Georgetown’s Newest Parking Lot?
• July 26, 2011

 

-In the June 30 issue of The Georgetowner, you gave your implicit endorsement of a recent decision to allow left turns to be made from M Street eastbound onto Wisconsin Avenue northbound (“Return of the left turn,” GT Observer). The decision was “coaxed” by Ward 2 councilman Jack Evans and others, probably those living on the side streets north of M Street, which were getting added traffic. According to DDOT officials, they intend to eliminate parking spaces on the south side of M Street to help traffic flow.

While the concept sounds great in theory, one has to wonder whether or not this will add to an already horrific traffic jam on M Street. If anyone truly believes that the entire curb-side lane on M Street will remain empty all day, they are dreaming. Those spaces will be occupied by delivery trucks, UPS and FedEx trucks, and the everyday assortment of illegally parked service trucks and cars. Why should anyone believe that these assorted drivers, who park illegally already, will not merely use this new space as just another area to park illegally? And if that does occur, and since the District police force barely enforces illegal parking on M Street now, this new rule will make M Street even more difficult for all drivers, both residents of Georgetown as well as commuters coming into the District.

Gary Langbaum
Water Street, Georgetown

Remembering Daniel Schorr
•

Contentious, abrasive, thorough, skeptical, dogged, courageous, trustworthy. High praise, indeed.

All of those words are job requirements and descriptions for what today is an endangered species in the field of journalism: the investigative reporter.

All of those words pretty much fit Daniel Schorr, one of the last of the great television and radio reporters who passed away at the age of 93 last week.

Today’s luminaries in the news may have more memorable faces, more dramatic delivery, and they’re certainly better looking, but they can’t hold a candle to the likes of Schorr, who managed to tick off just about every president, elected official and government official he came in contact with, including Nikita Khrushchev, Eisenhower, JFK, CIA directors, senate committee chairs and, most fondly and importantly to him, President Richard Nixon.

Schorr, who died while still working for National Public Radio, came from the Edward R. Murrow informal school of journalism, full of tough, in-your-face, questioning reporters and anchors. That school included Walter Cronkite, once the anchor for the nation on CBS, a network for which Schorr worked until becoming embroiled in intelligence committee findings he discovered, reported and then leaked IN TOTO during the presidency of Gerald R. Ford.

Schorr was discovered by Murrow and became a member of his team, though in his own idiosyncratic way. He was a CBS reporter in Moscow until a KGB reporter refused to let him return. He managed to anger both Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson, but most of all he made Nixon, who didn’t like the media to begin with, turn green and paranoid.

Schorr managed to win Emmy for his Watergate reporting on CBS, for “outstanding achievement within a regularly scheduled program.”

His reporting landed Schorr on Nixon’s infamous “enemies” list a large and eclectic rundown of political foes which also included the likes of Broadway star Carol Channing and New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath. Schorr, like many members of the list, was inordinately proud of his presence there.

In the 1970s, a House Committee investigating the intelligence community, especially the CIA, decided to dub its finding secret. Schorr leaked the findings to the Village Voice after CBS refused to run the story. He was subsequently fired, leading to questions about his integrity, a reporter’s most valuable asset. Schorr, in the end, was vindicated, and you can find an echo of the incident in the recent leaking of classified information about the Afghan war by a watchdog Web site.

Schorr’s passing, like that of Cronkite, is a reminder of the huge changes in the media. They’ve never been replaced.

Last Thoughts on Philly
•

So, the great pizza affair finally looks like it’s drawing to a close. On Feb. 19, the city’s Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs served an illegal use notice to Potomac Street’s Philly Pizza Company, echoing a Board of Zoning Adjustment decision a few days earlier to close the University’s favorite huckster of sauce and cheese on the grounds that it was operating as a fast-food establishment, not as the sit-down restaurant for which it is zoned. It had been a lingering, painfully slow fight — last November, Philly suffered a similar ruling but lucked out with a temporary reprieve until the BZA could reconvene this month. Clocking in at over seven hours, the final hearing was one of near-mythic proportions, a kind of neighborhood armageddon where the issue’s major players could take the field, voice their side and duke it out one last time. Neighbors were finally given the opportunity to speak (in the interest of time, citizen testimony was not heard at the November meeting), and ANC commissioners again submitted their two cents, reinforcing the claims of their unhappy constituents. Of course, Philly owner Mehmet Kocak and his legal team took the floor as well, arguing that the handful of cocktail tables dotting the cramped pizza parlor cemented its status as a proper restaurant.

