D.C. Intersections

An American University journalism class explores race and culture in the Metro area

Common Good City Farm cultivates community in LeDroit Park

LeDroit Park/ Shaw, Cultivating Community in LeDroit Park

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| By Thomas Barreiro |

A garden can be dismissed as an easy symbol for the rejuvenation of a community, but in the case of Common Good City Farm, it truly does symbolize how the LeDroit Park community made the best out of a difficult situation.

“This place could’ve been an eyesore ridden with crime,” said community member Sandra Green. “Instead, we have a beacon of hope.”

 

Farm Manager Anita Adalja uses her experience in social work to better relate to the community. / Photo by Thomas Barreiro

What was once a school, Gage-Eckington Elementary, an anchor of the LeDroit Park community for 100 years, is now a park. The school was closed as part of Michelle Rhee’s 2007 restructuring plan. Residents at the time were apprehensive about the impact to their community.

“Gage-Eckington was the heart of this community and, when they announced the closing, people were furious,” said Tricia McCauley, wellness educator and herbalist.

Many, including the LeDroit Park Civic Association, fought the plan to close Gage-Eckington Elementary, citing, in a letter to then-Mayor Adrian Fenty that the lack of any plan to “mitigate the tremendous challenges a vacant building of this magnitude in such a critical location will create.”

This “tremendous challenge” was the concern that the vacant building and lot would turn into a magnet for anti-social or criminal activity.  Something positive, a school was being terminated. What would the new reality bring?

“A lot of the youth get caught up in drugs and alcohol here,” Green said. “Their parents are too busy working multiple jobs and don’t have the time to care for them. A vacant building here would’ve magnified that element.”

Despite concerns, there was understanding that the school was dilapidated. It was inevitable that it would be closed once and for all. Many community members advocated for saving the school, but did not succeed. Gage-Eckington Elementary shut its doors in 2008.

Common Good City Farm. It was the positive that could override the negative. The small food justice initiative won its bid for the former baseball field and now maintains a yearly lease on the space.

“When we first settled in, you could barely recognize this as a farm, the soil was inhospitable,” said Tricia McCauley during an herbalism workshop at Common Good City Farm. “After all these years cultivating, the soil is so fertile that we’ve begun to have to deal with Dandelions.”

Today, you see a garden where once stood a baseball field, where once there could have been an empty lot. And the change, while no doubt traumatic and potentially quite negative for the community, takes a positive turn.

“The community was happy to see it [the school] replaced with something new,” Green said.

The farm has not been without challenges. According to Executive Director Rachael Callahan, the farm manager position saw a lot of turnover in the early years.

“My understanding is that, in a primarily African-American area, it was difficult for them to build a rapport with the community,” said Callahan.

A long-time community member, Green echoed this sentiment.

“They were white granola-hippies,” Green said. “They just couldn’t relate to the low-income families you have living just north of here.”

Despite the shortcomings of her predecessors, there is new hope in current farm manager Anita Adalja. With her background in social work, Adalja has already forged a stronger connection with the local community. According to Callahan, there has been a marked increase in community participation since Anita took over.

“The secret has been the peach trees,” Adalja said. “There are a few peach trees around the low-income housing. People come by and tell us how much they love our peach trees.”

The garden today, on a Saturday morning, is filled with volunteers, interns and participants working and sharing their efforts for the good of the community. All morning, the garden bustles with activity. Some two-dozen people set hoses, cart mulch and stack compost layers. The long, black hoses, which are set along the row of plants, are a simple, yet complicated irrigation system, called the “desert drip method,” which ingeniously delivers moisture drop by drop to each specific plant.

“It saves on water and contains evaporation,” said Jacob Gerety, a young intern who provided a quick visitors’ tour.

Volunteer worker Carolyn Carpenter, a regular at Common Good City Farm, plants a flower garden.

“I love this place,” Carpenter said. “I believe that, if you aren’t giving of yourself everyday, you aren’t living the way God intended. This place lets me give back.”

Green informs newcomers about the importance of the raised beds Common Good City Farm provides for low-income families in the area.

