The 68,074th post was from the partner of a furloughed D.C. federal worker announcing they were starting a vintage clothing business as a “secondary income source.” Another post, the 68,150th, was from a “canine behavior consultant” who promised to train “your dog to greet guests politely.”
The chatter on the neighborhood listserv in Adams Morgan, a community long known for its contrarian culture, took a spicier turn recently when a resident, in the 67,920th post, complained that new bike lanes had made crossing the street “a crap shoot thanks to the recklessly driven motorized micro-mobility vehicles.”
The message provoked 34 replies, a mix that included gratitude (“thank you … for elevating this important issue”), snark (“at some point you need to find new hobbies”), towel-snapping sarcasm (“If you can write a sentence I can understand, I will respond”) and hand-wringing (“There’s so much selfish thought on this thread.”)
Rhetorical food fights are what has made Adams Morgan’s listserv informative and entertaining, and at times eye-roll inducing, since starting 26 years ago, a milestone recently noted in a post by its founder, Josh Gibson, who touts the site as the city’s longest running communal conversation, one he refuses to censor despite occasional pleas from members.
“It’s a snapshot of what’s going on in the neighborhood at any given moment,” Gibson said.
In the virtual world of social discourse, the neighborhood listserv is a veritable horse n’ buggy compared to more modern and slicker iterations like Nextdoor. Yet listservs still survive, many of them assuming the character of their particular neighborhood.
In the case of Adams Morgan, a generation worth of posts exist in the listserv’s archive, and have become a kind of time capsule, preserving the neighborhood’s quirky and sometimes combustive past.
What memories.
“Please do not throw your dog waste into the residential trash cans your neighbors put out. It’s gross (and unlawful),” a resident identifying themselves as “A” wrote in 2020.
“I don’t have a ‘dog in this fight’, but I’m curious where you think the bagged dog waste should go if not in a trash can?” another responded.
“Get Woof My Lawn,” someone else wrote.
“When I had a dog I would put the poop into my toilet,” another resident volunteered. “Make sense?”
The listserv’s members have debated far weightier matters, as well, the types of issues that can transform otherwise mild-mannered citizens into keyboard versions of Mr. (or Mrs.) Hyde, fulminating about crime, rats, neighbors, parking, liquor licenses, and development. Unconfirmed rumors, too, have rattled the listserv, as was the case in January when a news organization reported that Elon Musk was looking to buy a neighborhood hotel (did not happen).
“It reaches a lot of people, especially the people who are concerned about stuff going on — it’s a weird little bunch,” said Bill Duggan, the owner of Madam’s Organ, a neighborhood bar that opened in the early 1990′s. Duggan’s voluminous contributions have included referring to a civic association leader as a “self-inflated fool” and the city’s parking enforcement officers as “party-poopers” and a “money-making militia.”
“The police pay attention to it,” Duggan said. “If I post something, I will get a call from a commander right away.”
A ten minute drive from downtown, Adams Morgan is known for its elegant rowhouses, eclectic mix of hole-in-the-wall shops, and a strip of nightlife along 18th Street NW. The neighborhood’s listserv, with 2,690 members, is not as large as, say, Brookland’s (2,972), Chevy Chase’s (5,769) or Cleveland Park’s (12,688 members), all of which have endured as other options for self-expression opened up, including Facebook, X, Reddit and Nextdoor.
What distinguishes Adams Morgan’s listserv is Gibson’s refusal to censor messages or ban members deemed offensive, a policy he has upheld, for the most part, since launching the site in 1999 with J.B. Fields, a tech wiz from the neighborhood.
“There’s little or nothing we will moderate out,” said Gibson, 53, the D.C. Council’s director of communications. “It reflects Adams Morgan as a result. It’s the chaotic, untrimmed, unkempt, not-quite-right kind of tone.”
Gibson acknowledged that heated free-for-alls can create headaches, such as when members periodically “write too many messages and attack someone personally” and complaints mount that “this has gotten out of control, why would you let the people go on and on and clog our inboxes?”
So be it, Gibson said. As far as he can remember, he has banned only one member, a woman who unleashed a torrent of invectives after subscribers complained about her incessant posts selling tickets to Hamilton and other cultural events.
“I’m more of a market place of ideas mindset,” Gibson said during an interview at his apartment, where many of the surfaces and walls are adorned with D.C. memorabilia, including a photo of him with the late D.C. mayor, Marion Barry, and a painting of Go-Go music pioneer Chuck Brown. “If someone goes overboard, the others will come to the defense of the person criticized and the person who did the untoward thing will lose face. I’d rather have the system work than keep out things people would be displeased with.”
One serial poster who riled members and then showed himself to the proverbial door is Nick DelleDonne, a Dupont Circle gadfly who sent a total of 386 messages to the listserv between 2019 and 2023, many of them opposing proposed bike lanes and development projects.
DelleDonne, 82, in a phone interview, said forums such as Adams Morgan’s listserv “are an important way to communicate in a neighborhood and around an issue — it’s not just ‘lost my keys or my cat.’ They’ve taken the place of local newspapers.”
Still, he gets why contributors like himself can test a neighborhood’s collective patience. DelleDonne said he has been banned from listservs in Dupont Circle and Cleveland Park and decided, on his own, to stop posting in Adams Morgan “because it was annoying everyone.”
DelleDonne and his allies also inspired, at least for a time, satire on the listserv, as provided by a writer identifying themself as “Chesterton H. Delmore II,” the “Seargant-At-Arms” for an organization referred to in their posts as the “East North Logan Circle Civic Association (North West Chapter).”
“The bi-cycle is the most evil invention ever to smear its sad rubber residue upon our fair city, and as such, any decent society must banish these vehicles of mayhem and madness to the furthest suburbs,” Delmore first posted in 2022, among dozens submitted over the next two years.
Delmore added: “It is a violation of my human, civil and constitutional rights for anything in this city to change from the way it is now, or the way I remember it being in the past, when I preferred things.”
Delmore kept on writing even after listserv members questioned the writer’s authenticity, pointing out that Google turned up no mentions of the East North Logan Circle Civic organization and that “Seargant” had been misspelled.
“I am filled with sadness to hear that you can find no other information on our organization! I suggest you simply look harder,” Delmore responded. “OUR ALLIES ARE MANY, AND OUR ENEMIES FEW!!!”
DelleDonne has ideas about who might have controlled the fingers behind the nom de plume — Daniel Adler, a Dupont Circle resident who achieved infamy in 2022 when he peddled his bicycle slow enough to disrupt a convoy of far right-leaning truckers driving into the city (he became known as “The Bike Guy”).
“It’s not me, I only wish I was that eloquent,” Adler said by phone before suggesting that Delmore may actually be Greg Wahl, an Adams Morgan resident and bike lane proponent who teaches English at Montgomery Community College.
“Not me,” said Wahl, adding that anyone who unmasks Delmore would provide “an amazing service. The mystery is delicious!” (An email sent to the address Delmore listed on the listserv bounced back).
Wahl said his interest in the listserv waned once President Donald Trump returned to Washington in January because “I don’t want to fight with my neighbors right now. We all need to be on the same side now.”
Indeed, the chatter on the site these days is of the more prosaic type. Recent posts include someone giving away a Schwinn bike that needs a tuneup and someone offering babysitting services.
Gibson, himself, weighed in with email number 68,197, headlined, “Free Ceiling Fan.”
“Works great,” he wrote.
The post Uncensored and unbound: This DC listserv has survived social media and snark appeared first on Washington Post.
