says. The Mayor must
step in. That’s her only hope.
Duncan Spencer is a regular columnist for the Voice of
the Hill and The Hill newspapers. His views are occa -
sionally shared by one or another of the publishers.
22 www.voiceofthehill.com
Spencer Says
Boys Town Rejection: Father, He’s Far To o
Heavy And He Ain’t My Bro t h e r
Congress saw fit to give $7.1 million
under the leadership of Senate Majority
Leader Trent Lott, who is on a Boys Town
board. But that is only the beginning.
This year, the 3-year-old Hotel George was
g i ven a “Rising Star” by Am e ri c a’s Elite
1000, The Ultimate List. The $90 tome calls
itself “The definitive guide to the best of
American life and style” and points you
toward the “right picture dealers to patronize, the
best interior designers to commission, the firms
that supply the best butlers, va l ets and
nannies…and the finest hotels.”
If it sounds like you’d be in for a snooty experience,
think again.
When the New Yo rk Ti m e s Travel section
reviewed the hotel last December, reporter Frank
Bruni said: “By all rights, the staff at the Hotel
George should have recoiled from me. I arrived late
on a lazy Sunday when I had taken a vacation from
shaving, showering, wearing clean clothing or any
other semblance of civilized behavior. But what
they did, even before I pulled out my credit card,
was give me a spectacularly warm welcome.”
The truth is, you don’t even have to threaten to
check in to experience the extraordinary graciousness
of The George.
As most of you don’t know, Bruce Robey and I
drop off stacks of papers at shops, restaurants and
hotels around the Hill each month. We get a little
exercise, treat ourselves to lunch, and have the
enormous ego massage of hearing folks yell: “Hey!
Is that the new Voice?” and chase us down for a
copy.
The George is always about the last stop, at a
point in the day when we’re both smudgy with
newsprint, bedraggled and dripped with ketchup or
some other lunch remnant, and, shall we say, a little
ripe. Yet the staff g reets me (this is my stop, he
gets the Hyatt) as if I’ve ar rived in my ermine and
tiara, flicking gold coins behind me on the red carpet
—instead of schlepping a 30-pound bundle of
community newsprint.
You just never know who’s doing the schlepping
these days, says the hotel’s General Manager David
Hill. If the baby boomers were responsible for stripping
away layers of formality, this current generation
has about demolished it. “It’s not like the old
days when we used to dress up to take the train to
New York. I pick up the business papers and see all
these young people that are worth a billion dollars
—I mean they look like hell. They’re all, like
kids. So anyone can be walking in here in shorts
and they can buy me, or this hotel, a hundred times
over.”
The George is part of a whole new phenomenon,
the “boutique hotel.” Like New York’s Mercer, and
Miami’s Delano, it ’s high-style, very hip—about as
far away as you can get from the no-surp ri s e s
offered by the big chains.
But make no mistake; if the mood is low-key,
informal and maybe a little quirky, this is a very luxurious
joint.
There’s a fitness center with steam rooms, a glasswalled
billiard parlor above the white coral stone
lobby, and a 24-hour concierge. Room amenities
range from fluffy white bathrobes and twice a day
maid service, to extra phone lines for internet connections,
designed-for-work desk chairs—and neat
toys like the Timex Indiglo clock-radios with the
flip-top CD players that are about to go into each
room (if you don’t happen to travel with CDs, The
George keeps a stash at the front desk).
They’ve also got some of the best room service
burgers in town, thanks to the hotel’s top-flight
restaurant, Bistro Bis.
And there’s not one inch of chintz.
That package has made the George extremely
popular with a wide range of glittery travelers. TV,
theater and film stars like Michael J. Fox, John
Malkovich and Kelly McGillis have booked rooms,
as have big name writers like George Plimpton and
J.D. Salinger, ro ck sta rs like Alanis Mori s s et t e ,
C h ri stina Aguillera and—ch e cking in the day
before this interview— flamboyant rapper ’Lil Kim,
who pulled up in a big bus with a picture of herself
painted on the side.
