Dan Silverman talks fast and walks faster. It’s hard to keep up with the local Washington celebrity who’s better known by his blog moniker: the Prince of Petworth.
Speed walking has long been Silverman’s default. “Wear sturdy shoes,” the Prince warns a rare walkabout companion on a recent Sunday. When Silverman lived in Petworth, a neighborhood in Northwest Washington, he walked to Georgetown “to breathe in the calm air.” Now that he lives in Cleveland Park, he walks to Petworth and Columbia Heights. “Because I need reality,” he says. “What makes D.C. so great is the combination of neighborhoods.”
Walking fast — and walking far — is the primary way that Silverman finds the news and oddities that fill PoPville, the blog he started 20 years ago. “I talked to everybody,” he says. “People would be like, ‘Are you a narc?’ I’m just interested in what’s happening.”
Silverman, 51, launched PoPville in 2006, during the blogging boom of the aughts, when everyone seemed to have a blog. But as other local D.C. sites have come and gone, PoPville has stuck around. Over the years, Silverman has turned it into a source of news, humor and community for Washingtonians. Later this year, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) plans to issue a proclamation to commemorate PoPville’s 20th anniversary, according to a spokesperson in her office.
“It’s an institution,” says D.C. Council member Christina Henderson (I-At Large), who has lived in Petworth since 2018. Jessica Sidman, Washingtonian magazine’s food editor, agrees: “PoPville is a pulse check on the city at all times.” Even rivals respect it. “PoPville is the O.G.,” says Raman Santra, a government attorney who has run the popular Barred in DC blog and X account since 2013.
Born in New York City and raised on Long Island, Silverman moved to Washington in 1997. The reason was typical, at least by D.C. standards: a master’s in international affairs from American University. After graduating, he worked as a Pentagon reporter for the Japanese newspaper the Asahi Shimbun before going to work at a defense consulting firm.
In 2003, he bought his first house, in Petworth (naturally), for about $200,000. “Petworth didn’t have a tremendous reputation at the time,” Silverman says, but it’s what he could afford. Back then, Silverman says, many of the neighborhood’s storefronts were boarded up and run down, but not long after he moved in, new businesses started to open.
At the time, he noticed that Petworth didn’t receive much attention or news coverage. “Nobody was talking about Petworth. With one exception — if there was a shooting,” Silverman says. He decided to fill the gap. Silverman already referred to himself as the Prince of Petworth in his answering machine message, so he decided that would be a good name for the site. He doesn’t remember what inspired the name in the first place: “I probably had a few Budweisers.”
From the start, the blog chronicled new businesses and restaurants, and whatever else caught Silverman’s attention: transoms, aluminum awnings, antique cars he calls “sweet rides,” flowers, benches, gossip that he dubs “scuttlebutt,” dogs. He dreams of one day taking a photo of a dog owner failing to clean up after their pet.
Silverman didn’t like that Petworth was mainly known for crime, but he blogged about crime, too. The blog is an unfiltered stream of consciousness of hyperlocal minutiae in Petworth and around the city via dozens of daily posts. “It clearly filled a void. People were starving for this super local content,” he says.
The blog also became a town square of sorts. Readers submitted “missed connections” in an effort to contact strangers they saw in the city and were interested in dating, and they sent inquiries about lost belongings in hopes of finding them. “Once an urn was stolen. I don’t think it was found,” he says.
Silverman’s genuine curiosity about the city, and love of it, helped the blog succeed, Martin Austermuhle, a longtime local D.C. reporter, says. “He approached a lot of things with this kid-like fascination about the District,” Austermuhle says. Case in point: Silverman still gets excited about every Little Free Library he sees. He trails off midsentence whenever he comes across one.
In 2009, Silverman quit his defense consulting job and gave himself a year to turn PoPville into a full-time gig that could support him. “I was like, ‘F— it. This is working. Let’s see if I can do it.’ And then, there was no looking back,” he says.