“Especially in this economy, the garden has a big impact,” Green said. “Families can qualify for a raised bed and raise their own vegetables. That means a lot for parents looking to put food on the table.”

The composting corner of the garden reflects layering of organic waste and hay, which stimulates the heat and decomposition.

“People from around the community bring their organic kitchen compost for our big piles”, Gerety said.

Indeed, a few minutes later, a woman and daughter emerged from a nearby building with two large pots of kitchen waste for the garden. They stayed to chat with volunteers after dumping their contribution.

A well-run garden, community support and participation, working hands in the soil in a sunny spring morning  — the scene on a Saturday morning at the Common Good City Farm evidences a success story, of a community that took a conscious turn for the better.

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Mentoring and manhood: Rec center program serves as a safe haven for boys in Brookland

Mentoring and Manhood, Brookland

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The Turkey Thicket rec center is an important part of the Brookland community in D.C. Andre Route leads a youth mentorship program for boys at Turkey Thicket Rec Center. This video takes a glimpse into the program (Litte Guys, Big Futures) and Andre Route’s position at the center.

Read more about Andre Route and the program here.

Video produced and edited by Bridget Gales.

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Americanizing Ethiopia: Two perspectives on a changing community

Silver Spring, Md.

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| By Kenya Downs |

Traveling north on Georgia Avenue into downtown Silver Spring is a short trip around the world. Restaurants and cafes represent a variety of nations and cultures, but the green, yellow and red flags of Ethiopia dominate the ambiance. A venture to other blocks east and west further show the influence of the East African nation on the Washington, D.C., suburb.

The area boasts a thriving Ethiopian community. The Ethiopian Community Development Council estimates that there are more than 250,000 Ethiopians and Ethiopian-Americans living in the Washington, D.C., metro area. Though Washington has the largest population of Ethiopians outside of the capital of Addis Ababa, gentrification in the District has sparked the community’s growth in the suburbs.

Getachew Beshir knows this area well, as a driver with Sun Cab, and offers a driving tour of the Ethiopian businesses. On a busy afternoon, he slows his cab down to a crawl as he points out the diversity of storefront shops offering a variety of goods and services from his homeland.

“We are all over the place here,” he said. “Within the last 10 years more Ethiopians have made this area distinctly ours. We’re a close community.”

Their methods of arrival are not all the same. Some have come due to political asylum, others on visas specifically promoting diversity. Beshir even asserts that within the last decade, more have come illegally, by first traveling through South America and Mexico.

But like many other Ethiopians, Beshir came to the United States knowing only one other person in the area. He attributes this common experience as one of the many reasons why the Ethiopian community is so close-knit.

“We stay connected to Ethiopia by staying connected to each other,” he said. “No matter how American we become, areas like this remind us of what’s in our blood, our hearts.”

But not all Ethiopians immigrants share Beshir’s sense of a connected community that looks out for one another. A Beshir drives past a cluster of groceries and restaurants on Eastern Avenue, on that street, Gebrehawariat Nahon looks outside his storefront window at what he calls the competition.

The block, which serves as the official border between Washington, D.C., and Maryland, is lined with Ethiopian restaurants and groceries. For Nahon it seemed like the perfect location to begin his lifelong dream of being a business owner. He takes his last sip of tea before rising to help a customer who walks in to buy injera bread.

“I never would have thought that (neighboring businesses) would not be happy when I came here.” he said.

Nahon refers to the three other shops selling foods and goods that line the Maryland side of the street. Migration of Ethiopians in Washington to Silver Spring is what attracted him, as well as an eagerness to capitalize on the familiar demographic of a developing area.

He thought his move to the Ethiopian community in Silver Spring would be reflective of the very culture they all shared, one that is welcoming and supportive. Instead he said he has encountered animosity. After two years operating Nahon Market, he now compares his experiences with his observations of Ethiopian neighborhoods around the District.

“In other areas like Virginia, I’d see us work together. It was a change when I came here; they are not happy.”