When the dust had cleared, the neighbors came out on top, and while Philly might have enjoyed a few days’ respite until the city could enforce their decision, the DCRA notice three days later effectively put to an end all the revelry, the good times for students and headaches for everyone else. At that particular corner, at least.

For the record, it’s worth noting that Kocak’s cooperation and diplomacy on this issue had been lukewarm at best. He seemed to hardly notice the clamor over his late-night clientele until the blogs, populace and community boards were all screaming about it. Even then, the solutions he offered were cursory: roll a few trash cans in the street, ask a bored policeman or two to check in every once and a while and hope the situation works itself out. The whole time, his put-upon attitude earned him few friends or allies. Georgetown students, when the ruling was reported on the University blog Vox Populi, seemed to shrug their shoulders and move on. There are other places in town to grab a slice.

To be sure, the BZA’s decision was the right one. Philly had been operating beyond the parameters of its license and indirectly made lives miserable for its neighbors across the street — all of whom have lived on the block for far longer. The community, however — the ANC, neighbors, students — will have to work hard to prove that this wasn’t an isolated lynching. The precedent set by the ruling must be upheld when dealing with similar problems at Tuscany, Domino’s and others, which very likely will inherit the crowds once commanded by Philly. After all, inebriated, early-morning revelers bent on greasy food will gravitate toward the nearest alternative.

Which warrants a word or two about the early-morning revelers: as those directly responsible for the complaints of neighbors, they bear much of the responsibility here, and deserve to be held accountable more than they have been. We urge the neighborhood boards (the ANC and BID especially) to allocate the necessary funding to ensure, if problems continue to arise, that officers are regularly on hand to halt the littering and noise at the source.

Show Us the Money
•

Say, you might ask, whatever happened to the teacher’s union contract?

What happened to that $34 million-dollar deficit or that surplus that wasn’t there?

And how are Chief Financial Officer Natwar Ghandi and DCPS Chancellor Michelle Rhee getting along?

Last time we looked, things looked mighty confusing on the budget front. Rhee and Gandhi were arguing while testifying before the city council on money matters, Gandhi arguing a) there wasn’t any surplus and b) he wouldn’t sign off on control by parties providing private funding.

But now it seems everything, we’re happy to say, is fine and dandy. Sort of.

On May 11, the Washington Post, the District schools and the mayor reported that the city was set to fund the teachers contract, its pay raises, retroactive and current. That agreement, which would cause $38 million in cuts elsewhere in the District budget, would pave the way for an eventual teachers’ union members vote on the contract, worth $140 million.

Mayor Fenty, Rhee and Gandhi appeared together at the announcement to give the appearance of unity. The solution of cuts in the budget, shifting of stimulus funds and private funds at a later date, appeared okay with Gandhi. The agreement must now await a rank and file vote by union members.

Meantime, Rhee has been busy. She announced that she will double the number of senior managers for public schools in the form of “instructional superintendents” with salaries ranging from $120,000 to $150,000. She also announced recently that DCPS would be hiring 400 new teachers.

But some answers still remain hazy. Where is all this money for new hires coming from when just a week ago we heard so much talk of surpluses that weren’t there and deficits that were? If it comes purely from budget cuts, lauded as the perfect stopgap, the District will still pull funding away from public programs on an already spare pocketbook, and just might find itself in a similar pecuniary pickle down the road. The mayor’s solution may not be as elegant as he would have us believe, and it warrants closer scrutiny. [gallery ids="99130,102678" nav="thumbs"]

Vancouver 2010
•

So, how do you like the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver so far?

