I live in Northern Virginia – about 10 minutes outside the District of Columbia, better known as "DC", as in Washington, DC. Lately I’ve been going in more often and seeing parts of it I’ve never experienced before. I learn something new about it each time.
Format. DC is in the form of a diamond, cut into 4 quarters: Northwest, Northeast, Southwest and Southeast. The north-south division is Constitution/Independence Avenues which straddle "The Mall", and the east-west division comes from North and South Capitol Streets. These streets, however, are off-center of the diamond, a few blocks east of the apex, so Northwest is larger than Northeast. Much of what we would think of as "Southwest" is better known as Arlington County, Virginia, cut off from the rest of Southwest DC by the Potomac River, so actual Southwest DC is fairly small.
North-south streets are numbered (going down as you go east in Northwest towards the Capitol and back up eastwards of the Capitol); east-west streets have alphabet names (A, B, etc. – K Street being the major business area). Diagonal streets are named after states: Massachusetts, Wisconsin and Connecticut being the major western streets (lots of embassies along Mass. Ave.) and New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York, and Pennsylvania Ave. being the major east side streets. Georgia Ave, though, runs north-south, also known as 7th Street. Each of the state streets continues well past the DC-MD line and well into Maryland, becoming major commercial avenues in the suburbs. Wisconsin Ave. turns into 355 and goes all the way up to Frederick, Maryland, an hour out of DC. We knew it as Rockville Pike and grew up along there as kids.
DC is connected to Maryland by land, with an invisible border you observe by a sign as you drive by on one of the major roads. It’s divided from Virginia by the Potomac River, so the connections there are by bridges and major highways (much more obvious that you’re going from one to the other). 395 comes up to DC from Virginia, but does not connect with 95 coming down from Maryland. They spent the money earmarked for the hookup on the Metro instead, so 95 splits off into 95 and 495 (the Beltway), whereas 395 sprouts off into New York Avenue, Pennsylvania Ave., and the Capitol Bldg. district. 395 goes across the 14th Street Bridge (final destination of an Air Florida Flight, as Howard Stern famously remarked as a finale to his career as a disc jockey in DC in the early 80s) which puts you on 14th Street running north-south. Memorial Bridge brings you to the Lincoln Memorial and the Rock Creek Parkway (if you can avoid getting completely confused) – an unfortunately rare destination from Virginia considering the bridge’s beauty and origin from Arlington Cemetary. Route 50/66 put you on Constitution Ave. coming in eastbound from the west. Key Bridge, a close second to Memorial Bridge in aesthetic appeal, brings traffic from Rosslyn to M Street in Georgetown and K Street, so it gets heavy traffic and more use than Memorial Bridge. I used to walk across it when I lived in Rosslyn.
The Beltway. It’s not just a circumferential highway surrounding DC, Arlington County and Alexandria. It completely surrounds DC and has two bridges across the Potomac, the American Legion Memorial Bridge and the Woodrow Wilson Bridge (which has a drawbridge), each of which connect Maryland and Virginia. It’s been used metaphorically to describe a state of mind: "inside the Beltway" (thinking of Washington’s federal bureaucracy, the Establishment, the insiders, etc.) vs. "outside the Beltway" – everywhere else in the country, a kind of "us vs. them" mentality depending on who is talking. Other cities – including Baltimore, right up to the northeast of DC – have their own beltways, but the DC Beltway has a unique political significance.
My own experience. I grew up in suburban Maryland, and my father worked at the Department of Commerce. The DOC building is on Constitution and 14th Street, is one of the last of the huge government buildings built in the 20s and 30s, and the last built without central air conditioning installed. Its official name is the Herbert Hoover Building, though I don’t recall anyone referring to it as such. The lobbies and hallways are archaic and you can tell it’s an old building, cold in the winter, hot in the summer, with the A/C units hanging out of the windows. In the basement is the National Aquarium, which has a decent selection of fish if you consider that it’s fairly small. My dad used to take us there as kids. The Air & Space Museum, and other Smithsonian institutions, were the other reasons for us to – briefly – explore DC.
In 1979 we moved to Paris, which meant we’d only see the US on home leaves every other even-numbered year. I mentioned 1984, when we stayed in a house on McArthur Blvd., though this is as far southwest DC as you can get without going into the Potomac, and as noted, the house’s poor A/C had us running to McLean, Virginia (right across the river) in search of sanity at our relatives’ house.
I came back to the US to live most of the year on campus at the University of Maryland, College Park. I missed the DC alcohol age grandfathering by 3 months (I turned 18 in January 1987, instead of October 1986) so my excursions into DC were very limited during this time. One time my friend Phil took me to a place called Brazil Tropical (off Pennsylvania Ave.) for my first caipirinha, ages before I went to Rio de Janeiro and had one there.
Once I passed 21 and my brother and friend were still single, we’d hit two of the major zones for straight 20s something singles: Georgetown and M/L Street (closer to 18th Street and the K Street district). This would have been the mid-90s as my brother got married in 1998 and my best friend in 1999. No more clubbing after that....
