Family Liquor has sold booze on H Street since the end of Prohibition, says store manager Lincoln Jerome Hodge, and the place survived the riots of 1968. But Hodge fears Family Liquor won’t make it through H Street’s latest upheaval: gentrification.

On Oct. 1 the city imposed a moratorium on the sale of single beers and half-pints of liquor for a seven-block stretch of H Street NE. Like other stores, Family Liquor does a significant amount of business in singles sales — big cans of Steel Reserve malt liquor or little bottles of vodka, for example, that cost a couple bucks. The District government agrees with the local advisory neighborhood commission (ANC): Singles keep H Street on the blight side, with public drunkenness, urination and littering holding back revitalization.

Singles-selling businesses up and down the strip agree the ban will hurt business. Hodge thinks that’s the whole point: “They want poor people out of the neighborhood. Let’s be honest and realistic,” he said. “They are dividing the community between the haves and the have-nots.”

ANC member Mary Beatty said she and Hodge serve different constituencies.

“Across all segments of our ANC we were unified — old residents, new residents, black residents, white residents,” she said. “This is not about class and/or race. We represent the residents of the ANC, and the residents, who may not be the customers of some of these liquor stores, support the moratorium.” Beatty said people come from other parts of the city to hang out and drink on H Street. Two highly used bus lines converge at H and 8th.

It may be unintentional, but this isn’t the first time Beatty’s ANC has waded into the race/class conundrum on this particular corridor. Has Hodge got a point, or is the city just race-crazed?

New rules recently went into effect governing the licensing of fast-food businesses after the ANC protested the District’s granting a permit to Cluck-U on the 1100 block of H. As The Washington Post put it in June 2006: “Some of Cluck-U’s supporters questioned whether the ANC was seeking to drive out modestly priced businesses that cater to African Americans in a corridor showing signs of an economic renaissance.”

At the ANC’s prodding, Ward 6 D.C. Councilmember Tommy Wells introduced a bill this year to limit the volume of non-commercial amplified public speech. On Saturdays, a group of street preachers irritates the neighborhood around H Street with loud ranting — against white people (because “God is a racist”). Proponents of the bill insist it’s about the volume, not the content.

Hodge sees a double standard in the moratorium. A big part of H Street’s revitalization has to do with nurturing the half-dozen new bars that have popped up, amounting to what may well be a net increase in drunkenness.

“Have you ever looked and seen how many people are drunk and urinating coming out of the clubs?” asked Hodge, who said he sometimes sees such behavior after closing shop and walking up the street. But there haven’t been a lot of complaints about this from neighbors.

Beatty said stores that rely on sales of singles will just have to go upscale and offer products comparable to what’s available at, say, Harris Teeter or Trader Joe’s, two businesses residents and the ANC have been clamoring for — even petitioning for — on the 300 block.

“Experience in other areas of the city indicates that a singles moratorium did not put a single store out of business,” Beatty wrote in an e-mail. “Store owners were really happy with their increased sales of higher-end products.”

Robbers hit two Capitol Hill banks on Pennsylvania Avenue SE in recent weeks. At 1 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 22, a man with a gun put a bag in an outdoor walk-up window and demanded cash at the National Capital Bank of Washington on the 300 block. The teller complied.

“Our policy is to instruct tellers that their own safety is paramount,” said National Capital Bank President Richard Didden, who declined to discuss details, citing an ongoing investigation.

A few days prior, a robbery occurred at the PNC bank on the 600 block. A PNC employee confirmed the robbery but declined to discuss details. First District police Cmdr. David Kamperin did not respond to inquiries.

Over the years, the huge police presence on Capitol Hill has not dissuaded robbers from striking the eight banks on this three-block stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue. In 2000, a serial bank robber nailed Citibank on the 300 block. In 1995, a police stakeout in the Crestar Bank on the 300 block led to the arrest of two crooks who’d been suspected in seven other bank robberies throughout the city.

At the BB&T bank across the street from the National Capital Bank, a festive orange-and-black sign wishes everybody a safe Halloween — but “Please, no masks allowed inside the bank.”

Hillscape reported a few weeks ago that the city’s massively popular kickball leagues had generated a backlash: The Anti Yuppie Kickball Guerilla Front, whose initiates prove themselves by direct action (e.g., throwing poop) at a kickball game. Inquisitor K, a spokesman for the group, claimed the Front had vast membership rolls, not just a really nice website.

Last week, that site bore a message announcing that Inquisitor K had been arrested by U.S. marshals, who had infiltrated the group by posing as kickball-hating comrades:

“He was arraigned on many charges including advocating terrorism (or something like that), providing material support to a terrorist organization, aggravated assault (for a botched ball-napping in July where a kickball player who gave chase was supposedly knocked out with brass knuckles), resisting arrest, 3 counts of theft, another assault charge, and he apparently faces extradition to Maryland and New Jersey for warrants related to narcotics trafficking,” the site read.

Some local blogs, including Wonkette, linked to the bad news, suggesting that kickballers (many of whom work for the government) pulled strings to get the Department of Justice to crack down on these kickball scoffers. Sinister kickball! Corruption! Frivolous waste of government resources!

Alas, all too good to be true. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C. said nobody in her office had heard of this, that there’s no way it could have happened without their knowledge but that they all had a good laugh over it.