Living in Bloomingdale, Washington DC

Rowhouses built in the early 1900s line Bloomingdale's grid in unbroken red-brick rows, many still holding their original bay windows and porches from a first wave of development that filled in this stretch between North Capitol Street and Rhode Island Avenue. Crispus Attucks Park, a hidden acre tucked behind the rowhouses off V Street, began as a telephone-company switching yard before neighbors persuaded the phone company to hand over the abandoned lot in the late 1970s; volunteers still maintain the park today, funded entirely through donations rather than the city. Restaurants and cafes have filled in along First Street and Rhode Island Avenue over the past decade, giving the neighborhood a small but growing commercial strip of its own.

Bloomingdale's safety rating sits in that same middle range as its neighbors along North Capitol Street, and residents without a car face a genuine walk or bus ride for a train — Shaw-Howard University, the nearest Metro station, is close to three-quarters of a mile from the neighborhood's center.

A donated utility yard turned into one of the district's most fiercely protected pocket parks, and Bloomingdale's rowhouse blocks carry that same do-it-yourself character in how residents have filled in a commercial strip and kept the neighborhood walkable without any help from a Metro stop.