This week’s City Paper cover story examines gentrification in Columbia Heights from an unusual source: a busy community email list active since 1999. The City Paper writers delve into this email list in search of poignant, funny, and ridiculous stories from a neighborhood in transition. (Oddly, they didn’t provide a link to the group anywhere in the story.)

Between a brief contextual introduction and the “Illustrations by Derf” the entire article is drawn from the “columbia_heights” Yahoo group, which is apparently loosely connected to this community website. Through the snippets they extract from the group’s sprawling archive (16,897 messages since June 1999) they provide a revealing portrait of gentrification mostly through, well, the eyes of the gentrifiers.