By Audrey Hoffer February 27 at 7:30 AM

Fairlawn is a quiet community east of the Anacostia River in Southeast Washington.

About 6,000 people live on peaceful streets along Anacostia Park, which hugs the river. The neighborhood is a short drive from Capitol Hill via the 11th Street and Sousa bridges.

A feeling of calmness comes over you when you cross the bridge, said Carol Casperson, a 35-year resident and recording secretary for the Fairlawn Citizens Association (FCA).

People live here because they want to, said Diane Fleming, FCA treasurer, president of the Anacostia Garden Club and a resident for 50 years.

And they come here to stay, added Casperson. Three generations live in the house next to Flemings.

The neighborhoods housing stock is varied it includes semi-detached and detached houses, condominiums and rental apartments. Modest brick rowhouses dating from the 1920s, 30s and 40s many with front porches and white awnings dominate. Because the porches are next to each other, you say hello to your neighbors, Casperson said.

Gaining new attention: In the late 1800s, Fairlawn was suburban or even rural in character, with large gardens and estates owned exclusively by whites. In the 1920s, it was a bedroom community for people working west of the river, especially at the Washington Navy Yard, and was still mostly white, according to Graylin Presbury, FCA president and author of Fairlawn: From the Flats to the Heights.

Were one of the first developed communities east of the river off Capitol Hill, he said.

Anacostia High School was desegregated in 1955, then the neighborhood followed suit in the mid-1960s. This was one of the last neighborhoods east of the river to integrate, he said.

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Where We Live: Fairlawn is starting to come onto the radar

A 33-year-old Crescent City man was arrested Tuesday on a charge of cruelty to a child after his 7- and 8-year-old sons were hit and forced to sleep on porches outside their Browns Fish Camp Road home, according to the Putnam County Sheriffs Office.

Jose Dolores Rodriguez is in jail on no bail, according to the Sheriffs Office.

Deputies were called to Middleton Burney Elementary School at 10 a.m. in reference to a child-abuse complaint and found that a 7-year-old boy had come to school with a bruise on his face, the Sheriffs Office said. The boys 8-year-old brother told teachers that their father had slapped each of them three to four times in the face for arguing, then forced one to sleep on the front porch and the other on the back porch, the Sheriffs Office said. Overnight temperatures dipped into the low 50s in that area, according to forecasts.

The father was questioned by detectives, then arrested, the Sheriffs Office said.

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Putnam father arrested after sons forced to sleep outside

Wendy Wiiks, grants administrator for the city of Leominster, stands in front of the historic Drake House, which was used in the underground railroad. Wiiks is applying for grants to help restore the building. SENTINEL & ENTERPRISE / Ashley Green

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LEOMINSTER -- An architectural firm has estimated that it will cost about $1.2 million to restore the historic Drake House to how it appeared in 1851, when it hosted fugitive slave Shadrach Minkins.

Wendy Wiiks, the city's grant administrator, said the restoration plan is the first step in applying for grants to cover the cost of bringing the city-owned home, at 21 Franklin St., once used in the underground railroad, back to its original appearance.

"We'd never be able to get any grants unless we have a plan," Wiiks said Monday about the $60,000 assessment and feasibility study commissioned in August by the city and paid for with a $30,000 grant from the Massachusetts Historical Commission and an equal match by the city.

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The assessment, according to the Mattapoisett architectural firm Durland Van Voorhis, sought to "document the existing conditions both structurally and architecturally, to develop short, medium and long-term preservation priorities with their related costs and to develop a schematic design plan that would both preserve the Drake House and make its history more accessible to the city and its visitors."

The firm had outside consultants inspect and analyze all aspects of the 1 1/2-story home, which included determining its original structure and paint colors.

According to the assessment, much of the original Drake House remains as it was when it was first built: "Original doors and windows are still functioning and in generally good condition.

However, because the home was built 170 years ago, several dormers have been added, as have a couple of porches, and there is asbestos siding and aluminum panning that covers the exterior.

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A trip back in time for historic Drake House as Leominster plans $1.2 million restoration

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Foote Homes doesn't need to be torn down. It needs rain gardens, trees, individual porches, a new drainage system, updated lighting, and walkways. That's according to the Vance Avenue Collaborative, a community group trying to save the public housing complex from demolition.

The group held a meeting last week to discuss how Foote Homes can be saved.

City officials will submit an application in September to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to raze Foote Homes' 57 buildings. HUD denied the city the $30 million grant for the project last year. But that did not deter Robert Lipscomb, the city's director of Housing and Community Development, who said the process is competitive and that the city would simply try again in 2015.

Should the city be selected for the $30 million Hope VI grant this year, the project would require $12.7 million from city taxpayers and $60 million from a private developer. In all, the project would cost $102.7 million, according to a Memphis Housing Authority document.

The city's plan calls for replacing the aging project with a mixed-income housing development like Legends Park, Cleaborne Pointe, University Place, and others.

The Vance Avenue Collaborative unveiled their alternative plan (called the Vance Avenue Community Transformation Plan) to renovate the Foote Homes complex during a meeting last week at the St. Patrick Center.They believe their plan to save the complex will cost less than the city's estimates for demolition and building new homes.