Slowly, American ideals such as individualism and capitalism are finding their way into the traditionally communal Ethiopian neighborhood. To Nahon, this means a common community objective simply based on a common country of origin is no longer a guarantee for new immigrants.

Now, to be more competitive, Nahon will begin rebranding his market as eatery not specific to one ethnicity, offering American-style sandwiches and treats. English signs have begun replacing those in the traditional language of Amharic.

While Nahon and Beshir present starkly different views on the bond of the Ethiopian community, both acknowledge a passion for maintaining an Ethiopian identification that is distinct. A stroll along Fenton Street on a Sunday will reveal women dressed in white as they trek to church. And both men insisted that younger generations of Ethiopians who do not utilize Amharic are heavily criticized.

Yet both men doubt there will ever come a time when the neighborhood will collectively accept becoming more American than recognizably Ethiopian.

“We are Ethiopian,” Beshir said “How we progress here won’t matter. This area will become more Ethiopian before we become just American.”

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Artists see Anacostia’s parks as source of inspiration, community growth

Parks in Anacostia, Anacostia

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| By Sam Pearson |

When Bruce McNeil uses the image-editing program Adobe Photoshop, the Anacostia River becomes a dazzling array of deep blues and greens, a range of color most urban rivers lost centuries ago.

Throughout history, art has revived the fortunes of neighborhoods that have declined. In Anacostia, a community of local artists is growing. Some, like McNeil, see the river as key to the area’s rebirth. The river’s proximity to the U.S. Capitol building and the federal government’s role managing it has made it a microcosm of larger struggles for environmental groups, and its location in Southeast puts the parks far from typical tourist destinations.

When he canoes on the river, McNeil said, “You wouldn’t even know that you’re in Washington, D.C., because of the abundance of wildlife and foliage and fish. … You don’t hear traffic, and you don’t see buildings.”

McNeil says the river and the fortunes of the Anacostia community, where he lives, go hand in hand. He’s one of a number of artists whose work blends environmentalism with community development.

McNeil came to Anacostia in 1998 when his mother was ill. She died in 2010, but he decided to stay in the neighborhood.

Several times a week, he drives the two blocks from his Burns Avenue Southeast home to Fort Dupont Park. He says he used to walk, but the 376-acre park is so massive he needs a vehicle to reach all of his favorite sites.

The park feels like a country forest on a quiet May afternoon; its empty picnic sites could almost pass for campgrounds beneath the stars.

Southeast, McNeil says, has more green spaces than the rest of the District put together.

It’s just that people from other areas don’t always use them. As the National Park Service’s website notes, perhaps to aid tourists, Fort Dupont Park “is not near Dupont Circle.”

Fort Dupont Park, in particular, is so large that wildlife normally associated with isolated forests have made a home in it. Some rangers even report stories of small dogs being snatched away by hawks and eagles when unsuspecting owners let them wander too far without leashes.

At a public comment event the Park Service hosted in March, Rondell Pooler said his biggest concern was doing something about the wildlife – which often unnerved residents who didn’t know a large deer wandering through an apartment complex was unlikely to attack.

“That shows you that the forest is alive and well,” McNeil said, “and it’s healthy.”

Jurisdictionally, Anacostia’s parklands are somewhat unique. They serve an urban area, but are controlled by the National Park Service, a unit of the federal government – with all of the bureaucracy that entails. Large events need permits; selling food not prepared by government vendors, in particular, has proven difficult to get cleared.

The Park Service runs formal programs for artists at its most prominent national parks like Acadia and Yellowstone, but despite Anacostia’s growing art scene, little of that exists in the park.

Compared to Washington’s dozens of storied monuments, “a lot of Washington doesn’t know we’re here,” said Michelle Oehmichen-Clark, supervisory park ranger for Anacostia Park and Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens.

The Park Service is doing more to provide meaningful services for the community, Oehmichen-Clark said. The annual Lotus and Water Lily Festival, the gardens’ biggest event of the year, has long partnered with embassies to provide cultural celebrations. But the Park Service had mainly connected with Asian embassies. Reaching out to African countries like Gambia, South Africa and Egypt drew more visitors from the neighborhoods near the park, Oemichen-Clark said.

