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different kind: U Street and its environs had become one of the city’s most notorious open-air illegal drug markets, offering mostly heroin but now, as the hyped-up ’80s began to gather steam, quickly diversifying into cocaine. At certain hours of the day, the empty street would magically fill with spectral figures who materialized out of boarded-up buildings and weed-choked empty lots; immediately, cold-eyed young men arrived to selllittle packets of bliss. Police called it “feeding time.” When afternoon gave way to evening, the commerce of prostitution settled in for the night. U Street was an exciting place full of opportunity and enterprise, all right, but in a sense that could give only pushers and pimps a sense of accomplishment and pride.
    That was nearly thirty years ago. Today U Street is one of the liveliest, most desirable neighborhoods in town. Old landmarks—not just the Lincoln Theatre but also the Bohemian Caverns nightclub, where past performers included Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and just about every other midcentury jazz artist you’ve ever heard of—are open again for the amusement of moneyed young patrons. There is more retail commerce up and down the street than ever—make that more
legal
retail commerce—with funky boutiques selling what passes for hip fashion in buttoned-down Washington. Where once there were empty lots and burned-out shells, new apartment buildings offer anyone with a million dollars the opportunity to live in spacious, spanking-new “lofts” that look almost like the real thing. There are cafés and wine bars; there are stores selling designer furniture. Around the intersection with Ninth Street, a lively row of restaurants draws patrons from around the city.
    The temptation is to say that U Street is “back,” but that wouldn’t be accurate. Sixty years ago, or certainly thirty years ago, you would have been surprised to see a Caucasian soul within blocks of U Street. Today, roughly half of the people you see out and about on U Street at any given moment are white. The restaurant row along Ninth Street is noteworthy in thatthe proprietors of most of the thriving new eateries are black—but they also happen to be recent immigrants from Ethiopia.
    It is not my godfather’s U Street.
    The trajectory of black Washington’s most storied district traces the arc of black America in the late twentieth century—a parabola of success, failure, rebirth, and divergence.
    By the early 1960s, U Street had already passed its heyday. Inner cities had fallen out of fashion; those who could afford to do so, both black and white, were moving away. The streetcar system that once had knitted the city together was gone, and those with means—and automobiles—had moved to what was once considered the periphery. The newspaper heiress Katharine Graham, who grew up blocks away from U Street in a mansion on the other, much whiter side of Meridian Hill Park, had decamped to Georgetown, a neighborhood that became synonymous with power and wealth; Jack and Jackie Kennedy lived there, as did Pamela Harriman, Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, and later Bob Woodward. Few residents of Georgetown today are aware that they are living in what had once been largely a working-class black neighborhood before a prewar wave of gentrification had made it
the
place to live in Washington. Years from now, I suppose, only historians will know that U Street was once one of black America’s jewels.
    The first blow to U Street was a positive development: African Americans suddenly had more choices. Washington was always something of a special case in terms of how segregation worked. Lying south of the Mason-Dixon Line, it was in essence a Southern town. But it was the site of the federal government, which gave the city a unique status as neither fish nor fowl—it wasn’t as relatively laissez-faire as some Northern cities but neither was it as