The plan would remove the large fence surrounding Foote Homes to increase pedestrian access to the site and diminish its reputation as a "ghetto," collaborative members said. New sidewalks would be installed around the campus, which would be rich with new green spaces, according to the plan.

Rain gardens would catch storm water and hold it to feed community gardens. Residents could eat or sell the produce grown in the gardens, the plan said. More trees would improve the "micro-climate" at Foote Homes. All of this would reduce litter because "the more beautiful the place is, the more we'll take care of it," said a voiceover in a 15-minute video describing the plan last week.

Backyards would be made semi-private. Each residential unit would get its own front porch, and they would be made larger than the existing shared porches. Walls would be painted. Mold would be scraped. Windows and screens and doors would be replaced. And it all comes with a price tag of $63 million.

"Our plan starts with the assumption that Foote Homes is not a problem to be eliminated but an incredible asset that could be even more positive and more uplifting with a little bit of work," said Kenneth Reardon, a collaborative member and University of Memphis planning professor who has been working on the alternative project for years.

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Group Devises Plan to Save Foote Homes from Destruction

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Jon Ronson's forthcoming book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, can't reach front porches soon enough, assuming it resembles the adaptation published in The New York Times. The journalist and humorist revisits the stories of mostly obscure people who showed bad judgment (as every Internet user has done at one time or another) but were unlucky enough to become the focus of an angry digital mob. The nature of their transgressions varies. But in each case, the punishments arbitrarily urged or meted out by callous strangers on social media affected their lives for years, costing them jobs, causing them to flee from their homes, stressing their loved ones, and sending them into states of existential despair.

Those subjected to death threats, harassment, termination, and mass outpourings of digital hate were not examined and found to be particularly malign or odious individuals. They just made a mistake that happened to go viral, often in ways that would've been extremely difficult to anticipate beforehand, and they were judged as if their transgressions alone defined them. Sometimes whole controversies unfolded on Twitter or Facebook. Other times, a digital journalist directed the ire of the Internet at a given target. Sam Biddle reflected on playing the instigator's role in an apology he posted on the one-year anniversary of helping to shame someone into unemployment, writing that when his target contacted him, "I realized suddenly that I felt very guilty about havingI assumeddestroyed another person on what was basically a professional whim."

Many people participate in digital mobs, and yet, they have few public defenders. Indeed, many who engage in digital pile-ons hardly realize what they're doing or contemplate the consequences of their actions. Take two instances of shaming that Ronson describes in his book excerpt:

One person I met was Lindsey Stone, a 32-year-old Massachusetts woman who posed for a photograph while mocking a sign at Arlington National Cemeterys Tomb of the Unknowns. Stone had stood next to the sign, which asks for Silence and Respect, pretending to scream and flip the bird. She and her co-worker Jamie, who posted the picture on Facebook, had a running joke about disobeying signssmoking in front of No Smoking signs, for exampleand documenting it. But shorn of this context, her picture appeared to be a joke not about a sign but about the war dead. Worse, Jamie didnt realize that her mobile uploads were visible to the public.

Four weeks later, Stone and Jamie were out celebrating Jamies birthday when their phones started vibrating repeatedly. Someone had found the photo and brought it to the attention of hordes of online strangers. Soon there was a wildly popular Fire Lindsey Stone Facebook page. The next morning, there were news cameras outside her home; when she showed up to her job, at a program for developmentally disabled adults, she was told to hand over her keys. (After they fire her, maybe she needs to sign up as a client, read one of the thousands of Facebook messages denouncing her. Woman needs help.) She barely left home for the year that followed, racked by PTSD, depression and insomnia. I didnt want to be seen by anyone, she told me last March at her home in Plymouth, Mass. I didnt want people looking at me.

Instead, Stone spent her days online, watching others just like her get turned upon. In particular she felt for that girl at Halloween who dressed as a Boston Marathon victim. I felt so terrible for her. She meant Alicia Ann Lynch, 22, who posted a photo of herself in her Halloween costume on Twitter. Lynch wore a running outfit and had smeared her face, arms and legs with fake blood. After an actual victim of the Boston Marathon bombing tweeted at her, You should be ashamed, my mother lost both her legs and I almost died, people unearthed Lynchs personal information and sent her and her friends threatening messages. Lynch was reportedly let go from her job as well.

Many of the individuals who shamed and harassed these women likely thought of themselves as doing something like telling a stranger, at a military cemetery or a Halloween party, "Hey, that's messed up, you jerk." In fact, they were helping to mete out a much more severe punishment, akin to thousands of angry people gathering around a person at a military cemetery or Halloween party to aggressively menace them. As a mob, their effect was to terrify and traumatize people. The punishments they imposed did not fit the crimes.

With more exposure to stories like these, I hope that more people will refrain from participating in what they'll now recognize as digital pile-ons-in-the-making.

Meanwhile, I propose a new social norm. My strong suspicion is that we'd all be better off if Americans developed a broad aversion to people being fired for public missteps that have nothing to do with their jobs. That norm would do more good than bad even if you think some people deserve to be fired. Sure, I'd advise against taking flip photographs at a military cemetery. But whatever one thinks of that error in judgment, there's no reason it should cause a woman to lose her job helping developmentally disabled adults.

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A Social-Media Mistake Is No Reason to Be Fired