“It made it more relevant to a lot of people,” she said. “We got an audience that we may not have gotten before.”

Many park rangers are not from D.C., let alone the neighborhoods that surround the parks.

Patricia Cummins, a third-grade teacher in Homestead, Fla., was one of two artists-in-residence at Anacostia Park in 2012. While prestigious artist-in-residence programs at nationally renowned parks like Biscayne Bay National Park near where she lives are competitive for artists, Cummins and her friend from college, Pearl Lau, were selected because Cummins knew Oehmichen-Clark when she worked at a park near them in Florida.

Large national parks often provide perks like special secluded cabins where artists can collect their thoughts for three or four months. In Washington, the two women stayed at Oehmichen-Clark’s house for about two weeks, Cummins said.

With Cummins painting and Lao working with pastels, they created river scenes outdoors in the muggy summer heat. Cummins said to keep cool, the pair would sometimes leave the park to walk to a McDonald’s across D.C. 295 on Nannie Helen Burroughs Avenue Northeast in the nearby Deanwood neighborhood for mango pineapple smoothies.

When they returned, “the park people there, they kind of looked at us a little weird,” Cummins said.
She said she found their concerns overblown.

“We didn’t get mugged or anything,” Cummins said, and the people they talked to along the way were friendly.

The parks in Anacostia offer perks, like being able to photograph cherry blossoms away from crowds, McNeil said. And its picnic spaces offer prime spots for summer cookouts.

Some of those stories are told at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum, in an exhibit on river restoration called “Reclaiming the Edge: Urban Waterways & Civic Engagement,” slated to be on display through Sept. 15, which features several photographs by McNeil.

Still, the park’s acting superintendent, Gopaul Noojibail, said he knew the Park Service had more to do to combat the area’s nagging problems.

“I think this side of the river has been neglected,” he said, “for whatever reason, since the founding of the city.”

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A ‘sidehustle’ with a side of advice: The Hive 2.0 brings Anacostia entrepreneurs together

Sidehustle Saturday in Anacostia, Anacostia

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Tambra Raye Stevenson talks about running her small business with other Sidehustle Saturday participants. / Photo by Amrita Khalid

|By Amrita Khalid|

Being a budding entrepreneur can be isolating, especially if you’re in a neighborhood that has roots in a complicated past. Just ask Anacostia resident Tambra Raye Stevenson, the founder of NativSol Kitchen, a cooking school that focuses on cuisine from the African diaspora.

“Particularly East of the River, it can get even more lonesome because outside of your four walls, all you hear is something negative about East of the River,” Stevenson said.

Which is why Stevenson was at “Sidehustle Saturday,” a monthly gathering of aspiring and established entrepreneurs hosted by small-business incubator The Hive. Offering “motivation and mimosas” on its Facebook invite, the free event attracts a bevy of like-minded creators and thinkers that gather in the basement of The Hive 2.0. Entrepreneurs share frustrations and offer advice over bran muffins and bagels. One meeting included the founder of an online music school, a jewelry designer, the owner of a restaurant finder website and Stevenson, whose cooking school seeks to connect African Americans with the healthier cooking styles of African cuisines.

At the meeting, Stevenson brings up the fact that while she prices her cooking classes for Ward 8 residents, most of her students end up being from outside the neighborhood. Stevenson, who has a background in nutrition and studied health communications at Tufts, sought to address the underlying health issues associated with soul food, such as obesity. Her “African Heritage Cooking” and “Food for the Soul” classes seek to equip the community to “cook, shop and eat their way back to health.”

Yet getting the word out in Anacostia is difficult, and a problem faced not just by Stevenson, but many a business owner at Sidehustle Saturday. As Stevenson shares her struggles with outreach, her fellow entrepreneurs nod their heads in recognition of an all-too-familiar problem. What do the residents of Anacostia and Ward 8 want in their neighborhoods? Where do they want to eat, shop and be entertained? The answers to these questions are crucial for the entrepreneurs striving to break new ground “East of the River.”

