"And yooouuu are......?"

AJC photo by Brant Sanderlin

"Hi, I'm new first-baseman Mark Teixeira. I just got here from Texas"

"Hi, I'm...uh....(mumble)-baseman Scott Thorman. Sit here, I was just getting up to catch my plane to Richmond."

-awkward silence-

Tex arrived during the seventh inning, in uniform after taking BP in the tunnel, and was greeted with a nice ovation. Wish I coulda been there. At least I'll get to see 'em three times in September against the Nats

As for how it felt walking out of the tunnel for his first time in the building as a Braves player?

"Once I found out how to get down there, it was nice," Teixeira said. "It was great just walking out there. I came out, the bases were loaded, and we scored some more runs. It was just nice being out there, and when the fans realized I was here and gave me a nice ovation, it felt great."

Street Mayors: A unique bit of city life

Shortly after we moved to Meridian Place, we met a great man named Matthew, who lives down closer to 14th Street. He's lived in the same rowhouse since the late 50's or early 60's, and saw everyone leave after the riots, and has witnessed the slow—and rapid—transformation of the neighborhood with the opening of the Green Line in 1999 and plenty of other factors.

Matthew has raised all his children in this house, and now has more grandchildren than he can count on two hands. Almost every morning, as I set out for work on my bike, I'm greeting with a wave and a "hey there, young man" as I wave back to Matthew sitting on his porch. He looks out for everyone on the street, knows most of the people who have been there for awhile by name, and knows the rest of the faces, probably.

The Bride blogged about Matthew shortly after we moved here. We heard stories from other friends of ours, including our pastor Glenn at GraceDC who said they have a "mayor" on his street as well. (Turns out its the same guy as this WaPo story - Outlaw) The first time they tried to have a package delivered to their house, he came over and politely notified them that no one on the street has any packages delivered directly to their house — he receives all of them. And he showed 'em where he had keys hanging to nearly every house on the block, so everyone knew where they had a spare when locked out or could ask him to water the plants and feed the dog. His mayoralty is a little more involved than ours. Apparently, this phenomenon is not uncommon all over the city—of a longtime resident who looks after things for everyone.

On the many streets in D.C. full of rowhouses and townhomes, rather than tall buildings with doormen like other big cities, these de facto street supes are a welcome addition, making many of our neighborhoods great places to live.

The Bride sent me this story from the Washington Post about one such Mayor near Stanton Park on Capitol Hill.

In a city of workaholics who leave home early and return late, many neighborhoods have their version of William Outlaw -- or would like to. The 80-year-old retiree accepts packages for 130 Capital Hill neighbors when they are not home during delivery hours. His practice is so well established that delivery services often head directly to his door without stopping elsewhere on the block. Some neighbors call Outlaw the unofficial mayor of the street, not only for his grass-roots post office but also for the way he volunteers to clean sidewalks, check on homes while neighbors are vacationing and do other odd chores...His name is passed like a secret treasure among grateful neighbors, so much so that real estate agents have touted him as a selling point to prospective buyers.

Read the rest of the story in the Washington Post

Well, if you've gotta cut the neighborhood in half...

...you might as well make good use of typically underutilized space. This is the area under the SE/SW freeway that cuts off the greater Navy Yard area (and greater SW) from the rest of 8th Street SE, Barracks Row, and Capitol Hill. I'm not sure how this came to be, but it's a great use of space that ordinarily just becomes parking or a haven for criminals and those who want to stay out of sight.

I was poking back through some old photos on Flickr, and I saw this photo from our self-guided alley tour we did of Capitol Hill awhile back.

Anyone local know how this got installed?

UnderpassBBall.JPG, originally uploaded by whiteknuckled.

The streets are filled with blood and crazy killers! Pictures at 11!

After working (in newspapers) in a tiny media market in middle america and dealing with patently unwatchable local news that even from time to time just read our stories on the air, I was ready to be back in a town where local television journalism was taken seriously and done with excellence.

This is not that town.

The local news here is generally terrible, and there are way too many anchors who talk in "anchor voice" which sounds like me trying to do a really bad imitation of a game show announcer.

Anyway, I noticed this sad story from my neighborhood over the weekend, where apparently a homeless guy got stabbed by someone on 14th Street. Upon opening the link, I was greeted with this "fantastic" image, since they didn't have any video or photos to correlate with the story.


ABC 7: In the future, if you don't have any corresponding pictures, we can do without the blood-filled graphic and "angry" knife-wielding hand, which was probably only Frank the Office Page who got handed a knife and told to "act like you're going to stab someone while we photograph your hand."

