Earlier this year, the owner of the Philly Cheese Steak on 23rd was shot and killed inside his restaurant. The front door is boarded up now, but you can still look through the dirty windows and see overturned chairs and broken glass.

The Central District doesn’t look like this anymore. The rest of the area is hard, shiny buildings and industrial apartments. But this tiny sandwich shop still looks the same, a memorial to a place that no longer exists.

My friend Albert blames “a bunch of hipsters” who he claims have stormed the area with their “tight pants and big sunglasses.” In light of his vehemence, I neglect to point out that I, too, own a pair of unnecessarily large sunglasses.

As I pass a recently sprouted Safeway—filled with yuppies, no doubt—I grind my teeth and try to look on the bright side. I loved the old Central District, but it had its problems. For starters, the area was rife with gang violence. And drugs.

My sophomore year, two men were shot in their car across the street from my high school, presumably the result of a drug turf struggle. Kids from the school newspaper took pictures of the car and the yellow “do not cross” tape.

So the CD had its problems—what neighborhood doesn’t? But it also had an eclectic community that made even me—a white girl from the northern tip of the neighborhood—feel at home. In my teens I hung out in Ethiopian restaurants and slam clubs and a small convenience store on Union Street that never carded minors. I attended the same battered high school where a young Jimi Hendrix once taught himself to play the guitar.

I call up my high school security guard Michael Dixon and ask if we can meet for coffee. Dixon grew up in the Central District in the 60s, when race riots at school were commonplace and he and his brothers were top members of the Seattle Black Panther Party. He wants to meet at Starbucks.

Dixon has graying dreadlocks that fall halfway down his back and is carrying a book about the JFK assassination when he arrives. He’s also drinking out of a Venti paper cup. When I ask him about what’s happening to the neighborhood, he snorts derisively.

“They’ve destroyed it,” he says. I don’t feel the need to ask who “they” are. “It was full of black families. What they’ve done to us since they spread that crack…Some of those families can’t afford to live in the CD.” Drugs and the people who sell and buy them have been in the Central District as long as I’ve been alive.

“This isn’t something that just happened.” Dixon leans forward, his eyes hard. “This is business.”
Struck by his ominous tone, I go digging on the Internet, looking for proof of a conspiracy to destroy my beloved neighborhood. What I find is a blog community of new Central District residents—apparently all white 30-somethings with kids.

I begin to read, first with skepticism and then with repulsed fascination. One blogger asks for shopping recommendations in his newly “developed” block and someone suggests a convenience store with “no fortified beverages, Funyuns or smoking materials allowed.” Others want a café that will serve Turkish coffee and paninis. These are all fine ideas, another blogger points out, except for the fact that “it would be an operational challenge for the owner to keep the street dealers and other troublemakers out.”

I scroll through the rest of the blog secretly praying that the anti-Funyun person gets his front door graffittied. And then I see a post dated May 1: “Man shot in the neck at 23rd and Jackson.” I scroll down further and there’s a similar post on May 13 about shots fired at 15th and Alder, another shooting on May 26 and an assault on June 1.

Well, some things never change.