SpaceTime Continuum no.2

THE SPACE:
Malcolm X Park (Meridian Hill), Washington DC
THE TIME:
Sunday 3aug08, 4:10pm. 90 seconds.

Blind, forgotten...and fluffy

We found this poor fellow face-down in the rain-gutter at Malcolm X Park on Saturday. With a little encouragement, he found the strength to sit upright and endure some questioning. We thought we were making real progress, but the mood changed suddenly; his features clouded, and he sank into his own private, dark inertia once again.

We can't save them all, but we persevere, though it breaks our hearts to see the forgotten ones fall like this...

Poltergeisting Columbia Heights

Some 15 years ago, I was renting a share of a (semi-legal) sublet in the basement of a Victorian rowhouse on Monroe Street. It was about a block from the long-abandoned Tivoli Theater, which slept in a cocoon of barbed wire and plywood, dreaming of the inevitable wrecking-ball.

It was a schizophrenic place, stranded between the relative safety of 16th street and the rancid horror of 14th street. My roommates and I furnished the place almost entirely from nearby eviction leftovers (the stinky burlap couch was a personal favorite). Cops chased young hoodlums past my window and I watched their sprinting feet through the bars. Sometimes I heard their gunfire as I tried to sleep. Despite this, there was a homey, real-neighborhood vibe to the area. Between the outbursts of gang warfare and mornings spent waiting for "that guy" to wake up and get offa my front steps, Columbia Heights imprinted a strangely complex and appealing flavor on my memory.

Fast-forward to 2005: I've spent a few years in New York, nearly a decade in Arizona, and a year in Maine. Now I'm back home and "poltergeisting" on weekends (poltergeisting = the obsessive re-visiting of old neighborhoods). After 15 years, I feel like a ghost wandering these streets.

For example: the Tivoli Theater has shed its barbed wire and is fully renovated. The Scary Giant has moved next to the Tivoli and has become a clean, shiny, and huge grocery store (it seems VERY ODD to find curries and imported wine in a Columbia Heights Giant). High-priced condos are sprouting everywhere like fragrant, garish blossoms seeking wealthy suburban hummingbirds. Weird.

My ghost-wandering took me south on 16th Street to Malcolm X Park (officially known as Meridian Hill) -- Back in the old days, this was the one-stop-shopping district for various narcotics, and it was absolutely unsafe. Now, the park is filled with sunbathers, families playing croquet, frisbee-tossing jocks, soccer games, student-types with books, and innocent camera-wielding wanderers like myself.

My goal in Malcolm X Park was to see if SERENITY was still there, and she was. Serenity is the white marble statue of a seated woman whose facial contours had long since been eroded by acid rain, time, and abuse. I remember black, Alice Cooper-esque streaks running from her eyes and down her cheeks, making her name, "Serenity," a dark and cynical joke... Her goth streaks were gone, and someone had thoughtfully colored her eyes a charming shade of blue.

From there, the August heat drove me back to the Metro, and home: Poltergeists, it seems, aren't any more immune to the weather than their human neighbors...