In the beginning, Silverman was thrilled when just 10 people visited the site. Now, PoPville receives upward of 750,000 unique visitors per month, according to Silverman. He reaches even more people on social media. Readers have sent photos of themselves wearing PoPville merchandise in places all over the world, from Afghanistan to Sweden. He declines to share how much money he earns but says it’s more than enough. “Not every month is the same, but thank God it’s giving me a living,” he says. Advertising is his main source of revenue.
Petworth has changed a lot over the past two decades. When Silverman moved in, he says convenience stores used bulletproof glass to separate customers from the merchandise and employees.
The few remnants of the old Petworth include a liquor store and Hackett’s funeral home. On the same block, a new deli called District Larder Co. is opening. Silverman records a short video about it and then darts across the street to inspect a consignment shop. He can’t determine whether it’s opening or closing. Either way, he wants to write about it. “Why the f— did nobody send this to me?” he asks while peering through the grimy window. He receives dozens of tips per week.
Nearby in Rock Creek Cemetery, Silverman points out the gravestone of Evelyn Y. Davis, who died in 2018. “This is very funny, if you can say a gravestone is funny,” he says. The inscription celebrates Davis’s four divorces and lack of children. “Queen of the corporate jungle,” it says. “1929 — forever.” Silverman reads it aloud and snorts.
Years ago, PoPville seemed to control the cultural conversation in the District, and Silverman had fervent fans — and die-hard haters. Criticism ranged from his avoidance of basic journalistic standards to his perceived obliviousness about or even complicity in the gentrification transforming Petworth. “I set my own rules, my own ethics,” Silverman says. “I’m oblivious to nothing.”
In 2015, members of local punk band Jack on Fire printed stickers with Silverman’s face and distributed them around the city. “The Duke of Douche,” they read. The band followed up the stickers with a song about Silverman called “Gotta Get That Silver, Man” that presented Silverman as a “jester” for “realty kings” and “their investors.” The band broke up years ago. Silverman says he never listened to the song.
Relevance in media is fickle, and although PoPville still has a hefty audience, some wonder whether it’s as central to Washington discourse as it once was. “Very few things can be relevant forever, and that even extends to PoPville,” Austermuhle says. Santra from Barred in DC thinks reading PoPville is an indicator of how long someone has lived in the city. “I still think he’s relevant, but I just don’t know whether it is for the newer folks,” he says.
While wandering through Columbia Heights, Silverman says he worries that Washington doesn’t feel as confident under the Trump administration. “This has been a very difficult time for D.C.,” he says, pointing to the decimation of the federal workforce, the presence of the National Guard and the closures of small businesses. “D.C. feels like it’s walking on eggshells,” he says.
National issues are particularly omnipresent in the capital, but Margot Susca, a journalism professor at American University, thinks PoPville continues to resonate with readers because the blog extends beyond politics. “In Washington, we want to remember what makes our city so vibrant, wonderful and alive,” she says. “The Prince of Petworth gives us access to that and helps us remember that we aren’t just a political city.”
Silverman says he never set out to create a historical record, but over the years, PoPville has inadvertently become a time capsule of hyperlocal happenings that, taken together, illustrate the broader development that has transformed the District. “I just wanted to cover the now,” he says. “But now, holy s—. In 50 or 100 years, somebody’s going to come upon this trove of every single day being documented.”
Change is the only constant, Silverman says, and his goal has always been to document the city’s ebb and flow. He plans to continue blogging for at least 10 more years, so he can say he did it for 30. “There’s always new places opening. There’s always new places closing. There’s always areas to be optimistic about, and there’s always areas to be pessimistic about,” he says. “I don’t think we’re ever going toward nirvana.”
Back in Columbia Heights, Silverman is taken aback when a woman on the stoop of a hair salon tells him that the owner of the nearby Don Julio deli and pupuseria died. “That’s very sad. They’ve been here for so long,” Silverman says.
Later, he posts about it.
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