The Washington Post, May 7, 2018: Washington is now a cool city. That’s terrible news for American democracy.
Sparky’s Espresso Cafe was a few blocks from my apartment off 14th Street NW, but in the years after I moved to Washington in 2006, it felt to me like home. To get there from my apartment, I needed to walk by a decaying dry cleaner and a homeless shelter. Sparky’s featured people getting their morning coffee on their way to construction sites bumping into people working on laptops. It served nice enough espresso that it seemed cool, but it had just enough dirt on its walls and khaki pants on its customers that it also seemed genuinely less than cool.
Sitting in Sparky’s, you might as well have been in Atlanta or Buffalo or Kansas City. These cities, like the Washington of those years, were small big cities — or maybe big small cities. They offered a dose of cool, along with a serving of the casual and the communal. Their residents enjoyed the amenities of urban life but didn’t, on the whole, seem to be suffering through the effort of performing it.
Today, Sparky’s has been gone for 11 years — replaced first by the more stylish Cork Wine Bar and eventually by a make-your-own meatball chain opening its first location outside of New York. The dry cleaner is now the home of Le Diplomate, the French restaurant that Michelle Obama ate at the night before she had dinner at the White House with the actual French president. The homeless shelter has partly turned into condos that rent for as high as $7,000 a month.
It isn’t just the 14th Street corridor that has transformed dramatically in Washington. From Shaw to H Street NE to the Wharf, the city has, over the past generation, become a substantially cooler place — one with great restaurants, trendy bars and endless rows of glass condos. Much of Washington in 2018 arguably has more in common with the country’s hippest neighborhoods — Williamsburg in New York, Silver Lake in Los Angeles, the Inner Mission in San Francisco — than it does with the less cool cities of middle America.