If you’re an American, quite a bit, thank you very much.

If you’re one of the NBC sportcasters here, you like it even more, because now you’ve got an almost legitimate excuse to talk about practically nothing but Americans.

If you’re Canada, the host nation, probably not so much, for obvious and not-so-obvious reasons. If you’re from Russia, even less. You and your president are mad as hell about it all.

This has been an unexpectedly dizzying and surprising winter Olympics, at turns exposing everything that’s right and everything that’s wrong with these every-four-years efforts. If nothing else, we’ve seen a couple different sides to the host nation, for better and worse.

That image of the Canadians as bland, modest, mild-mannered folks who are patient and have things in perspective and proportion, well, that one took a small hit. They are as crazed about gold as anybody else, and carry as much bellowing national pride as the next country, which happens to be their too-good neighbor, the United States.

The Canadians, in their efforts to create a really fast luge and bobsled competition, created a course that athletes and experts complained was way too fast. It certainly proved to be too fast for a young luge competitor from Georgia who was killed when he lost control at somewhere around 90 miles an hour.

That tragedy, right before the start of the games, was a huge controversy with charges, tortured explanations, and countercharges in the midst of competition. It’s not being talked about too much any more, except perhaps in the Georgian village where they’re still mourning the loss of their hometown athlete.

The Canadians, who should be good in these events because there’s lots of ice, mountains, and snow there — as opposed to Washington — haven’t fared well. Last two times they hosted the winter Olympics they got no gold. They finally broke the spell this time, but then the United States — with most of their NHL stars playing for Russia, Sweden and Canada — managed to knock off the Sidney Crosby-led Canadian team, a huge upset.

The Russian hockey team, with Alex Ovechkin at the helm, lost to Slovakia. Russia was shut out in the medals for pairs skating, where China finished first and second, and when defending gold medalist Evgeni Plushenko, a boyish Putin look-alike in sequins, lost the gold to American Evan Lysacek in men‘s figure skating, he got peevish. He waltzed up to the gold podium at the medals ceremony then, after some comments about skaters who don’t do a quadruple jump not being manly, he walked out. Russian President Putin and his wife also complained about the loss.

And then there was our country ’tis of thee. Even if the Americans don’t win another medal, they’ve kicked butt. This would be really wonderful to behold if we didn’t have to listen to the various broadcasters point out the obvious to us, instead of letting us enjoy it.

This, in spite of the fact that this has not turned out to be the Vonncouver Olympics.

We’ve seen too much of the golden girl, in both senses of the word: her hurt shin, her pained grimaces, her bikini poses, her personal life, her long hair, all of that. She won a gold in the downhill and flashed her gutsy brilliance, fell in another race, and raced conservatively in the super-G for a bronze. Not bad at all, but just modest enough to let others shine.

Others won big also, with Shani Davis taking gold and silver in speed skating, Julia Mancuso winning two silvers and Apolo Ohno setting a record for Olympic medals with short track skating.

Then there’s Bode Miller. Remember him? Like Vonn, Miller was the hyped American athlete in Torino and crumbled like a cookie, with no medals. Here, he’s been about as good as he can get, getting a bronze, silver and gold so far, and a lot less attention, while looking like the scruffy skier Robert Redford might have played once.

Finally, there’s Shaun White, the red-headed snowboarder in a class by himself. I think I saw him working his way to the moon after one of his runs. Confident without being arrogant, articulate, shrewd and funny, he’s the coolest guy in Vancouver.

Canada has enjoyed a few victories, though. The gold medal win by dark-horse moguls skier Alex Bilodeau, the country’s first in a Winter Olympics, prompted a fire of excitement nationwide. More touching was seeing Bilodeau’s older brother Frederic, who has cerebral palsy, weep with joy when the results were announced.

One of the great things about watching ski runs is to see how the Vancouver’s mountain setting revealed itself every time. It was breath-taking. And there’s the city itself, gleamingly hip and cosmopolitan against a backdrop of fierce nature. Even if Canadian athletes aren’t sweeping the podiums, the country has the shown the world a remarkable culture full of natural beauty and modern elan. Now there’s something to be proud about.

