Map by Peter Fitzgerald/Wikipedia Commons. Today, DCist was named the best neighborhood blog by the Washington Post’s Express.
While we appreciate the support, DCist, in its ten years of existence, has never been a neighborhood blog. We say this, not to seem ungrateful, but to put an emphasis on how much D.C. needs actual neighborhood blogs, hyper-hyperlocal watchdogs who can focus on everything from trash pickup to illegal construction to Advisory Neighborhood Commission meetings.
There are a number of great neighborhood blogs, including New Columbia Heights, the Hill is Home, the Georgetown Metropolitan, H Street Great Street, Life on the Edgewood, JD Land, the Brookland Bridge and Congress Heights on the Rise.
But with the city undergoing rapid changes, D.C. needs more of these blogs to better represent individual communities and to serve as historical records. Blogs like Frozen Tropics, run by Elise Bernard, who has covered the Trinidad neighborhood and H Street NE corridor from a personal perspective for nearly a decade.
Bernard started the blog in December 2004 with a post introducing people to Trinidad, where she purchased a home at age 24. Almost 7,000 posts later, it has become a go-to resource for people who live or are interested in the area.
Speaking by phone today, Bernard said she started writing the Frozen Tropics, “mostly for me,” inspired by a blog written by a fellow single woman in Shaw.
“Trinidad was almost like an island to me. A lot of my friends lived in Northwest and didn’t want to come over here and visit me,” she told DCist. “Now I find most of the people I hang out with are my friends and neighbors who live close by, many who are home owners, but not all.”
Meeting other home owners in the area provided Bernard with a sense of “stability,” she said, at a time in her life when people commonly leave the city.
Bernard also wanted to share her thoughts on the neighborhood, as well as photos with a “fresh perspective.”
“I wanted everyone to see the beauty that I saw around here,” she said.
But Frozen Tropics also provides a record of important events in the neighborhood, like the military-style checkpoints instituted in 2008.
“It was pretty raw,” Bernard, who was a member of ANC 5B08 at the time, said of her posts. “A lot of people felt very shellshocked by what was happening. To talk about it now, this many years later, it’s not as fresh, it’s not as painful as it was. But while it was going on, it was really unreal.”
To Bernard, it’s important to not post rumors, as one of her goals is to support local businesses. “I really try to hold off on doing that if there’s potential for the news, if it drops too quickly, to harm others,” she said. “Everybody wants to be first with stuff, but I’d rather be sensitive at times and make sure it’s accurate.”
To people who may be interested in starting their own neighborhood blog, Bernard said “you have to have a lot of passion” and also not expect a readership immediately, if at all.
“You have to write it for yourself first,” she said. “You have to talk to people and get a feel for what’s going on in the neighborhood.”
When she began running the blog almost a decade ago, there’s wasn’t much mainstream coverage of Trinidad and H Street NE. “And now there’s so much information, it’s really hard to keep up with all of it.”
But Bernard doesn’t plan to stop running Frozen Tropics. “It’s really a big part of me at this point,” she said. “I’m sure at some point it will end, but I can’t really imagine that now.”