“I will fault myself in terms of I’m not standing outside the Metro handing out flyers, I’m not going into businesses all along the Main Street,” said Stevenson. “I could get interns and volunteers, but I’m just not at that level.”

“I think the best ideas are when people need a service,” advises Nikki Peele, who, as the managing director of The Hive, serves as part-time cheerleader for the Anacostia business community. Peele suggests Union Market, a “food incubator” in the NoMa district that allows food vendors restricted by the price of opening their own restaurant to make use of its commercial kitchen space. Stevenson hasn’t heard of Union Market, but wants to look into it.

“Since my world is food, I saw that I really need food space. Since I own my home, my home is my office,” said Stevenson, referring to The Hive and The Hive 2.0’s primary focus: office space for small business owners on the rise. Members pay a monthly fee to get 24/7 access to Hive facilities and make use of its meeting space and office equipment such as projectors and copier machines.

“They should do Hive 3.0.—an incubator food space,” said Stevenson, laughing.

The fact that Peele guided Stevenson toward membership in another incubator and not The Hive speaks to a certain giving nature within the organization feels more like than a non-profit than a business. The Hive is partially funded by the ARCH Development Corporation and the D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development. Almost all of its events it hosts are free, including a four-part workshop on crowdfunding for your small business or a tutorial on branding.

“I’m the world’s great procrastinator. So just being here with these like-minded people captivates me into doing something more consistent,” said Jennifer Bowen, a jewelry designer. April’s Sidehustle Saturday was Bowen’s first Hive event. Though Bowen is from Woodbridge, Va., she is attracted to the “wealth of information” available in the Anacostia entrepreneur community. Bowen said the event made her realize she needed to be persistent, to “be about your business,” see the connections between technology and art, and not forgot the essential business components of starting a creative venture.

“You know, because I could have all the art in the world — and I have the creativity to get it done,” said Bowen. “But if I don’t have anybody to show me how to display the art, it’s going to die.”

A $25,000 grant from Capitol One Bank made the construction of The Hive 2.0 on Anacostia’s Good Hope Road possible. The original Hive, located on Martin Luther King, Jr. Avenue, currently hosts 17 small businesses and non-profits. The original Hive building is rented by ARCH, which relies on the income it acquires from tenants. Hive 2.0 is unique in that ARCH owns the building it occupies, which also housed the ARCH Training Center and will soon host the Anacostia Arts Center.

Tambra Raye Stevenson and Terry Scott of the Hive mingle during Sidehustle Saturday. / Photo by Amrita Khalid

For Terry Scott, a consultant at the ARCH Development Corporation, the challenge of developing Anacostia lays in planning its future in respect to its past.

“Right now, the object is to transform the neighborhood, but also to make sure that you don’t displace people,” said Scott in an interview after Sidehustle Saturday. “That you help them enhance their standard of living, and not just by doing what needs to be done, and by dealing with the resources we have.”

Scott, who previously served as a senior coordinator at StoryCorps, the national oral history project that features on NPR’s Morning Edition, was attracted to The Hive because of the role it played in incubating “creative economies” and small businesses.

For a neighborhood like Anacostia, Scott sees the rise of the creative class as vital to its economic progress. Yet for the creative class to prosper, there is a need for an economy that is flexible in turn, which is where the 24/7 component of The Hive proves most useful. Scott feels that the start-up, incubator environment  is a testament to fact that the work-body politic has changed.

Technology has enabled people to telecommute. There is no longer a need to work the German-assembly line model of 9 to 5. Artistic entrepreneurs need an environment that runs on their hours. At the very least, they need a mailing address.

“By focusing on bricks and mortars, you can attract these kinds of people to this neighborhood,” Scott said. “Brains and minds are here. It’s smart to invest in bricks and mortars, but also brains and minds. It’s a symbiotic relationship.”

Ward 8, which encompasses Anacostia, holds the lowest number of retail stores per capita and the least commercial development in D.C. Three out of 10 storefronts in Anacostia are vacant, and ARCH took advantage of this by launching LUMEN8 Anacostia, a yearly arts festival that transforms the storefronts into temporary creative spaces for local artists and creative entrepreneurs. The festival, which premiered last year and featured the work of 100 artists, is set to take place this year on June 22, and will run until August.

