Mmm...Trader Joe's

"Would you sign a petition to convince Trader Joe's to open in MidCity?"

I totally would if only we could stop referring to the neighborhood as "MidCity." I'd really like a Trader Joe's, but the speed with which the local business association and members shady real estate cabals have been able to foist this term on the world is distressing.

Comments

What's midcity?

fwiw, they're already opening a new store at 25th and Penn NW.

Posted by flippantangel | August 30, 2006 1:42 AM

"MidCity" is, allegedly, sort of the U Street and 14th Street corridors. Basically, the more commerced up portions of Shaw, Logan Circle, etc.

Posted by Matthew Yglesias | August 30, 2006 9:01 AM

Well, that's stupid. It's not as if the city was abounding in the kind of neat, organic neighborhoods lots of other cities have to begin with, so I'm totally at a loss to comprehend this new desire to start christening big amorphous chunks of the city with dumb names that sound more like how someone in the planning office labels a development map than anything actual people would call them: Mid-city, West End, Penn Quarter. Bleh. Not to mention, 14th and U is too far north to actually be Mid-City....although my perspective is admittedly rather south-skewing.

Posted by flippantangel | August 30, 2006 11:38 AM

How about "golden triangle"? Equally peverse, if only because it includes my neighborhood.

Posted by the green lantern | August 30, 2006 7:40 PM

That, and the "West End" that Foggy Bottom has suddenly become.

Why can't we just call it Columbia Heights?

Posted by Daniel M. Laenker | August 31, 2006 1:30 PM

Midcity is the oldtimers' name for the 7th/9th Street corridor between K and Rhode Island or so. When I say oldtimers, I mean the mostly African-American families who have lived there for two or three generations and are managing to hang on through the gentrifiers and realtors and their NoMa gimmicks. In the 1930s there were lots of buninesses and clubs that used that name, like Midcity Drugs, etc. There used to be Germans, Greeks, Irish (even a Syrian Orthodox church) in that neighborhood, too.

Midcity was eclipsed during urban renewal in the 1960s when city planners along with public school reformers slapped the name Shaw on everything basically between 13th Street, North Capitol, Downtown and Howard University. Shaw subsumed alot of old time neighborhood names, even U Street at one point. By the 1980s Shaw took on a terra incognita-like aura when everything "bad and scary" happened east of 16th Street and "over in Shaw."

Midcity is a legitimate historic name for a specific DC neighborhood. It's different than Mount Vernon Square, U Street, Westminster, Logan Circle and all the other organic neighborhoods that were obscured by the Shaw overlay.

So in fact Midcity is the old-school, real DC name. It's the newcomers that haven't bothered to figure that out yet.

Posted by Brendan | August 31, 2006 4:58 PM

Trader Joes is so overrated.

Everything, I mean everything, is packaged.

Almost everything is processed in some way or other.

They do have good wine prices.

We have two near us. If they left I wouldn't miss them at all.

We also have several natural foods stores here. Much better. Go for that in MidCity, wherever that is.

Santa Cruz, CA

Posted by Craig Wilson | September 1, 2006 8:43 PM