Gentrification run amok

For many years, there was bar near my old office in DC called Lulu's. It was a cavernous New Orleans-themed place a few blocks from the GW University campus that sold Miller Lite in plastic cups to crowds of drunk students. We Americans have a genius for turning insignificant events in other countries' histories into excuses to get plastered – Cinco de Mayo, St. Patrick's Day. I'm surprised that Victoria Day isn't an excuse for excessive embibement. Lulu's catered exactly to the kind of crowd that made these “holidays” what they are. On St. Patrick's Day, they had an infamous tradition of opening at 9:00 a.m. to serve breakfast and beer. People would form a line several blocks long; I remember seeing them on my way to work in the morning. I have never actually patronized the place, but my good friend C.M. had been a few times many years ago while in graduate school at GW. He did not have kind things to say about it, and neither did anyone else I know who has been to it. About a year and a half ago, it finally closed, with quite a bit of noise (literally – the going-out-of-business party lasted three days) and an auction of every item and fixture in the place. I could have bought my very own piece of wrought-iron balcony railing, had I had a balcony. The space, along with a section of the adjacent hotel, was gutted, and a fence went up around it with a local construction company's logos on it. Good riddance, many people thought. It was a local institution, to be sure, and a successful business, but one that was difficult for the neighborhood to respect.

The other day, by happenstance I found myself in the neighborhood. The construction has been completed. The space is now occupied by a Walgreen's and a Starbucks, and all of I sudden I found myself really missing Lulu's. There is already a CVS directly across the street, a Starbucks on the same street two blocks away, and another three blocks in the other direction, not to mention miniature ones hiding in nearby hotels. And these are short city blocks, not mile-long suburban ones. How many chain establishments can we sustain? I know they are necessary, offering predictability to their customers and steady growth to their stockholders. But wouldn't you think that the cost of opening an operating new locations would eventually negate the additional revenue they generate? Surely there is a saturation point somewhere, and it's got to be somewhere well before we have one of everything on every block. I can only hope that as companies overextend themselves and have to close superfluous branches, independent businesses like Lulu's can sweep in and snap up the vacated space for cheap, but given the way commercial real estate market operates, that's highly unlikely. The landlord will simply find another gullible chain, one that has not learned its lesson yet, to open a new location.