I have written about the war on DC sidewalk fun (and existence) waged by Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Frank Winstead before (click to relive the magic) but now, after Comet Ping Pong, the Marvelous Market benches (and your soul), Politics and Prose is ANOTHER Connecticut Ave location under attack (or namely, their bench in front of the store).
The bookstore’s weekly email newsletter was sent out overnight, which leads with the following from owners Barbara Meade and Carla Cohen:
LETTER FROM BARBARA AND CARLA
Every once in a while we get an abrupt reminder that we live in a jurisdiction where small business is not respected or encouraged. When we first opened across the street, there was no government agency that could advise us on what we needed to do. Then, after we made the applications we needed to, we could not get an occupancy permit, no matter how many times we called or went down to the office responsible for that. The process simply stopped somewhere in the Office of Regulatory and Consumer Affairs. We were fined and we started over again, but the certificate was never issued at our first location.
A few years ago we were infuriated when, as a D.C. business, we had to pay a surtax for the new stadium. The rationale: the stadium would help businesses in the District of Columbia. We fail to see how the baseball stadium helps Politics and Prose, but perhaps we are just missing something.
The latest irrationality occurred when an inspector visited us last week and told us we had to remove the bench in front of our store or pay for a permit. The bench, which is used by our employees eating lunch, or by people accompanied by strollers or dogs, or occasionally by the homeless, seems harmless. But the inspector told us it had to be gone the next day or….
Apparently this latest problem is occasioned by a member of the Advisory Neighborhood Council who went to war to get rid of all the outside chairs and tables on our block. As many of you know, the sidewalk is very wide in front of our buildings so there is no problem walking there even with sidewalk fixtures. And we think lots of activity on the sidewalk—sitting, eating, and playing—make our block more lively and fun. But Mr. Frank Winstead doesn’t, and he has made it his personal mission to eliminate everything. You can write to Mr. Frank Winstead and express your opinion of his mission: fwwinstead@hotmail.com
Police state, anyone?
(DCist has a nice comment section going on this already)
For good measure, I am going to include some of Frank’s greatest hits here:
with 76 more available on his YouTube channel.
Inferiority complex is a bitch.
Never forget that.
Did anyone else catch his butchering of the word convenience at the end of the UPS piece of garbage?
May 29, 2008 at 7:29 pmthis is ridiculous.
i had to pass a Dunbar and a Corona truck on Columbia Rd. the other day, does he have anything against them too?
and did anyone read that article a while back about the family whose grandma was in a wheelchair and they couldn’t get permission to have a ramp at their doorway because it was a historic district and they were told they had to remove the ramp? (run-on, i know)
May 29, 2008 at 9:52 pmhere’s a thought, why don’t you just rip-off flavorpill & last nights party and create a new blog called BYT…oh wait…shit
May 29, 2008 at 11:02 pmthis is fun, we haven’t really had much hate mail in a while.
http://www.brightestyoungthings.com/misc-awesome/byt-hate-mail/
May 29, 2008 at 11:16 pm
Seriously? War on UPS? Question: Do ANCs actually *do* anything? My two previous encounters with ANCs involve:
(1) an ANC board telling a guy whose construction on HIS HOUSE was halted because a neighbor thought that his walkout basement counted as an extra floor (one too many for zoning apparently) and complained to fuck off. He and his family were living in an apartment, and he was desperately petitioning to finish the construction because it was costing him thousands of actual US dollars a month to sit on a stalled construction. Problem was, ANC board was going on vaca for the summer so he was told to bring it back 4 months later when they reconvened. NEXT!!! (May, 2004, Takoma.)
(2) The mincey little ANC maggot that roves around Adams Morgan brought a troop of boy scouts (!) around the BACK of my girlfriend’s apartment early on a saturday and had them pull all of the vines that covered the floor-to-ceiling windows in her bedroom down, because apparently they were raining seeds down on a nearby park and he didn’t like the weeds. Seriously. (July, 2004, Adams Morgan)
I mean seriously: did these people get kicked off the church potluck organizing committee or something? WTF?
I challenge any potential commenters to come up with ONE useful thing that any ANC has done in DC, at all, ever, in the entire time that you’ve lived here. But obvs bitching is more fun, so go nuts with that too,.
May 29, 2008 at 6:55 pm