WASHINGTON — A plucky group of wealthy gentrifiers up against the odds triumphantly did the impossible yesterday, shuttering the beloved Sojourner Truth Recreation Center in the Columbia Heights neighborhood using nothing but the power of dance and rising property taxes.
“Yo, listen up fam. I’m gonna kick it to you like this,” said Grayson “Ozone” Danforth, a defense contractor and one of the organizers of the “Breakdancing for Bulldozers” benefit show that successfully closed the center. “This place has been a traffic nightmare and an eyesore for years. The land this building sits on is worth too much to have it wasted on a community resource serving underprivileged kids. We dipped into our trust funds, but this is gonna take a miracle to pull off, so dig deep, y’all, and let’s get a Whole Foods up in this hizzy!”
“Look, I’m not gonna front,” agreed fellow organizer Alicia Shartue. “City Hall, the Neighborhood Advisory Commission… hell, pretty much the whole damn neighborhood doesn’t want us here today. But we got something to say to that. DJ, kick it!”
Danforth, along with several recent transplants to Columbia Heights, successfully organized, studied breakdance, and staged a fundraiser that pooled enough money to buy out and demolish the neighborhood institution.
“These no good break dancers have no idea what they’re doing,” said real estate developer Bradley Meyers. “We don’t need any help getting this place torn down. We’ve already petitioned the city to sell the land, and with market forces and all, we typically get what we want every time. Also, I’m not the best judge of this stuff, but the dancing was pretty terrible.”
For their part, the neighborhood’s long-time residents were particularly incensed by the gentrifiers and their astounding, non-underdog tale.
“This community has come together countless times to save that place, but you can only fight for so long, I guess,” said Rafael Michaels, who once ran a youth football program out of the establishment. “It sucks because a lot of these people learned to dance at my studio. I knew white folks weaponized black culture against us, but I didn’t think it would be this on the nose.”
Sadly, since the benefit, the dancers have declared Columbia Heights no longer “authentic” and are looking for the next up-and-coming neighborhood to move to and virtually destroy.