You stay classy, San Diego.

Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens

The Bride and I went out to Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens for the first time over the weekend. Good stuff. I don't want to steal her thunder, so I'll just have a brief view, but check out the video of the water on the lily pad. If you do go, now is the best to see the flowers in bloom, and going after a rain can result in a sight like this:

I'm Lucky. Stupid....but lucky

So last night we were headed back to our friend Jess's house in Columbia Heights following jazz in the sculpture garden, which is really a story in itself due the rain. I had all of our food and the blanket and stuff hanging on my bike, so I went home to drop it all off before biking over to meet The Bride and our friends Ben and Brooke who were walking over to Jess's

So at about 9:15 or so, I came by our rowhouse on Meridian, and laid my bike against the front steps, and went inside with the bags to set 'em down before coming right back outside to leave. So I'm inside for about 10-15 seconds, and I come outside, and as I'm coming up the basement steps, I don't see my bike wheel in front of the steps. "CRAP!"

I run up the steps, and my neighbor Josue sees me, looks at my face, and says "you just got your bike stolen, didn't you!"

He was walking up after parking his car and there was a guy walking up the street near our place. When he got to his house next door, he's going inside and sees the guy riding a bike across the street into the alley. Then I show my face, and he put 2 and 2 together.

We take off down to the alley on the S. side of Meridian place, look all the way to 14th, don't see him, and run around behind the building across the street. All this time, I have flip flops on and can barely keep 'em on running. We come back to the house, I grab shoes from inside, and we go to get in my truck and look through the neighborhood.

Josue and I both knew that whoever it was, they probably lived in the neighborhood, and the chances that they would bike it far away were unlikely. So we started driving around. After about 7-10 minutes, were getting ready to give up and head back. I'm coming south on Holmead, and right at Oak Street, there's a couple of kids on bikes turning onto Holmead towards us.

I see the first one, and can tell it's not mine by the shape of the handlebars. But as we get closer, the second one is DEFINITELY mine. So I swerve my truck in front of the kid as he turns north onto Holmead, so I block him in up against the curb.

He lays the bike down as Josue gets out of the truck and asks him something about "is that your bike." There are two couples walking by, and a lady sitting on her porch on the corner, so the kid just takes off up Holmead, leaving my bike on the side of the road. I grab it, and stick it in the back of my truck. The lady asks us, "did he steal that bike?" I said "yes", though I didn't know at the time that it wasn't the same guy who stole it. She said she knew him or something like that.

A cop came up pretty quick due to my truck parked basically across the road, we told him what happened, and he took off up Holmead to look for the kid.

After a few minutes, he came back and said he couldn't find him, and would I like to file a report. Josue says that neither of us could ID the guy who took it, the kid likely wouldn't be prosecuted anyway for receiving stolen property. I said there was no real point in filing a report, since I got my bike back, didn't get shot looking for it or confronting the thief, and we couldn't ID the guy who took it.

The cop said it was probably a crackhead or junkie of some kind who took it, which makes sense. It was an older guy, according to Josue, not a kid, and the cop said he probably biked around the corner and sold it for 10 bucks to the nearest 14-year-old and got his fix for the day. Jumping to conclusions, perhaps, but it makes sense.

Anyway, so despite being an idiot by leaving my bike outside, even for just 15 seconds, I managed to get it back within 15 minutes. He tossed off my bike lock and helmet, so I've gotta replace those today, but it's better than buying a new bike, eh?

The only other thing I really did lose is a convenient excuse to buy a new road bike, which I'd been thinking of doing since I'm still riding a 50 pound mountain bike to commute only. I guess I'll just have to save money for that instead.

Lake Mead goes down, grass comes out

One look at this startling picture from Lake Mead near the Hoover Dam, and you can see why Las Vegas has no future. This very interesting story from the NYT is about how Las Vegas and the Southern Nevada Water Authority are paying current residents to tear up their lawns and replace it with more sensible xeriscaping that uses little to no water, while also making new development grass-free, due to the massive water shortage that the region is facing (and won't end anytime soon).

According to the story, watering lawns and gardens represents 60% of the water usage in Las Vegas, which is actually more than what the casinos use on the Strip and in the grandiose founatins. Lake Mead is at 2/3 of its normal level, and with drought conditions persisting and not going away anytime soon, all of the new development out west that survives based on cheap land, cheap gasoline, abundant energy to air condition it 10 months of the year, and abundant water will soon come to a crashing halt.

