erudity.net prattlings on via nattering nabobs

Park Place

Park Place is the neighborhood just west across Granby Street from me and across 38th Street from Colonial Place, an up-and-coming neighborhood that has largely resisted the violence that plagues its neighbor to the south:

That made Sunday's news harder to accept: Humphrey, 18, was fatally shot in the Park Place neighborhood early Sunday morning. Humphrey was found dead at the intersection of 34th Street and Colonial Avenue about 1 a.m. No arrests have been made, and police are investigating the shooting. He is the sixth football player from South Hampton Roads to be injured or killed by gunfire in the past 10 months.

I ride my bike to the gym along Llewellyn and recently stopped doing it at night due to an uptick in violence in Park Place.  It's not a decision I made lightly, since I both enjoy the ride there and subscribe to the "broken windows" theory of neighborhood violence and considered my daily rides a normalizing part of life there.  No discussion of Park Place would be complete without a history of it:

Real estate interests had ordained that the area was marked out for black settlement, and they were already engaged in drying up the white demand by warning white home buyers that the neighborhood was a bad investment, that it was endangered by black invasion, and that, because of schools and other factors, it was unsuitable for white occupancy.30  After it was demonstrated that the houses could not be sold to whites, blacks could buy, and the real estate agents could assist in the orderly withdrawal of the white population. Customarily the withdrawal was spurred on by a barrage of mail and telephone solicitations and personal door-to-door visits, all of which urged white residents to leave at once, "while you still can"--before real estate values collapsed, while buyer demand was high, and before they were left alone in an all-black neighborhood. This had been the pattern in East Ghent, in Park Place, and after the late spring of 1966 on 36th and 37th streets. It could be expected that the same pattern would be repeated in Colonial Place all the way up to the Lafayette River.

This contrasts with Norfolk's recent efforts to revive and gentrify the area, starting with the 35th Street Corridor and then making Park Place fall under the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority and all that implies.  Inroads have been made at the edges of Park Place, with a de facto border of 35th Street forming between the "good area" and the "bad area."  Old, dilapidated houses are razed and new ones built in their place for what amounts to cents on the dollar when compared with similar housing just a few blocks north and east.  That being said, there's still a great amount of crime from 24th-35th street which sometimes spills over into the "good" areas - one just has to look at the breathless CPRV listserv announcements about shifty characters menacing their fair neighborhood (along with the actual announcements of copper thieves) to see that.

Where to from here?  I honestly don't know - I do know that, in the long term, Park Place will continue to gentrify and attract young, adventurous people who are looking for a bargain in their housing.  It's too close to downtown Norfolk, Ghent, NOB, and Ocean View not to continue along the path that downtown Norfolk and Ocean View are blazing as we speak.  It just remains to be seen how long that process will take in this economy.