While the Penn Avenue Arts District has been successful in drawing arts uses, it remains a corridor through two neighborhoods. When it was imagined fifteen years ago it had two distinct goals. One was to see whether the arts could transform the very blighted place that it was. The other was to “zipper” together the two vastly different neighborhoods on either side of it. This second goal was never achieved and while Friendship to the south is nicely middle class, Garfield to the north struggles with an impoverished population and much vacancy. This is a socio-economic face-off. Can our experiment help to resolve it?