JFK Jr. stayed several times—and had a few parties
for his magazine, George.
Muhammed Ali, I’m told, is “the best celebrity
guest. He kisses all the girls, and loves to have his
picture taken.” The last time he was in town he was
doing magic tricks in the lobby. It’s rumored he was
levitating.
How did the George become one of Washington’s
hottest hotels? “Part of it is the grapevine,”
says Hill. “That if you’re in the arts or fashion
world, this is the place you should stay.”
Maybe it’s also because celebrities are as prone to
gawking at other celebrities as we commoners are—
and therefore, flock together. Hill says Julia Child’s
agent told him this story after the French Chef’s
recent visit: “Newt Gingrich and his girlfriend were
in the restaurant while we were having lunch and
she kicked me under the table saying, ‘don’t look,
don’t look! There’s Newt Gingrich!’” Gingrich was
apparently just as taken with seeing Child, he came
over to her table to introduce himself when he’d
done eating.
Part of it also has to be David Hill, who learned all
the hotel rules very well before he decided which
ones he needed to break in order to achieve this delicate
balance between Grand Hotel and cutting
edge.
Today the GM is tieless, dressed in khakis, and
www.voiceofthehill.com 23
Business Bits
T h e re’s Nothing Chintzy About the
Hotel Georg e
24 www.voiceofthehill.com
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2 Quail 2 Quail
1107 Pennsylvania Ave., SE • Washington, DC 20003
Phone 202-543-0100
JUST ASK RENTAL HOURS:
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Buy what you want. Rent what you need.
Fr a g e r ’ s
navy blue polo shirt. His hair’s a hyper-stylish buzz
cut (though it’s kept up at the decidedly downscale
Sneeds, 8th and I Barber Shop over by the Marine
Barracks).
“Dressing this way,” he says, “is a whole new culture
for me.” David’s done two stints at downtown’s
l ove ly, and ve ry genteel, Henley Pa rk Hotel. In
between he managed a collection of resorts in the
Caribbean. All of them run, literally, by the book.
“In the old days, you’d pull out the handbook
and—no beards allowed. Pigtails? Now I look,” he
shrugs, “and it’s fine. …as long as the staff is presentable.
Whatever that means.” Many of the oldtimers
just don’t fit in. “Some people have a problem
with not wearing a business uniform. They
need structure. It’s like a military syndrome.”
He looks for employees that have the right attitude.
“You try to find people that have a nice sense
of life, and the right kind of spirit.”
He also feels it makes good business sense to participate
in local organizations and be supportive of
the residential community. “You want to be a good
citizen and cater to your neighborhood people—
particularly if you’re in a neighborhood with people
of means and position that can support what
you’re doing. Capitol Hill people live well. They’re
professionals, lawyers, association people, executives.
They may be using my hotel for business, or
my restaurant to eat. Or they might have friends
coming to town…”
But to get involved to the point where he’s spending
a Saturday cleaning-up and painting a Capitol
Hill housing project?
Hill says: “Someone needs help, you make a
donation. Some place needs help with clean-up?
OK, we have to go out and help them. That’s jus t
part of doing business. I assume that everyone else
is doing the same thing. Maybe I’m naive.”
Which, perhaps, makes it understandable that he
was “truly amazed” when The George won this
year’s “Best Business” award from the Capitol Hill
Association of Merchants and Professionals.
No, David. The Hotel’s contributions to the community
are well beyond average.
The George donates rooms to school and church
auctions, hosts local events, and helps underwrite
galas like the PEN/Faulkner Awards at the Folger
Shakespeare Library. David himself goes out of his
way to support other businesses in the community.
“When I needed some pictures framed I called
CHAMPS and asked which framers were members. I
wanted to patronize them first and foremost. That’s
the whole point of supporting each other.”
He was also the first to press to include the New
Jersey Avenue, NW hotel belt in the newly forming
Capitol Hill Business Improvement District.
