Things can get pretty contentious when someone exerts a claim over a space that neighbors consider communal.

Cady’s Alley, Naylor Court, Crispus Attucks Park, Blagden Alley: These are sites of Michelin-starred restaurants and new speakeasies as well as hotbed of residential construction.

After more than a century of efforts aimed at clearing them, alleys have survived in the District. But many of today’s incarnations are a far cry from the rat-infested dwellings where tuberculosis spread like wildfire.

Let this be a lesson to you: narrow alleyways in Petworth are probably not the best place to be shooting off explosives. I mean, unless you like shrapnel in the eye. It wouldn’t be summer time if there wasn’t video proof that fireworks are crazy and those who set them off are kind of nuts, now would it? Thanks to an anonymous Petworthian for the terrifyingly hilarious footage….

There have been three trash receptacle fires in the last four weeks in the same alley behind a section of 3rd Street SE, WJLA reports. A string of fires like that in the same location makes it tough to speculate that a carelessly tossed cigarette butt might be to blame; odds are some pyro is setting the bins ablaze. So far, no buildings have become victims of the flames, but residents over there are…