March 11, 2006

9th Street

The wind was from the south, and a few hardy souls had the tops down on their cars, even though dirty piles of snow lingered in the places where the sun did not shine.

It was New Jersey, on the nearly ten mile shortcut on Jersey Route 22 East that Google Map had recommended for me. I looked at the strip-malls that lined the road. Every franchise chain in America was represented, with the series replicating every mile.

McDonalds, of course, and Outback, and Starbucks and Home Depot, and a hundred more you can think of. I had no idea how many places you can go to get your nails done.

There was only one White Castle Hamburger outlet, and I wistfully drove by it, thinking the tasty little silver-dollar sized burgers would lull me to sleep. Perhaps cause me to later swerve off the Jersey Turnpike, or hurtle off the Delaware Bay Bridge.

I had miles to go before I could do anything interesting. There were 234 miles to go and only so much daylight and the prospect of arriving in DC at the height of rush-hour.

I was fleeing a long meeting abut security, and how we might compete to get some of the business that the government is going to dispense over the next few years.

One of our consultants pulled me over in the conference room with the burled walnut table large enough to land a helicopter on. “You know what the deal is, don't you?”

I told him I didn't. He whispered conspiratorially, close enough to tell what he had for breakfast. “The goal is to disengage from the Gulf, and give the security problem to China and the European Union. That is going to mean a shift of focus to Africa, and to Latin America for energy. Put the Europeans in the crosshairs off the Loonies for a while and see how they like it.”

I nodded. "Good," I whispered back. “We'll trade Iraq for Nigeria and Hugo Chavez.” I had been wondering what the government was we going to do for a reliable source of oil. The business sprawl on Route 22 indicates we are going to be shackled to the personal automobile for the foreseeable future.

I listened to the radio and let the pre-spring breeze flood in the window as I drove. The wind was from the south, warm, but coming in fresh gusts that moved the rental car sideways in the lane. The wind was making people do strange things, some too fast and others too cautious. Regardless of the dry pavement, it was white-knuckled driving right through Phillie and Wilmington.

In Washington the wind didn't matter, since I hit the Beltway at the perfect instant around five o'clock when traffic simply came to a halt. For those that know, the dreaded triangle around the I-270 spur is what I am talking about, creeping for an hour to get around the one o'clock position, counter-clockwise on the eight lanes of concrete.

I had not been in a mess like this in years, not since I left the wilds outside the Beltway and moved to Arlington. I marveled at how utterly impossible it is, totally dysfunctional.

I looked around me at the drivers. The woman with the pursed mouth, flicking an  angry cigarette. The man with the bad toupee in his old Taurus sedan.

Why would anyone live like this?

Eventually, I crept across the Potomac at the American Legion Bridge where the Cabin John estate once stood. From there, I escaped on the George Washington Parkway and then to the refuge of Arlington's local streets.

The car-hire agency is located almost within walking distance of Big Pink, which is why I picked it. I was the last customer of the day, and they locked the door behind me as I waited for a cab. The tension of the drive drain away. I looked at the construction cranes that are changing the landscape, block by block.

Just up the street, they are incorporating the façade of the old Jeffersonian post office into the base of the new tower, an architectural quotation intended to fool us into thinking we are still in the same place.

Old Arlington was a two-story town, and now it is not.

Old Arlington was slightly down at the heels, and diverse. Now it is increasingly white, and yuppy.

The same process is happening thing in the District. But DC ceased to be diverse after working hours right after the riots that followed the murder of Dr. King. It beacame all African American as the whites fled the city for the new suburbs beyond the Beltway.

For those of us that love the quirky old city, the road back has been a long one, but it has come at a price.

I work in the building that was plopped down atop the lobby of the old art deco Grayhound Bus Station. When it was new, our building was a powerful statement in the region north of the Federal section of the city. It was an outpost of re-development then, since the Bus Station was an excellent place to find all manner of trouble.

The other day I was on the roof to take my daily picture of the new twelve-story building going up across New York Avenue. I counted no less than fourteen construction cranes marching off toward U street, towering over areas once blighted and dangerous.

I had a dinner invitation over on the Hill during the week. Some friends bought the place there when they retired from the Navy and went into respectable work. They hated the commute, and the new job was downtown, so they bought on what had been, in my experience, the edge of the universe.

Years ago, a woman I worked for had the same idea. The houses were so cute. The commute was human scale. She is the smartest person in the intelligence business, and she thought the gamble was right. She purchased a charming row-house that she could afford, on the edge of Gentrifcation.

Too close to the frontier, as it turned out, since bodies still turned up on the newly trimmed lawns, and gunfire occasionally erupted when her children walked home after school.

She was too soon in the cycle. It takes dual-income, no-kids families to change a neighborhood. She sold, ruefully saying “Buy high, sell low, that's my motto.”

But in the long term she was right. Block by block the row-houses were reclaimed from despair, or at least from those who could afford to live in them when no one cared, and the police responded to calls grudgingly.

Capitol Street divides the city, north and south. Numbers go up in each direction from this cardinal axis; accordingly, you may have the same number and same street address within a few blocks of one another. That uncomfortable fact has made discrete meetings and effective espionage a problem since Lincoln's time.

I stopped at the wrong address first, thinking my friends must live at the alternative closest to Pennsylvania Avenue. I felt the fool, clutching my bottle of wine, and walking expeditiously back to my car when I was disabused of the notion.

I motored on north five or six blocks on 9th Street, row after row of handsome houses with the architectural details renewed, and daffodils poking up in the beds behind wrought-iron fences.

When I pulled up to the curb in front of the correct number, I looked up at a wide porch nestled in a row of solid homes. Broad steps led up to it, concealing an English Apartment  on the ground floor. Inside, the hardwood floors were immaculate, and covered by rich riental rugs. The second renovation was nicely and neatly done. 

Later, we were standing out in back by the grill between the home and the carriage house. I asked my host about the neighborhood, since we were awfully close to where things used to be really dangerous.

He turned the lamb-chops, done to perfection, and gestured with the tongs. The people two down were a professional couple, the man neck-door had moved down from Baltimore and wore gold chains, the couple on the other side were attorneys.

One more over, he said, was the last original tenant on the block. I saw a light shining from the second floor, and noted that the window treatment was basic in the extreme. She was an eighty-year old African American woman, he said, and she probably wouldn't be here much longer.

Dinner was excellent. When I walked back to the car, I checked out the old woman's house. It had excellent bones, and it looked like someone was going to have a great time re-doing it.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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