But Scott is weary of what is commonly referred to as “artists colonizers,” a sub-culture of well-meaning, but clueless artists who neglect to take into account the communities they work to revitalize. Scott gave one example from when he lived in Brooklyn and would regularly attend community artists meetings. He remembers how a group of artists brainstorming for “Art in the Park” considered portraying erotic content.

“I said, ‘Look, children and families are going to be here and they are not going to want to see this shit,’ ” said Scott. Free speech was the defense used by the artists in question, which appalled Scott.

The need to find out what the long-time residents of Anacostia want to see in their changing neighborhood inspired Scott to plan what he calls a “cultural census.” Scott is currently seeking funding for “Creation Without Representation,” which will compile data from the people that live in Ward 8 about the role that arts and culture play in their lives in order to better inform local programming. The project will soup in data from the U.S. Census to highlight relevant demographics and will use OpenStreetMaps, a free open-source mapping technology.

“You can’t just come into a neighborhood and say, ‘We’re going to help you out,’” said Scott. “Who invited you? Who invited the artists? What about the people that live here, who have been here 20 years?”

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Change on the horizon: What the new streetcar line means for H Street

Streetcar on H Street, H Street Northeast

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| By Tyler Tomea |

With the addition of a streetcar line, H Street is set for some changes and challenges this coming fall. / Photo by Tyler Tomea

Finally, the wait is coming to a close.

The building of a streetcar line along H Street and Benning Road N.E. is underway, with the first phase of construction having started April 1. The reform of the H Street roadway should be completed by the time fall 2013 rolls around, with D.C. planning to start testing streetcars in October.

“Metro does a good job of bringing people into the city from different areas like Maryland and Virginia,” said Dara Ward, a spokeswoman with the District of Columbia Department of Transportation (DDOT). “What it doesn’t do is connect neighborhoods, and this connection between very different areas is important.”

According to the Streetcar Land Use Study, the implementation of the system to the city will provide neighborhoods with a modern and attractive transportation alternative. It will also provide residents with a broader range of transit choices, and has plans to attract and reach new transit ridership.

Dan Malouff, who is a professional transportation planner for the Arlington County Department of Transportation, agrees that more individuals will be willing to give the streetcar a shot.

“There will be higher quality (and) more frequent transit service, since the streetcar will overlay on top of the X2″ bus, said Malouff, who has a degree in Urban Planning from the University of Colorado, in an email. “It will be more comfortable (and) more people will be willing to ride, including the sort of people who use Metrorail but don’t ride the bus. H Street will feel more connected to the rest of the city, and it won’t seem as necessary to own a car to live there.”

What Malouff touches on is among other goals listed within the study, which includes the “reducing of short inner-city auto trips, parking demand, traffic congestion and air pollution” and “encouraging economic development along streetcar corridors.”

Carl Pierre, a city news and tech staff writer for the D.C.-based local news website InTheCapital, details how H Street looked prior to the building of the line, and in what ways the landscape will change along the avenue as a result of its implementation.

Before the area was disjointed, there was no Metro Line and no form of public transportation, according to Pierre. But now, this will revitalize and inject a lot more people to H Street. It also means that residents will no longer have to rely on the consistently unreliable X line buses.

“This is like a steroid shot to the real estate market there, you now have that increase in property taxes, and more desirable places to live,” Pierre said.

The Streetcar Land Use Study alludes to challenges in regards to housing affordability. According to the study, a potential problem is that up to one-third of areas along streetcar corridors could see strong upward pressures on housing prices, and one half would face moderate price pressures.

The tracks have been laid on H Street, and it will be interesting to monitor how the streetcar affects the community in the coming months. / Photo by Tyler Tomea

Some potential responses put forth by the study includes the utilization of public land, including 100 acres within areas facing strongest price pressures for housing, and the usage of tax-credit and other affordable-housing funds in a targeted way.