Plus, we got to see fiddle players who could tap dance. What more could you want?

Remembering Lena Horne
•

In the 1980s, Lena Horne, a pioneer, legend and star in her mid-60s, put on a one-woman show called “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music,” which became the longest-running solo performance in Broadway history.

She brought the show to the Warner Theatre in Washington, and if you had the good fortune to experience it (and that’s the right word), you got the essence of Horne, and a pretty good idea of what courage and perseverance were required to succeed in America if you happened to be black or of mixed race parentage and if you happened to be born early in the last century.

Horne brought all of her life experience, her humor, her still-burning bright beauty, her vocal abilities and her shazam style to the performance. She sang her signature song “Stormy Weather” twice during the course of the night. “I was young when I first sang it,” she said, and sang it right there like a naïve, lovely young girl, and sang it again, all the stormy weather she had experienced herself at full throat. “This is me now,” she said.

Horne came from a mixed marriage, and was married at one time to Lennie Hayton, a top conductor and arranger at MGM when the studio’s musicals where American landmarks.

When it came to civil rights and racial history, she was a little like Zelig, being everywhere: she was a Cotton Club chorine, she was both famous and half visible as an MGM starlet and star, including Vincente Minnelli’s “Cabin in the Sky” and “Panama Hattie,” in which she sang “Stormy Weather.” She was in numerous MGM musicals, but her roles tended to have the position of production numbers, which could be cut if the films where shown in the segregated South (and they were).

In the 1940s she worked with the controversial and politically active singer and performer Paul Robeson, a man of huge gifts and anger. She made United Service Organizations tour stops (where German POWs were routinely seated in front of African American soldiers), a task at which she balked.

She took part in the dramatic civil rights marches of the 1960s and sang on behalf of the National Council of Negro Women and the NAACP.

Her music, once she stopped making Technicolor movies, was beyond category, beyond jazz and completely enduring. She recorded well into her 80s.

Through all the trials and tribulations, the difficulties that were part of her life, she never succumbed to such shallow notions as complaining. She just kept on doing what she loved, stood up tall, and was dazzlingly emblematic of class, as in classy, as in first class. [gallery ids="99131,102679" nav="thumbs"]

What’s happening to our merchants?
•

 

-Georgetown has always had its ups and downs. In the 1960s, saloons and nightclubs were a major concern to residents. In the 1970s, crime was running rampant and vendors were setting up all along Wisconsin Ave. in front of stores. But the Georgetown merchants organized and built a strong merchant association that got city hall to pay attention to what was happening to this historic neighborhood. The Citizens Association got involved in fighting crime with increased neighborhood watch programs and increased policing of the neighborhood. The realtors of Georgetown were willing to work with the small merchants. Johnny Snyder, Sam Levy, Emil Audette and other commercial realtors did not gauge the merchants, but set reasonable rents. Rick Hinden of Britches, John Laytham and Stuart Davidson of Clydes, The Georgetowner and Richard McCooey all worked together to form a strong mercantile base for the community.

By the ’80s, Georgetown was in its heyday. Business was strong. Then in the ’90s, things began to change. Rents went sky high, mom and pop stores moved out, foreign money took over the commercial sector, banks (the mainstays of the community) such as Riggs, Washington National and American Security all closed or were taken over by outside interests. The merchant association lost its importance when the BID came about. The Citizens Association became more of a social outlet. All nightlife disappeared as saloons and nightclubs were forced out. Parking enforcement turned many shoppers off. Malls in the suburbs stole business from Georgetown, offering free parking and big movie screens.

All of Georgetown’s movie theatres shut down. The Food Mart, Neam’s Market, the French Market all left. Residents had to drive outside of the community to go grocery shopping. Chain stores moved in. Shoppers did not come back. The same chain stores could be found in the suburbs, where parking was easy and free. And so, here we are today, almost at a stage where Georgetown has to start over. The merchant mix is all wrong.

