Midtown Youth Academy Founder, Eugene R. Hughes Walking under its peeling sign and into 14th Street's Midtown Youth Academy feels like walking into a museum. The well-traversed wood floors give the room a musty odor and decades worth of photographs and posters adorn the faded walls. Shelves of books line one wall while a row of personal computers line the other. But the institutional feeling goes away as soon as one sees the boxing......

Check out this string of robberies listed in the Northwest D.C. portion of today's WaPo crime report:GIRARD ST.,1100 block, 2:24 p.m. July 15. A male approached a pedestrian from behind, snatched her purse and fled. IRVING ST.,1300 block, 2:02 p.m. July 15. A male approached a pedestrian from behind and snatched her purse, which contained a Global Positioning System device, a cellphone and a camera. IRVING ST.,1300 block, 3:29 p.m. July 14. A man asked......

According to the Examiner, there's a been a recent surge in the number of rapes and attempted rapes in the District, and now police think several of them may be the work of the same man. It's frustrating that this is the first we've heard about an increase in rapes in the city this year. The latest incident was on Thursday at around 4 a.m. in the 3300 block of 18th Street NW, near Park......

We've always known that the city's many community email lists are beehives of communication. Whether being used to promote neighborhood awareness or flush out arguments over local zoning ordinances, the email lists represent the best, the worst and the funniest of living in a densely populated urban area. This weekend the MPD-1D email list, used by police and residents living and working in the First District, was alive with controversy over a suspect ice cream......

Residents watch the police checkpoint in D.C.'s Trinidad neighborhood on Saturday, June 7, 2008. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana) We balked at the initial news that the Metropolitan Police Department planned to throw up barriers and checkpoints in certain D.C. neighborhoods experiencing excessive violent crime. Later, when we learned the details of the first case, the week-long checkpoint that was established in Trinidad, the MPD's plan appeared to be both constitutionally dubious and potentially not......

Monday night, a large crowd gathered at the Advisory Neighborhood Commission 3F monthly meeting to ponder a series of proposals from Comet Ping Pong owner James Alefantis. The crux of the matter: a request by Alefantis to lift a voluntary agreement between his business and the commission regarding the operation of his restaurant. But the larger than usual crowd was a sign of things to come (or a sign of what had already passed), and......

Our own Andrew Wiseman last night happened upon what was no doubt the beginning of a really terrible morning for several Columbia Heights residents. On 13th Street NW between Clifton and Fairmont, a row of five or more parked cars were smashed up by another car crashing into them. Some had missing wheels, front ends knocked off, crunched fenders, broken bumpers and more. Police had already arrived on the scene by the time Andrew showed......

PassiveAggressiveNotes.com spots this scooter in D.C.'s Mt. Pleasant neighborhood all decked out in angry, belittling and sometimes profane messages to a failed thief. Check out the full post for more photos, sent in by a resident who notes the irony of the neighborhood's name when matched with the sentiments expressed in the scooter notes. I can't help but be reminded looking at these photos why I eventually decided not to buy a scooter last......

Mayor Adrian Fenty held a news conference yesterday to announce his support for emergency legislation that would ban the sale and use of all consumer fireworks in the District. The bill is set to be introduced to the D.C. Council on Tuesday. Setting off fireworks in the city during the July 4th holiday has long been a tradition in certain District neighborhoods, but has also been a source of safety concerns, not to mention noise......

In 2006 it was Glover Park, and before that, Dupont Circle, but NBC4 reports that the D.C. Department of Health has officially declared Tenleytown to be the rat hotspot of this year. The neighborhood surrounding the intersection of Wisconsin and Nebraska Avenues is lousy with rats right now, and the "Rat Abatement Team" is putting out poison in the hopes of putting a stop to the vermin population explosion in the area. The nexus of......

The Examiner reports on a new master plan for the future of the National Zoo set to be unveiled on Thursday that includes a call to build an aerial tram running the length of the 163-acre park. Other proposals include expanded exhibits, new visitor centers and a public plaza on the current site of the Great Ape House. The image at left is of the Skyfari aerial tram at the San Diego Zoo, which might......

Yesterday City Desk pointed us to the YouTube video above concerning something that always fires up District residents -- parking. The video in question creatively makes a point that's long been a reality for residents of Adams Morgan and its surrounding neighborhoods -- people who go out in Adams Morgan tend to park pretty much anywhere they want. As a resident of one of the nearby neighborhoods, I can attest to the fact that......

Everyone remembers the church parking debate that cluttered neighborhood email lists, local news media and blog comments back in 2006. In a report last night, WJLA appears to have brought the saga back to life. As a refresher, back when Mayor Anthony Williams was in office, residents in the Logan Circle and Shaw neighborhoods began demanding that the tradition of not enforcing double parking laws on residential streets during church hours come to an end.......

The commissioner for ANC 2F06, Michael Benardo, recently circulated an email with an online petition pushing for the creation of a dog park at the Shaw Recreation Field at 11th Street and Rhode Island Avenue NW. Now, anyone who lives in a ten block radius of Logan Circle knows that the neighborhood is in desperate need of a legal dog park. Just try walking through the circle itself at dusk sometime - odds are pretty......

It only took three hours for the five alarm fire in a Mt. Pleasant apartment building to displace roughly 200 tenants. It didn't take much longer for Ryan Wakeman and Chris DeWitt to come up with a way to help. Under the moniker "The Queen of the Water Dolphins", Wakeman and DeWitt organized a benefit concert to raise donations for victims of the fire. "We wanted to do something useful with ourselves about the fire,......