Then there’s the hotel’s growing involvement
w i th the Capital Childre n’s Museum, and th e
Museum’s charter school. They’ve donated equipment,
and painted the auditorium. Now they’re
helping the school raise funds.
D avid says that, fo l l owing the hot e l ’s second
anniversary bash, which featured a show by celebrated
artist Steve Kaufman, “we went over to the
charter school and did an art class for the kids. This
fall the paintings they did will go on display at the
hotel, and we’ll have a reception for donors and
auction them off.”
“ C a p i tol Hill’s a neighborh o o d ,” says Dav i d .
“First and foremost you want to be part of your
n e i g h b o rhood, your community. You try to do
what you can.” And doing what you can adds up to
good business.
The Hotel George
15 E Street, NW
Washington, DC 20001
347-4200
Bread and Chocolate…The Café Swears it Cares On
May 29, “Kirk” posted this message to the Voice
website discussion area: “Has anyone else noticed
the consistently poor service at B & C [Bread and
Chocolate]? I have noticed this on several visits,
and I guess there is nothing to do but not go. Just
wanted to make sure it wasn’t just bad timing on
my part, but slow service…has made me wonder
how they stay in business? Opinions?”
What followed was a virtual gripe-fest. A dozen or
so complaints like these flew in:
From Marina: “I live on the Hill for 8yrs. now.
B&C is the worst place for service. My fiancé and I
think that to work at this place a person must past a
very strict test: BE SLOW, BE RUDE, BE READY TO
MESS UP ORDERS, if the IQ is below 70 it’s a bonus
and one can be hired on the spot. So bad because
the food is actually good.”
From Brian: “I, too, wanted to support Bread &
Chocolate. But, the terrible service prevents me
from doing so. Very poorly trained wait staff and a
general ‘we’re at Eastern Market, so you’ll do anything
to eat here’ attitude is a bad combination. I
take my business elsewhere.”
Get buffed.
www.voiceofthehill.com 25
JAZZ!
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FROM 8:30PM UNTIL CLOSING.
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WEDNESDAY-SATURDAY 6:30PM THRUCLOSING
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From Chris: “My wife won’t go back there after
we were made to wait and then forgotten at brunch
one morning. It’s sad. Maybe if the owner were to
read these comments, he’d try to improve things.”
Well, the owner did. Rema Manousakis, Vice
P resident of Retail Operations, and wife of th e
founder and president of Bread and Chocolate,
wrote:
“In response to some of the comments that came
over the Hill Talk recently regarding the service at
Bread & Chocolate, we would like to let our customers
know that we always appreciate their comments,
both positive and negative. Interestingly
enough, we appreciate the negative more because it
allows us to focus in on the problems and to do our
best to solve them.
Even in light of the cur rent, ongoing, low unemployment
rate and the difficulty in finding good
service personnel, Bread & Chocolate is constantly
striving to train our personnel to better serve our
customers in a friendly and efficient manner.
Bread & Chocolate has been proud to be a member
of the Capitol Hill community for almost 15
years. You have been loyal customers and we don’t
want to let you down. If you have any comments
and/or suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact
me directly at our Corporate Office at 703-549-
7524.”
Was she serious? Manousakis says as soon as the
complaints were heard, “we were down there like
flies.” Unfortunate phrasing for a restaurateur, perhaps,
but it seems the company did take quick
action.
Manusakis wrote an immediate response for the
web. Then she gave the comments to the company’s
Director of Retail Operations who set up a staff
meeting at the restaurant.
Every member of the staff was gathered and the
complaints were read out loud. “They had to read it
and turn red,” the VP says. Then they were asked,
“Is this what we want to hear from our customers?”
Manousakis also gave her Dire c tor of Reta i l
Operations some light beach reading: a book on
management, and another on customer service.
And that’s not all. Those web complaints are
about to achieve immortality in a training syllabus
that Bread and Chocolate is pre p a ring for new
employees.