As the neighborhood’s primary lobbying force, the Georgetown Business Association has to take the lead. The cit council has to wake up and see what is happening to this historic neighborhood and work with the BID and other merchant associations to improve the situation.

Let’s be a little more creative.

DC leads a just cause
•

It’s official. Let the weddings begin.

As of today, March 9, gay men and women could get married in the District of Columbia, and many of them probably did.

Officially, same sex marriage was legalized in the district on March 3, when same-sex couples could get a marriage license in district court and many, many of them did, from the District of Columbia and elsewhere, states where same sex marriage is not legal, the number of which still constitute a large majority in the United States.

Still, the issue of gay marriage passed a gauntlet in the District of Columbia that seemed insurmountable at one time in a jurisdiction where Congress, which had veto rights over the District budget, routinely insisted that anti-sodomy laws remain in place.

That might seem a thing of the past, but the climate for legalization of gay marriage and gay rights and discrimination is still a stormy one. For all the celebration and sighs of relief and it’s-about-time commentary that erupts whenever a jurisdiction legalizes same-sex marriage or equivalent rights, there’s always an event, a fight, a comment, a slur, a legal battle or maneuvering that reveals just how far gays have yet to go to achieve rights that to them and to most reasonable people seem just.

To many religious organizations and institutions, same-sex marriage threatens their beliefs and threatens the family, an ill-defined word in these contemporary times where divorce among straight people is alarmingly high. And there is always the religious fringe whose hatred of gay Americans, or gay people in general, appears to know no bounds.
That’s why, for instance, the Supreme Court is set to deliver a free speech verdict, no less, on the fate of rabid (there’s no other word for their cruel use of speech) anti-gay protesters who routinely show up at military funerals with hate-filled signs like “God Hates Your Tears” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” (among milder examples). The groups, members of Kansas’ Westboro Baptist Church, believe that 9/11 and U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq are God’s punishment on America for tolerating gays in America. Needless to say, they are not fond of same-sex marriage, either.

A family of one dead soldier who sued the protesters and initially won a $5 million verdict is appealing a U.S. district appeals court decision that overturned the verdict on First Amendment grounds, saying that the signs had “imaginative and hyperbolic rhetoric” which was protected.

Meanwhile, Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli II, who had toned down his ultra-right rhetoric during the recent election campaign, has written letters to Virginia higher education officials asking them to back off policies against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, causing a furor among students on public university campuses.

And the unworkable and painful “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about gays in the military remains in place, even though some of the highest ranking officers in the military have spoken out against it.

All of these landmark efforts on same-sex marriage, legal rights and recognition are essentially about making gays and lesbians a part of mainstream America, a notion that absolutely terrifies anti-gay forces. If gay people have the same visible rights and place as other members of the community, it becomes impossible to marginalize them with slurs, rhetoric, oppression, discrimination and open hateful acts. If gay men and women come into the community light in terms of equal rights and responsibilities, it forces bigots to slink into the dark, where they belong.

High Hopes for Health Care
•

 

-In a recent New York Times op-ed, Paul Krugman, echoing Abraham Lincoln, remarked that the case for universal health care was “an appeal to our better angels, urging politicians to do what is right, even if it hurts their careers.” His politics and bias, whether you agree with them or not, are immaterial here. More important is to understand his use of a phrase now firmly ensconced in the American rhetorical canon, one which may help us to see how the passing of a landmark piece of legislation on Sunday fits into the larger picture of American social policy.

Better angels. It’s a Lincoln original, a curious turn of phrase he used, against the advice of his Cabinet and colleagues, to describe an aspect of America’s internal conscience. It implies the smallest lozenge of good residing within everyone, heavenly, metaphysical, one we strain to hear over the din of heated argument and impassioned emotion. Our ongoing struggle with this innate empathy also calls to mind a stark truth: that American crusades for civil and social justice, the ones we now deem unshakable and sacrosanct, were never popular with contemporaries.