A couple of days ago Prince of Petworth posted this picture, along with a query typical of his highly observant neighborhood blog: what do you do when you have a neighbor or an absentee landlord who doesn’t mow the lawn? According to a story in today's Examiner, the District is actually cracking down on these types of overgrown lawns for us. The city government issued nearly 1,400 citations last year to residents who failed to......

Image on the left, taken the morning of the Eastern Market fire, April 30, 2007. At right, the same view in the evening on April 15, 2008. Both photos by erin m It was one year ago today that District residents awoke to the sad news that a fire had torn through Eastern Market's South Hall, displacing the many food vendors who called the historic building home and shuttering a favorite weekend destination. And......

Don't forget about DCist and Cultural Tourism DC's photo contest for this weekend's WalkingTown DC. All you have to do to enter the photo contest is check out the schedule of free tours being offered on Saturday and Sunday and pick one or more to attend, take some great photos, and then upload them to Flickr and tag them with WalkingTown and DCist. More details on the contest, which last fall earned several lucky winners......

Nina Albert, the Real Estate Development Manager at the Deputy Mayor's Office of Planning and Economic Development, is naturally going to be a gung-ho advocate for the neighborhoods in D.C. that are seeing a boom in real estate development. One such area, the city's Southwest Waterfront, will be highlighted on a tour led by Albert, along with 30-year Southwest resident Barbara Ehrlich, this weekend during Cultural Tourism DC's free WalkingTown DC event. To attend this......

DCist is proud to be an official media sponsor of Cultural Tourism DC's free event this Saturday, April 26 and Sunday, April 27: WalkingTown DC offers a wealth of free walking tours all weekend long to get Washingtonians out and discovering new things about their city and neighborhoods. D.C.'s Mt. Pleasant neighborhood has a rich history of live music performances. That tradition is one of many reasons groups like Hear Mt. Pleasant have been fighting......

We can hardly believe it ourselves, but the Harris Teeter in Adams Morgan celebrated its grand opening this morning. The ribbon cutting ceremony for the store, only about five years in the making, took place at a little after 10:30 a.m., with Mayor Adrian Fenty, Ward 1 Council member Jim Graham, and countless Harris Teeter officials on hand to deliver run of the mill remarks and welcome to the store to the neighborhood.......

If you're heading down to Nationals Park tonight to watch the team face the Mets at 7:10 p.m., you might like to know that you suddenly have a new option in terms of transportation: you can actually just drive and pay $15-$20 to park when you get there. WTOP first reported this policy change late on Monday. Before today, you had to be a season ticket holder or buy game day parking permits online beforehand......

If you spend any time on Bloomingdale or Eckington blogs or email lists, there could be no question in your mind that residents of the up and coming neighborhood(s) (Bloomingdale was just treated to a profile in the Washington Post) want more retail and services. They want a full service, sit-down restaurant, by all means. But now that plans for an enormous new dining and nightlife complex in the long-fallow Old Engine Co. 12, a......

DCist is once again teaming up with Cultural Tourism DC to sponsor a Flickr photo contest for their twice yearly WalkingTown DC event. This year's spring WalkingTown will be held on April 26 and 27, and will feature even more fantastic free walking tours of D.C. than ever before. All you have to do to enter the photo contest is check out the schedule of free tours and pick one or more to attend, take......

Ross Bradford lives in the 1300 block of Delaware Ave. SW, and recently received his very own visitor parking permit, part of the District's new pilot residential parking restriction program in the Southwest and Near Southeast neighborhoods around the new Nationals stadium. Bradford told us the visitor permit, pictured above, was sent to him by the D.C. Department of Transportation without him having to do anything. Each household in the designated neighborhoods gets a......

The area around the new baseball stadium isn't much more than a construction site so far, but the promise of a bustling entertainment district in what was formerly a bleak industrial sector is enough to leave developers and city officials frantic for a new branding. According to a Post article published today:Despite appearances, this is just the way District leaders hoped it would be: a ballpark set amid a vast Southeast Washington neighborhood in the......

WTOP's Adam Tuss got a chance to take an early look around at the new, widened entrance to the Navy Yard Metro station this morning. A sneak peek at the newly expanded Navy Yard Station in Southeast, which will be the main gateway to the ballpark, shows there is still work to be done. Plastic tarps still flap in the wind, power tools drill into the ground and hammers bang away. In the video,......

Here's a good question raised by WTOP's Adam Tuss: Should the shuttle that's supposed to take people who park at RFK on Nationals game days to the new stadium at the Navy Yard make a stop along the way? On the pro side is Ward 6 Council member Tommy Wells. Wells would ideally like to see the shuttle make one stop at 8th and G Streets NE SE, near the Barracks Row neighborhood, in......

Photo by m.j.b. There are a number of other dramatic photos in the Flickr pool of last night's five-alarm fire in Mt. Pleasant, so we thought we'd post a few of them here. Below the jump, you'll find photos I took this morning from the scene of the fire, which firefighters were still working to extinguish completely at 10 a.m. UPDATE: Via Hear Mt. Pleasant, donations are being accepted for victims of the fire at......

We haven't yet gotten the official press release from the Department of Public Works, but the agency's online public calendar shows that residential street sweeping is set to resume on Monday, March 24. As happens every winter, street sweeping and the parking restrictions that come along with it were suspended on Nov. 30. Here's how DPW describes its street sweeping regime:Mechanical street sweeping is a weekly service in heavily trafficked residential sections of Wards 1,......