Manousakis says she has a few excellent staff
members in the Capitol Hill restaurant, but in the
same breath acknowledges that she has plenty of
staffing headaches— and this location is one of the
most difficult. Though the company offers a good
base salary, and better than average working conditions
and benefits, turnover is extremely high.
Like many restaurants, Bread and Chocolate does
not advertise for help. They have applications for
employment at the front register, and tend to hire
from the community—mostly people who walk in
from the street looking for a job.
While that works well in areas like Chevy Chase,
where Manousakis says some employees have been
around for fifteen years, it rarely works on the Hill.
Many of the people now applying for jobs seem
to want work, but they don’t understand customer
needs or the needs of the business. They’re chronically
late, and skip work without calling. “Babies
that they can’t find care for, situations they have to
attend to, personal problems,” says Manousakis.
High turnover means that the counter help and
wait staff often have little experience. And though
they’re taught to at least “make eye contact” with
waiting patrons, many lack good people skills.
To try to combat this, Bread and Chocolate is
building a training facility in Chevy Chase where
new employees in any of the restaurants 8 locations
will be trained in customer service in a classroom
setting. A variety of techniques will be used, including
role reve rs a l — o r, in this case, turning th e
tables. Once they begin working they’ll be “shadowed”
by a more experienced employee before they
get their own stations.
I t’s been a horrible week, Manousakis says .
“We ’re st riving consta n t ly, talking and tra i n i n g
personnel. We love our customers, and are very
proud of our business. I was so frustrated to read
those letters. I personally hurt to read such comments.”
“I want customers to call me with complaints—
‘Your Napoleons are dry today.’ We’re very passionate
about our business. Tell Capitol Hill, Bread and
Chocolate definitely cares.”
Radio Shack-ing Up on the Hill. Radio Shack, one of
the largest retailers of consumer electronic products
and services in the United States, makes the
claim that 94 percent of all Americans either live or
work within five minutes of one of their outlets.
Feeling a tad un-American?
Oh sure, if you live or work in Northeast and you
time those traffic lights just right, maybe you could
make it to the Hechinger Mall store in about that
time. But most of us have to suffer a good tenminute
trip for our hearing aid batteries.
Until now!
CapHillLLC, the development comp a ny th a t
owns the Payless Shoes and Last Stop for Jeans
buildings on 8th Street, SE, has announced that
Radio Shack has just signed on as the first tenant of
their new retail space that is now under construction
across from the Eastern Metro plaza on D
Street, SE.
Maurice Kreindler, who is managing the project’s
development, says the electronics shop will take up
a little less than half the building. He is still seeking
a tenant or two for the second half of the building,
a 3,000 sq. ft. space that could be divided into two
stores.
By the time this issue of the Voice comes out, the
foundations for the building should be in place.
Completion of the project is expected by early fall.
Sometimes it Pays to Drag Your Fe e t . G i n g ko
Gardens at 911 11th Street, SE is now open and
spilling over with flowers, greenery and porch and
garden ornaments. Owner Mark Holler says he has
“ m o re annuals, perennials and hanging basket s
than you can possibly imagine, and great shrubs
and trees that I picked especially for townhouse gardens.”
There’s also a wide selection of fabulous pots and
p l a n t e rs—including these funky high heel shoe
jobs in designs that range from classic pumps to
Priscilla Queen of the Desert—candles and cast iron
candle st i cks, faux-ancient vases, wind ch i m e s ,
table and chair sets, columns and garden torches.
At a time when the pickings begin to be mighty
slim at most ga rden centers (and a time when
plants are most inclined to go belly up while you’re
off on a long we e kend at the beach) Gingko
Gardens is just getting going. Best of all, those lovely,
healthy, bushy, fragrant annuals and perennials
can be had at 20% off through July 23.
Ta ke a virtual tour of the ga rden center at
www.voiceofthehill.com.