From September 1998 to April 1999, and then again from January 2000 to November 2000, I worked at a government contractor, CACI, on their L Street office. This was at L and 12th, one block off K Street, and for all intents and purposes well within the "K Street" corridor. I took the metro from Rosslyn to McPherson Square and got to know this central business district, where all the fancy commercial offices are, and the major DC law firms. The deli’s in this neighborhood have names like "Gourmet Provisions" and charge twice what you’d consider reasonable. Thank God the McDonald’s on New York Ave. kept its normal rates, not that I’m a big fan of Evil Clown.
A few blocks south is the Mall, the southern end of Pennsylvania Avenue, and the Capitol. The Mall is flanked on one end by the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial at the end of the Reflecting Pool (remember "Forrest Gump"?). At the opposite, eastern end is the Capitol. It’s lined by the various Smithsonian museums including, but not limited to, the National Museum of American History, the Museum of Natural History (north side) and the Air & Space Museum (south side). The Mall’s most recent purpose has been grounds for protests, first the Free Mumia series of World Bank/IMF series – from 1999 to 2003 - and then the next set from March 2003 (invasion/liberation of Iraq) onward to the present. However – as "Forrest Gump" points out – the area was rife with protest during the Vietnam War and even the Bonus March of the Great Depression.
Pennsylvania Ave. itself was supposed to have an unbroken view from the White House to the Capitol, but some dumbass Treasury Secretary decided that his ego trumped L’Enfant’s plan and dumped the Treasury Dept. building in the middle. A suitably creepy building along Penn. Ave. going towards the Capitol is the Old Post Office Building, with its tall clock tower, which is now an indoor mall usually full of tourists. The "new" post office building next door dates from...1935. This does it for the tourist part of town.
DC does have large swaths of ghettos, run-down shithole land, off in Southeast and lots of Northeast. As I noted earlier, Southwest is rather small. Northwest is generally decent territory – it includes very posh residences along Foxhall Road (my uncle, who was a lobbyist, used to live there), and the American University neighborhood is very nice.
Lately I’ve gotten more aquainted with the Dupont Circle and Adams Morgan areas. Dupont Circle is where Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire Aves. meet, crossed by 19th Street. It’s a trendy district where you can count on seeing too many guys holding hands and fans of "Will & Grace", Judy Garland, etc. ("Not that there’s anything wrong with it!" as they insisted on "Seinfeld"). Adams Morgan is essentially 18th Street north of U Street, up to and including Columbia Road, and is a multicultural district, primarily hispanic, with plenty of Spanish spoken. When the Brazilian team won their fifth World Cup on Sunday, June 30, 2002, we celebrated the victory right at the top of 18th Street. It was a huge block party with bongos, cheering, Brazilian flag waving, and shouts of "PENTA CAMPEAO" over and over again.
Just last weekend we took a walk through the Meridian Hill Park, which dates from the early 20th century. It has a fantastic cascading fountain (like you’d find in Italy, of all places), and statues of James Buchanan, Dante, and Joan of Arc ("which of these things is not like the other, which of these things does not belong") which is, to say the least, a bizarre combination to find in an otherwise beautiful park – even nicer than Parcul Cismigiu or Parc Monceau. 16th Street goes up a steep hill, and features some of the most bizarre architecture you can see in DC, short of the gothic, Adams Family monstrosity of the Old Executive Office Building or a close second, the Willard Hotel. Much of it dates from the turn of the century, when cable cars allowed development up the steep hills on 16th Street, Wisconsin, Connecticut, etc. Some resemble castles, some resemble Arabic/Middle Eastern, and even when the neighborhood changes from apartment buildings to houses, you still get the early 20th century eclectic style, with many bungalows or the mail order houses you could find in old Sears catalogs (yes, you could buy an entire house from the catalog back then). Much of the buildings between Adams Morgan and Dupont Circle share this schizophrenic heterogeneity. Perhaps H.P. Lovecraft would have felt at home here – or perhaps it would have been "too new" for his tastes.
Getting around. The Metro in DC, unlike New York, London, and Paris, is a fairly recent addition and doesn’t have anywhere close the coverage it does in those cities. In Paris it’s like a station every 4 blocks, in DC it’s more like 10-15 blocks. Driving in DC is a hassle. In theory the city is set up intuitively with the numbered, lettered, and state streets, but in practice it degenerates into insanity with one-way streets, streets ending and picking up half a neighborhood away, the Rock Creek Park cutting the northern part in half, plus terrible potholes and bad drivers, many of them cab drivers from who knows where. Even when you do get to where you’re going, you still have to find a parking space, which is as much a nightmare in DC as in any other city. Walking around the city, however, is fine (as least in good weather), assuming you don’t mind walking long distances. I got used to it in Paris-sur-Seine (and that shithole version on the Dambovitsa) so I don’t mind it too much in DC, it’s the parking BS I can’t stand. Even so, whenever I’m in DC I’m immediately inclined to leave ASAP.
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