A Neighborhood in Transition
3 03 2008This flickr shot by Daniel Macy is so typical of the way many area neighborhoods are starting to look. At the intersection of Florida and Vermont Ave in Shaw we suspect that these bright rowhomes won’t be able to hold out much longer.
It’s open for debate if this change is a good thing or a bad thing… but we think there should be a happy medium, a neighborhood can’t be all modern glass lofts, can it?
I can’t tell, but it looks like those are new windows in the blue rowhouse above the A/C unit. The stickers on the top left portion of the window are usually a sign of that.
So if those are new windows, might they be fixing it up those buildings for future use?
Just a thought.
What exactly does “holding out” mean — but for the noted potential renovation underway, the blue row house looks like it’s probably been boarded up, graffiti-ed, and vacant for quite a while. If “holding out” simply means holding onto neighbor-harming vacant property (see, e.g., Shiloh Baptist Church’s portfolio of blight), then I hope such negligent property owners can’t “hold out” much longer.
But I agree in the general sentiment that the city shouldn’t become all “loft style” condominiums, and hopefully the row house fabric that defines many neighborhoods, if not the city at large, will remain.
I really like the developments that have incorporated row-homes at street level with the more modern highrise set back behind, it preserves some of the character of the neighborhood and allows for higer density.
We want all those abandoned buildings back on the market, and not held hostage! So many people would love to restore them, especially as the neigborhood transitions.
The row houses need to stay. Our city has the most beautiful row houses you can find. It would be a shame to lose any more of them than we already have. Even the plain ones pictured here are historic, and isn’t that history a big part of our city?