Pups Still Panting for New Vet. Top rated Dupont
Veterinary Clinic, which had hoped to open a new
full-service, state-of-the-current-art, practice with
s u r g e ry, hospitalization, dentist ry and board i n g
this summer, is experiencing some construction
displays.
We hear the 3-story building near Union Station
(which Vet, Bruce Herwald, says will be a “pretty
buff joint” when completed) will not be completed
until mid-fall.
In the meantime both Herwald and Julie Giles,
DVM, who will be in charge of the Capitol Hill
branch, can be reached at 466-2211.
Business Bits is written by Voice editor-in-chief,
Stephanie Cavanaugh
26 www.voiceofthehill.com
Mason
Michaliga Masonr y
321 C Street, SE
544-4484
Mortgage Lenders
Apex Home Loans
301-474-7100
See our ad on page 11
Jeffrey A. Love, Loan Officer
Federal Funding Mortgage Corp
202-210--7106 jlove@ffmcorp.com
Pet Supplies
Doolittle’s Pet Supply
224 7th St., SE 544-8710
See our ad on page 33
Office Supplies
Capitol Hill Innervision
Art and Office Supplies
701 8th St., SE 544-4664
Photography
Asman Custom Photo Service, Inc
924 Penn. Ave, SE 547-7713
See our ad on page 21
Motophoto
666 PA Ave., SE 547-2100
See our ad on page 11
Picture Framing
Frame of Mine
522 8th St., SE 543-3030
See our ad on page 8
Newman Gallery and Custom Frames
511 11th St., SE 544-7577
See our ad on page 15
Plumbing & Heating
Leakbusters Plumbing & Remodeling
202 544-5000
Antiques
Antiques on the Hill
701 North Carolina Ave., SE
See our ad on page 31
Astrology
Ajai
Good advice since 1979
543-9053
Attorneys
Davis & Gooch
920 Pennsylvania Avenue, SE 543-3600
Rick Halberstein & Karen Byrne
705 D St., SE 543-1110
Arts Center
Capitol Hill Arts Workshop
545 7th St., SE 547-6839
See our ad on page 41
Association
CHAMPS
621 PA Ave., SE 547-7788
Bank
National Capital Bank
316 PA Ave.,SE 546-8000
See our ad on page 13
Books
Capitol Hill Books
657 C Street, SE, 544-1621
Good Used Books Bought & Sold. See p. 42
Riverby Books
419 E. Capitol St., SE 547-3228
See our ad on page 28
Chimney Cleaning
Winston’s Chimney Service
Washington DC (301)571-8546
See our ad on page 31
Church
Christ Church Washington Parish
620 G St., SE 547-9300
See our ad on page 40
Clothing & Gifts
Art & Soul
225 PA Ave., SE 548-0105
See our ad on page 12
The Village
705 N. Carolina Ave., SE 546-3040
See our ad on page 28
Computer Consultant
Better Computer Solutions
623 N. Carolina Ave., SE 546-8084
See our ad on page 39
Drug Store
Grubbs Care Pharmacy
326 E Capitol SE 543-4400
See our ad on page 32
Electric Repairs
Bob Willett / K&W Electric
301-283-4004
Service work small jobs
Garden and Landscape
Gingko Gardens
911 11th St., SE 543-5172
See our ad on page 29
Ornamental Garden
544-7831
District Cityscapes, Inc
202-544-4886
See our ad on page 27
Grocery
The 8th Street Market
419 8th St., SE
See our ad on page 33
Hardware
Fragers Hardware
1115 Pennsylvania Ave., SE 543-6157
See our ad on page 40
Health & Fitness
GI Jane
645 Pennsylvania Ave., SE 547-7906
See our ad on page 31
Home Furnishings
Woven History
311 7th St., SE 543-1705
See our ad on page 27
Home Repair
Federal City Iron
321 K St., NE 547-1945
See our ad on page 27
Handyman on the Hill
Washington DC 206-7185
See our ad on page 15
H&W Contracting, Ltd.
