Shining A Harsh Light on Trinidad

Post opinion columnist Courtland Milloy examines the controversial MPD checkpoint on Montello. MPD has also, in a move perhaps more likely to concern residents, begun to close off certain streets during checkpoint hours to street automotive traffic through the checkpoint. One note about Rayful Edmond, the long-incarcerated drug king whom Milloy references, is that he actually was running things out of Orleans Place. Though neighborhood lines are sometimes malleable, today you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who would say that Orleans is located in Trinidad. Most people would probably either place it in Near Northeast, or the more recently minted Capitol Hill North. But this isn't the first time a reporter has called the area around Orleans and Morton [two tiny one block streets] Trinidad. Harry Jaffe did it in 2006 when he referred to Trinidad as “sandwiched between Florida Avenue and H Street.” Umm, not so much. Looking at a map the neighborhood of Trinidad lies entirely north of Florida Avenue and entirely east of Gallaudet University. I suspect that what's going on here might be a little confusion about boundaries. Trinidad's official boundaries are pretty clear because it was a separate estate long before it ever became a neighborhood. Looking at this Post article from 1996 you can see that Trinidad was often mentioned in connection with Rayful Edmond because he did supply many of the drugs sold there, but this was also true of other neighborhoods. The 1996 article, and the 1995 court document above, refer to the Morton Orleans two block clump as The Strip. The 1996 article gets the boundaries of Trinidad right and says that Edmond worked out of the Strip, but later, while incarcerated, orchestrated sales of cocaine to supply the Trinidad neighborhood "just across Florida Avenue NE from Edmond's old retail drug operation, known as the Strip, on Morton and Orleans places NE."