Where Is the East End? Just Look for Fun Street
(Editor's Note: Earlier reports of this DCist's loss of an arm are unfounded. It was actually our big toe.)
DCist loves Fun Street. You ask: "Where might that be?" In what seems to be an aborted late 1990s marketing rebranding attempt, F Street near the MCI Center was given a Botox injection in the form of "Fun" Street to place emphasis on the strip's funness quotient. It never caught on, but the signs remain. Surrounding Fun Street is the East End. Or is it downtown's east end? Or is it Chinatown or Gallery Place? Perhaps Penn Quarter has swallowed the rest of neighborhood.
For the downtown area between Mount Vernon Square and the Navy Memorial, identity crises are nothing new. The area has fallen victim to a major personality disorder. Development-wise and in terms of general buzz, the area has been on fire the past few years. The Post today carries an account of Mayor Williams' checking out the new Gallery Place mall -- and its sparkling new Aveda where the mayor accepted a "small, beribboned flask" of cologne from the store, the Post reports.)
With the new retail complex, Gallery Place itself has a well-anchored name. But walk one block from the mall, and where you are exactly is anyone's guess.
If you Google "Penn Quarter" with D.C.'s "Citizen Atlas," this is Penn Quarter (above). No boundaries are defined, but the map goes no farther north than F Street. Earlier this year, the Archives-Navy Mem'l metorail station got Penn Quarter attached to its official name, which anchors Penn Quarter to the area south of F Street.
But if you look at the Post, it has referred to the area inconsistently over the past year or so. Sometimes, Penn Quarter is laid over a good swath of the downtown area. In this piece, the Post says "the National Museum of Women in the Arts is at the western edge of the Quarter at New York Avenue and 13th Street." And then in today's piece, the Post says that Gallery Place is the "linchpin of a shopping revival in downtown's east end." And then in another instance, we've seen "East End." (Capitalization makes it an official neighborhood, no?)
We don't fault the Post's editors, Bill Walsh or the Post's top-notch copy desk for the confusion. All of this falls into a gray area, with Penn Quarter's pushers as the main culprits of confusion. With Penn Quarter too cool for school, marketing buzz has blurred the lines. In a VirtualTourist.com write-up on La Tasca, the joint, located across the street from Gallery Place, is described as a "[f]airly nice tapas bar in the heart of Penn Quarter."
Then for top-notch Ceiba, it too has been lumped into Penn Quarter. From the Travel Arts Syndicate:
It’s called Penn Quarter, an area off Pennsylvania Ave. loosely between 6th and 14th Streets, and bounded by H Street.
As eager beavers across downtown have latched on to the name Penn Quarter, the real center of the neighborhood can be pinpointed by its sidewalk tourist locator signage on Eighth Street NW behind the Market Square complex (where the fresh farm market is held).
So with that here are DCist's downtown neighborhood definitions:
Downtown: Following the traditional definition, the central business district is the east of the White House campus and to the west of Judiciary Square
East End/downtown's east end: The area of downtown to the east of Ninth Street. Includes Gallery Place, Chinatown and Penn Quarter
Gallery Place: Anchored by the retail complex with the same name, the MCI Center and the National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gallery Place is centered on Seventh Street between F and H sts
Chinatown: Don't be fooled by the Chinese characters for Hooters and Chipotle. There is nothing Chinese about Seventh Street. Chinatown in its more present-day definition is on H Street between Fifth and Seventh sts.
Penn Quarter: Centered on Eighth and E sts, Penn Quarter is bounded by Fifth, Ninth and F sts and Pennsylvania Avenue.
What are your definitions? And what about Fun Street? (Let's let that die a peaceful death.)
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