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A regular summary of irregular news and notes from neighborhood blogs and email lists around the District.
Jets vs. Sharks: Street music can add a lot to a city: culture, entertaining background music, or merely be a pesky annoyance. A member of a Metropolitan Police Department email list is fed up with drumming that infiltrates the streets of D.C. They write, “The urban drummers add to the street life, but when they play outside of residential building in an urban area w/ a tight street grid, the sound bounces off of nearby buildings and is very loud in unexpecting places. Trying to work, sleep, or even carry on a conversation inside one’s own home is impossible. The solution is to co-exist in a compataible manner. If the city truely wants a live-work downtown, we need some guidelines so that we can co-exist peacefully.” If only this dispute were to result in a battle between street drummers and D.C. professionals to the tune of West Side Story!
Up All Night: Street drumming isn’t the only noise plaguing residents in D.C. There’s also bothersome hard-partying neighbors. A member of the Cleveland Park email list is seeking ways to solve the problem of a bunch of new—and loud—neighbors. “Ever since our new rental group house (nice group of people) neighbor moved in a few months ago, we have been experiencing loud parties almost every weekend, sometimes both Saturday and Sunday. These parties start at 9pm and end between 1am to 2am. Everyone has rights as homeowners and renters to have parties, events, and make noise. What action should I take? I would approach them myself, but would be very interested that I am not the only neighbor that has the same issue.” One member responds with possibly the nicest way to tell people to shut up, ever. They write, “Perhaps you can try this sort of approach: Coming by with flowers, wine or baked goods from a local store.” (Is it possible that this poster is one of the noisy neighbors in question?)
Advice from the Experienced: Georgetown Metropolitan dispenses this advice: “Dumbarton Oaks gardens and museum don’t open until 2:00 pm (and not at all on Monday). This is evident right on their website, and this information is probably listed in most tour guide books. Yet despite the fact that this information is readily available, almost every time GM passes Dumbarton Oaks on Saturday or Sunday mornings, there’s a group of visitors standing by the gate with a ‘well-what-the-Hell-are-we-supposed-to-do-now?’ look on their faces.” A commenter took this opportunity to do some promoting of their own. They write, “If those uninformed tourists are waiting in the a.m. on a 2nd or 4th Saturday of the month, they are certainly welcome to walk 2 blocks west and visit the Peabody Room at the Georgetown Neighborhood Library, 3260 R Street. I will be more than happy to give them a little 411 about Georgetown’s history!” Never mind that it’s the rare tourist that reads neighborhood blogs!
Lessons Learned:A member of a Takoma Park email list posted a message titled “Bikes and Cars,” about what they learned over a month of driving a car instead of riding a bike. Such lessons included: “Discovered again how much children resent walking. They just think it is ridiculous — the same kids who will play soccer and beg for more time to run around playgrounds — they just want to drive there”; “Paid more attention to gas prices than gas fumes”; and “Saved no time because I spent more time sitting in traffic, driving around looking for parking spaces, driving further than I would have walked, and returning so fatigued from coping with traffic I was less productive the rest of the day.” A point to the two-wheeled set, then?