398-7117
See our ad on page 25
Income Tax Services
Jackson Hewitt Tax Service
8th St., SE 554-8840
Internet Provider Services
DC Access
118 Kentucky Ave, SE 546-5898
www.dcaccess.net — a local ISP
Business Directory Listings:
Voice of the Hill is including a yellow-pages style directory of businesses and services that cater to the Capitol Hill community.
To be included in the directory businesses must commit to a one-year contract, payable in advance by check, Visa or
Mastercard. The annual fee is $250. Display advertisers on annual contracts will be included in the directory at no additional
charge.
Each business will be given three lines in the directory; two must be used for the company name, address and phone number.
An extra line is available for your name, a description of your business or service, or a direction to see your ad. Additional
lines may be added at an annual cost of $60 per line (per year). If you would like to be included in the next directory, please
fill in the following form and send it, along with your check or payment information, to: The Voice of the Hill, 120 11th St., SE,
Washington, DC 20003. If you have questions please call Bruce Robey at 544-0703.
Your Name:_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Company Name: ________________________________________________________________________________________________
Address:_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Phone: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Business Description: (30 character maximum) ____________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Please charge my Mastercard or Visa
Name on Card: _________________________________________________________________________________________________
Card Number: ______________________________________________________________________Expiration Date:____________
Real Estate
Valerie M. Blake
Prudential Car ruthers Realtors
5025 Wisconsin Ave, NW 202-362-1348,
x111
www.DCHomeQuest.com
Thom Burns
Coldwell Banker Real Estate
109 8th St. NE 547-5805
Larry C
Pardoe Real Estate
605 PA Ave., SE 546-7000
Tom & Alice Faison
REMAX Real Estate
220 7th St., SE 546-5881
John C. Formant
John C. Formant Real Estate
225 PA Ave., SE 544-3900
Pardoe Real Estate
605 PA Ave., SE 546-7000
See our ad on the back cover
Jackie von Schlegel
REMAX Real Estate
220 7th St., 547-5600
Phyllis Jane Young
Pardoe Real Estate
605 PA Ave., SE 546-7000
Real Estate Settlement
Capital Home Title
703 D St., SE Washington DC 544-4300
See our ad on page 29
Congressional Title
650 PA Ave., SE 544-0800
See our ad on page 33
Eastern Market Title
210 7th St., SE 546-3100
See our ad on page 25
Business Serv i c e s
www.voiceofthehill.com 27
Business Serv i c e s
Restaurants
2 Quail
320 Massachusetts Ave. NE 543-8030
See our ad on page 24
Banana Café
400 8th St., SE 543-5906
See our ad on page 29
Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream
327 7th St., SE 546-CAKE
See our ad on page 30
Bluestone Cafe
327 7th St., SE 547-9007
See our ad on page 8
Ellington’s on 8th
424A 8th St SE 546-8308
See our ad on page 25
Hawk ’n’ Dove
329 PA Ave., SE 543-3300
See our ad on page 15
Park Café
106 13th St., SE 543-0184
See our ad on page 39
Sheridan’s Steak House
713 8th St., SE 546-6955
See our ad page 10
Stompin’ Grounds
666 Pennsylvanai Ave., SE, 546-5778
See our ad on page 30
Salon
RPM Salon
225 PA Ave., SE 543-6481
See our ad on page 27
Social Services
Capitol Hill Group Ministr y
421 Seward Sq., SE 544-0385
Schools
Capitol Hill Day School
210 S. Carolina Ave., SE 547-2244
Edmond Burke School
2955 Upton St., NW 362-8882
Levine School of Music
2801 Upton St., NW 686-9772
St Peter’s School
422 3rd St., SE 544-1618
Spiritual Advisors
Corrin Bennett
920 G St., SE 543-5825
Gabrielle Hill
639 E. Capitol SE 544-438
See ad on page 7
Vacation/Travel Consultants
Jan Cammarata
Judiciary Express Travel
7th & Penn SE, 547-3007
Yoga Studio
Dancing Heart Center for Yoga
221 5th St., NE 544-0841
See our ad on page 7
Federal City Iron, Ltd.
