"Who Belongs Here? An Oral History of D.C.’s Most Gentrified Neighborhood"

Big Bear Café has been the Bloomingdale neighborhood spot for one of the area’s best cups of coffee or tea; breakfast or a homemade lunch, all served in a comfortable, welcoming environment or on the restaurant’s cobblestone patio surrounded by herb and flower gardens. Truly a ‘neighborhood’ spot, it has been involved in the founding of the area’s farmers’ market, community activities and social causes.

Big Bear Cafe

Journalist and Shaw resident Shilpi Malinowski explores the complexities of stories of belonging in the District’s most dynamic neighborhood

An opportunity to learn and chat with the Author of "Shaw, LeDroit Park and Bloomingdale in Washington, D.C.: An Oral History" Shilpi Malinowski is an author, reporter, oral historian, teacher and D.C. resident whose writing has been published in The Washington Post, The New York Times and India Abroad. Her first book, Shaw, LeDroit Park and Bloomingdale in Washington, D.C.: An Oral History, tells the story of 70 years in D.C.’s most gentrified neighborhood through reporting, oral history and photography. She is a 2022 and 2023 Fellow with the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities."Let residents tell you what it’s been like to live in D.C.’s most gentrified neighborhood. When Gretchen Wharton came to Shaw in 1946, the houses were full of families that looked like hers: lower-income, African American, two parents with kids. The sidewalks were full of children playing. When Leroy Thorpe moved in in the 1980s, the same streets were dense with drug markets. When John Lucier found a deal on a house in Shaw in 2002, he found himself moving into one of four occupied homes on his block. Every morning, he waited by himself on the empty platform of the newly opened metro station. When Preetha Iyengar became pregnant with her first child in 2016, she jumped into a seller’s market to buy a rowhouse in the area."link to the book: <a href="https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Products/9781467149693" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Products/9781467149693</a>

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"Who Belongs Here? An Oral History of D.C.’s Most Gentrified Neighborhood"

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"Who Belongs Here? An Oral History of D.C.’s Most Gentrified Neighborhood"

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