At the turn of the 19th century, those who had fought so hard to guarantee free speech in the Constitution faced its erosion by sedition laws. In Lincoln’s own time, emancipation was reviled by the South and thought imprudent and reactionary in the North. A century later, a handful of legislators, state politicians, and citizens showed they would go to any length to curb the presidency’s quest for civil rights chartered by law. To question the spirit of these movements today, now removed from any political or prejudicial skew, would be to question what is now snugly assimilated into the country’s heritage.

Do we possess the prescience to feel certain the cause for health care will be remembered similarly? No, but we have a feeling it will be. Of the three fundamental rights Thomas Jefferson ascribed to humanity, life and liberty are the most easily stripped by the vindictive, heartless, cutthroat side of mankind. We must never allow that side to take ground. We must recognize for ourselves and for each other that the cause for life, like the cause for liberty, will be threatened constantly by the shallow, inhuman interests that lurk on the fringes of a harsh world. We must pledge to never lie beholden to these. We must pledge to take the steps necessary to ensure that our citizens, one and all, have the resources they need to preserve their own life and the lives of loved ones.

This may require us to quiet ourselves for a moment and listen within to that which binds us together as Americans, and as human beings. The better angels of our nature.

Evans for Chairman?
•

Well into the middle months of Mayor Adrian Fenty’s final year of his first term, there is an unsettled, faintly ominous feel to the political and economic atmosphere in the District of Columbia.

While the mayor appears to have made significant progress in many areas, large sections of voters throughout the city seem to be unhappy with Fenty, as well as his chosen Chancellor of Public Schools, Michelle Rhee. Speculations have it that some members of the city council, notably Chairman Vincent Gray, who has been visibly at odds with the mayor over a number of issues, will challenge the mayor’s re-election.

No one is exactly betting against the mayor, who has a fat war chest. But electoral politics are a background noise to the business of the council, which now has to contend with a looming budget deficit of the kind not seen by most of its members.

The man least fazed by turbulent political clouds or impending economic troubles, and who probably knows more about them than anyone on the council, is the council’s finance committee chair, Jack Evans. More telling, Evans is the longest continuously serving councilman, having won a special Ward 2 election in 1991, when he emerged the winner over a large field.

Evans has seen the mayor-council relationship ebb and flow over his nearly 20 years in office. “It’s never been ideal,” he says. “Mayor Kelly and council Chair John Wilson were at odds often. Mayor Williams at first didn’t have much to do with the council but that changed in his second term, where there was a lot more contact and cooperation. Right now, I’d say, we’re having some problems in that arena. It’s no secret that Chairman Gray and the mayor rarely communicate. There are several people on the council who’ve had no words with the mayor for months. Maybe years.”

Evans isn’t one of them. It is generally recognized that Evans, who supported Linda Cropp in the mayoral race, has become Fenty’s most consistent and strongest supporter on the council, as well as supporting the school reform efforts of Rhee. “That’s fair to say,” he says. “I think the mayor is a doer, he believes in action, and when something’s done or settled, he moves on.”

The electoral hubbub doesn’t really concern Evans, although if Chairman Gray should run for mayor, “I can tell you I will run for chairman,” he says. “No question.”

Right now, though, politics are not at the top of his list. The budget is. “We’ve been very lucky in terms of the economy,” he says. “We’ve done extremely well and haven’t felt the main brunt of things. That’s not true anymore. As everybody has noted, we’re facing a shortfall of nearly $500 million. It’s almost a cliché, but this requires some extremely tough, painful decisions. We’re better off than other jurisdictions, but things are not going to get better right away.

“There’s only so many places you can look, so many things you can do. Now we’re going to be perhaps talking about looking at freezes on wages, maybe even pay cuts. We are required to balance the budget.”

Evans is by far the most experienced member of the council when it comes to financial and budget manners, making him ideally positioned to be heard in his role as head of the Committee on Finance and Revenue.

Mayor Fenty is scheduled to bring the Fiscal Year 2011 Budget Request Act of 2010 and the Fiscal Year of 2011 Budget Support Act of 2010 to the Council April 1.

“That’s where it starts,” Evans says. The council will hold a public briefing on the mayor’s budget plan on April 12.