On a related note, during the timeshare presentation last weekend we attended to pay for our weekend away, our very nice saleslady told us we should visit Vegas sometime on a vacation, because "the architecture was so wonderful. I mean, it's like you're really in Venice, or New York, or Paris".

-grimace-

Griffith Stadium in NW DC

(More photos added) I'll save all my yapping about this stadium for another post, but I wanted to show you some images I worked up yesterday on my lunch break.

Griffith Stadium was the home of the Washington Nationals, the Negro League Homestead Grays, and then the Washington Senators, from 1911 to 1965 when it was demolished without fanfare six years before the Senators left for Texas. It was a beautiful old park with crazy dimensions that had character oozing from its aged steel and concrete.

It basically sat on the site where Howard U Hospital is today, bordered by the alley north of U Street to the south, 5th Street NW to the east, W Street to the north (almost), and Georgia Ave to the west. There were about 4-5 rowhouses and one tree north of the U Street alley on 5th Street NW that the Nationals couldn't buy, and as a result, the centerfield fence juts right back into the outfield to compensate.

I've walked and biked the square, and I have yet to find any sort of plaque or marker commemorating the 70+ years of baseball played on the site (National ballpark actually sat east of this site, opened in 1892 and burned in 1911, leading to this place being built.)

It's a shame that the neighborhood could today feel like Wrigleyville if the park was still standing, with 5th Street as Sheffield and the U Street alley as Waveland Avenue. It wasn't as smooth a park as Wrigley, Comiskey, or Fenway, due in large part to the fact that it wasn't built mostly at once like Wrigley was. Griffith was just a lower deck for years before the second deck and outfield seats were added. The second deck didn't even really connect to the lower deck, so it would be a lot harder to buy cheap tickets and move up like you can at Nats games today!

I've decided to make it my personal mission to make sure that Cultural Tourism DC or some other DC entity recognizes this historic site with some sort of marker. I'm sure there's gotta be some other people out there like me that love baseball, baseball stadiums, and would love to see where Josh Gibson, Harmon Killebrew and others knocked the ball around a park in a DC neighborhood. I'll save my full "outrage" until I've thoroughly checked the area for some sort of marker, though I'm 99% certain there isn't one there.

I think it'd be a great thing for the neighborhood to memorialize and include in one of the Cultural Tourism walking tours, especially due to how the stadium fits into the African-American heritage of the greater U Street neighborhood, with the Grays using it as their "home away from home" for years.

Don't miss the note where Mickey Mantle's tape-measure homer landed back in the day. It was supposedly well over 500 feet, landing in the backyyard of 434 Oakdale, and significantly longer than the one he nearly hit over the RF roof at Yankee Stadium, or the one he hit over the seats in right-center at the Stadium.

Anyway, enjoy. Thanks to Google Earth and the power of the internets for the photos to make this sort of visualization possible. Click on any of them for a larger version

From the east, looking west/slightly northwest

From the southeast, looking almost directly northwest

From the northeast, looking to the southwest

From the east, looking west/slightly northwest. It's interesting to notice that the area was significantly more dense back when this picture was taken, which was the oldest aerial shot I could find of the stadium. There are few, if any, surface parking lots, and buildings fill out almost every block. I'm sure some of that is due to the riots, which were focused nearby at 14th and U street, but I'm sure some of that is the suburban-centric development mentality in the neighborhood over the last 30 years.

From the direct south, looking due north. Notice the rowhouses on U Street that are still there today, as well as a few of the ones on the corner of U and 5th that forced the outfield fence to jut back into play.

Same thing, just in black and white.

Check out:
• Baseball in Washington, D.C. by Frank Ceresi, Mark Rucker, Carol McMains
• And the always irreplacable Ballparks.com

For Sale

For Sale: One Michael Vick replica jersey, size medium. This jersey was a gift a few years ago, was lightly worn during football season only, has never lived up to its potential, and is now too embarassing to wear. $1 or best offer. Consider adding a "1" to either side of the 7 and having a highly-prized "Eric Newman" or "Kurt Quarterman" jersey.

Overheard: Delivery Envy

Overheard this morning while locking up my bike out front of my office on L Street:

FedEx guys are parked on the side of the street, and two guys sitting in the truck are chatting about all sorts of things right next to my bike. A UPS guy walks up with a package in hand to the open drivers' side door.

UPS Guy: "Man, I just want to know how I can get a job with FedEx....so I can sit around in the truck and talk all day. (Laughs)