montestewart wrote:pancakes3 wrote:ok brimley, how do you like this city so far? maybe i should have told you about an asian sorority party last weekend at ibiza. slipped my mind.
ok monte. i want an old school DC experience. are you saying it's dead or just dying? are there places i can go to where the first three things girls ask won't be: what school i went to, what major i chose, and where i work?
i know i grew up in a sheltered bubble world of the suburbs even from my hyattsville days (moreso now after stints in short pump, charlottesville, and now gaithersburg). i'm all up for the extraordinary, if it exists. i think i'm going to go to my first barry farms game on saturday. should be all right... right?
I'm not quite so upset as Wes_Tiny_Abe_ over what's changed about DC, but I do relate to some of his lamentations. When I was younger, I was a bike messenger, and as I whipped around town, I slowly learned the locations and functions of virtually every government agency and various other organizations. I miss the pre-terrorism access to government buildings. I miss the many old buildings (looking like they are from a 1940s movie) that have been leveled or gutted such that their "history" is frequently a farcically Disneyfied facade.
Downtown was a mix of pricey old restaurants and nightclubs and cheap cafes and bars, high end stores and dime stores. It was to me more eclectic, vibrant, and interesting. There is more nightlife now, but there was nightlife then, and new office buildings displaced many clubs and restaurants, and the rents now are too high to justify most offbeat stuff. I miss non-chain book and music stores. I miss the juxtaposition of the FBI on one side of 9th street and peep shows on the other side. I miss a Chinatown that was ten square blocks plus of Chinese restaurants, and the remnants of DC's Little Italy right next to it.
Places and things I've liked have disappeared from Georgetown, from Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Connecticut, Georgia, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania Aves all the way to Maryland, Adams Morgan, Mt. Pleasant, H St. NE, Capitol Hill, Anacostia, etc. People with money come in, and it's easier to meet consumer demand with a uniform, homogenized product. They'll pay big money to live near the pulse. The hospital my mother was born in is now condos. The law school my grandfather attended is now condos. My wife's former business is now condos. And you gotta have a drug store, so all the beautiful old and interesting movie theaters were converted to CVS stores. And you need coffee, so every funky little place that was too small to be a CVS is now a Starbucks (DC Space, the club where Lebron's self-proclaimed "father" allegedly met his mother, is now a Starbucks).
Much of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Baltimore, and other urban areas have experienced similar changes, but the Federal dominance of DC, the bizarre tax base, the small jurisdictional enclave that it is, and its building height restrictions all stand among its unique set of circumstances.
But the museums are still here, still free, and some of them are better than ever. There are more restaurants I like near my house. The economy's still OK here, thanks largely to the Fed Gov's continuing revenue stream, so I'm still employed. And thanks to all those people willing to move back into town and buy fancy shacks in the air, my property values have skyrocketed. There's still plenty to do in this town.