Aside from housing, it’s also important to take into account what the streetcar will do in terms of the makeup and composition of the area.

What usually happens is the hipsters first set their boots in the ground, come through and make some place “cool,” and then the yuppies see it and come through as well, according to Pierre.

There will be a sort of cultural loss due to gentrification, a subject which Malouff speaks to as well.

“Gentrification will increase along H Street, but there will be a corresponding decrease in pressure to develop elsewhere,” Malouff said.

“For the longest time, one of the most energetic neighborhoods has been H Street,” Pierre said. “It’s always been a quirky place, pretty hip and culturally off the beaten path. With the inclusion of this line I expect more young professionals to come and new retail businesses as well.”

The shift in markets is undeniable, as the streetcar is sure to draw businesses from other areas of D.C. The challenge is how these new businesses will clash with older, more established organizations and stores. The rent increases to existing businesses, along with more competition coming in, has some owners worried about the streetcar line.

But according to the land use study, this problem should not be an issue if the proper planning is done ahead of time. The usage of streetcar planning to identify strategic ways to use existing D.C. business-assistance programs will be paramount.

Additionally, experience of other cities suggests that the increase in consumer activity generated by streetcars more often than not tends to give a boost to ‘mom and pop’ stores, with the increased foot traffic in the area.

For now, H Street is in a state of transformation. As for how it will be when looked at, say, five years from now?

“It will look like 14th Street looks today,” Malouff said.

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At Vietnamese restaurant, a Honduran does all the cooking: Generational shift brings more Latino chefs

Latino chefs, staff forge new relationships with Vietnamese community, Falls Church

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German Sierra, left, had no cooking experience when he left Honduras in 2000. Now head chef of Viet Taste restaurant in Falls Church, he learned to cook Vietnamese food in several kitchen jobs. Owner Thi Quach, right, taught Sierra Viet Taste's dishes by showing him: “I said, ‘this is how it’s supposed to be. This is how it tastes.’ "

| By Luz Lazo |

When German Sierra gets an order for a plate of bun cha hanoi, he knows exactly what to do.

He has cooked the pork dish — with noodles, greens and pickled vegetables — many times, and knows exactly how much fish sauce, salt and spices to add.

Outside his kitchen, the customers who are mostly Vietnamese are expecting to eat authentic Vietnamese cuisine. And Sierra makes them just that.

“When I left my country I never imagined that I would be cooking this food,” Sierra, 39, said in Spanish. “You come here ignoring all about other cultures and foods.”

A native of Honduras, Sierra has mastered the art of Vietnamese cuisine while working at Asian restaurants in the Washington region. As head chef of Viet Taste at the Eden Center in Falls Church, he cooks, reads and even speaks Vietnamese.

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The art of development: who is Petworth’s coveted ‘creative’ class?

Petworth, Changing neighborhood

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| By Paul Abowd |

Sometimes a fresh coat of paint is all it takes. That’s the city’s idea in Petworth, where D.C.’s Office of Planning merged art and urban redevelopment in April, teaming with a local foundation and an out-of-town design firm to host an street art project at the intersection of Colorado and 14th Avenues Northwest.

At the event, organizers handed out copies of the city’s renovation plan (PDF), called the Central 14th Street Vision Plan and Revitalization Strategy, for this historically black, middle-class neighborhood. In the plan, Petworth is described as a gritty and hip, relatively low-rent “arts-based niche” neighborhood. With this brand in mind, city planners are banking on the arrival of industrious, young creative types — to help pound down a few nails.

“We’re using art very deliberately,” said Harriet Tregoning the city’s planning director, while Petworth’s young and old, black, Caribbean, Latino and white residents painted on the pavement nearby.

People talk about gentrification in code: “changing” neighborhoods combine an influx of “artists,” (young, white, and educated) and “young professionals” (more tucked-in, well-heeled versions of the former), with “longtime residents,” (black residents, many in an older age bracket—who comprised 88 percent of Petworth’s community in 1990 but 57 percent by 2010, according to D.C.’s Urban Institute).

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