All Ornamental Ironwork
Expert Cast Iron Stair Repairs
Window Bars & Security Gates
Fencing & Tree Boxes
Metal Repairs
SPECIALIZING IN CAPITOL HILL STYLES
202-547-1945
Best Price Guaranteed!
Free Estimates
321 (rear) K St., NE
e-mail: steel1M@aol.com
RPM HAIR & SKIN CARE CENTER
ACCOUNTING SERVICES
MARINA MARTIN, MBA
Innovative and Versatile Range of Services
for Small Business and Non-Profit
Software Installation and Training
Free Consultation
202 547-9536 lastrega@hotmail.com
Log On! w w w. v o i c e o f t h e h i l l . c o m
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28 www.voiceofthehill.com
Long-time
Capitol Hill Resident
John Corrigan
Mortgage Consultant
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202-243-1972
or
202-886-8017
b a n k A Citibank unsecured installment loan for a term up to 15 years and an interest rate that is 2% over the first mortgage may be available
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Riverby Books is always buying quality used books.
Single volumes or an entire librar y.
Call us BEFORE your next yard sale or fundraiser
and we’ll pay you the highest prices…for one book
or for all the books. Capitol Hill Location!
202-544-1925
Steve Cymrot E-mail riverby@erols.com Paul Cymrot
805 Caroline Street • Fredericksburg, Virginia 22401
d o w nL o a d
Tuesday-Fri 11-6, Sat 10-6, Sunday 12-4 • Eastern Market Metro
705 North Carolina Ave. S.E. On Capitol Hill
(202) 546-3040
Check us out for clothing and great
stuff for those hot summer days ahead.
GALLERY OF ART, CLOTHING & UNUSUAL STUFF summer
Sale o n
s e l e c t e d
c l ot h i n g
ANC Votes No on Boys Town,
Heart & Soul
July 13 Special Meeting Draws Mob
July 14. ANC6B’s July 13 special meeting on the
looming Boys Town development at 14 th and
Pennsylvania Avenue, SE drew a standing room
o n ly crowd to the basement meeting hall of
Providence Baptist Church.
Nineteen residents and Councilmember Sharon
Ambrose pre-registered to speak to the project, and
nearly all were adamantly opposed.
Glaringly missing was any representative from
B oys Town. Sharon Robinson, the nonp ro f i t’s
spokesperson, told us her organization was not consulted
about the meeting date, and had a prior
meeting commitment in the Northeast community
near St. Anselm’s Abby where they operate another
shelter.
After hearing several hours of testimony, six ANC
commissioners voted to oppose the project, and
one, Kalimah Abdul Sabur, voted her support .
Commissioner Tom Wells, who has some professional
ties to Boys Town, abstained. Thre e
Commissioners were absent.
W h ether the ANC voted aye or nay,
Councilmember Ambrose had already made up her
mind. She has been trying to throw a wrench into
the project for months, even meeting with the
executive director of Boys Town, Father Val Peter,
who flew in from Nebraska recently for discussions
with Ambrose and the Deputy Mayor for Economic
Development.
Un fo rt u n a t e ly, Ambrose re p o rts, the pro j e c t
appears unbudgeable.
The groundswell of opposition to Boys Town has
been growing since the Voice of the Hill broke the
story in March of this year. We then reported that
the nonprofit made famous by Bing Crosby in the
eponymous 1938 film classic had purchased the
long vacant 88,000 squ a re fo ot parcel at
Pennsylvania and Potomac Avenues for $8.2 million,
with the intent to build a residential childcare
facility for 50 troubled youngsters.
Connie Washington, the project’s site director,
told us that all of the children that will be served are
neglected or abused. Candidates for placement are
wards of the District that have been referred to
B oy’s Town by the Child and Fa m i ly Serv i c e s
Division of DC’s Department of Human Ser