The thing about DC

Some thoughts about the city I still love

I’m in DC for a short work conference this week, and while the conference itself isn’t anything worth writing home about, I’ve embraced the chance to visit DC again and think about this city and my place in it and what it all means. So at the risk of repeating myself when I start to wax poetic about our nation’s capital.. here are some rambling and disjointed thoughts.

The State of the Union was last night, and I confess — even though I was here in DC, the fact the speech was taking place just a half mile down the road didn’t even register with me. I know, I know — “Go to a bar and watch the State of the Union” is supposed to be this very clichéd DC activity — but I never did it when I lived here. I always thought it was kind of a performative DC thing that only appealed to a very certain type of DC person. I’m sure there are places on Capitol Hill where the DC newcomers — the interns, the steady turnover of 22/23 year olds who show up here year after year — love to do this. They love the SOTU and the motorcades and the Marine One flyovers and did-you-hear-Jill-Biden-was-at-Le-Diplomate-last-Sunday, and the West Wing tours — and eventually they turn 27 or 28, decide they’re tired of living in a Columbia Heights group house with four other 20-somethings, and they move back to the big city in their home state.

But that was never really my DC. I don’t have any thoughts about the State of the Union or about politics in This Town, so I’m not going to write about any of that. Instead, I’ve spent my time on this trip circling back to the same usual haunts where I pay my respects anytime I visit — Kramerbooks .. Annie’s Steakhouse .. the Three-Fifty Bakery .. Big Bear .. Baan Thai Siam. And I’m staying at a hotel in Adams Morgan — a neighborhood I’ve come to love for all its broken down weariness. So many neighborhoods in this city are overrun with 10-story steel-and-glass big box apartment buildings — hulking, soulless monstrosities all built in the last 10 years that take up an entire city block. Adams Morgan is, mercifully, free of all that. It’s old and dense and the sidewalks are uneven and everything is a little too narrow and not at all ADA-compliant. The storefronts are tired and they need a coat of paint, and so many of them are constantly changing hands. What was once an all-night jumbo slice pizza shop is now a record store is now a coffee-shop-slash-art-gallery. So I come to DC once or twice a year, and I visit my little list of places, and I stay in AdMo and I remind myself that this used to be my home.  It’s nice.

On the left, Miss Adams Morgan herself. On the right, the best jumbo slice in DC and anyone who says otherwise is a liar.

But I do have to admit that, lately, things have gotten a bit rough here.  Yes, it’s partly the pandemic, of course, and party the long shadow of the Trump years.  But it’s impossible not to conclude that the town is a little more broken now.  The bus doesn’t come when it should. The metro train *really* doesn’t come when it should, and if they’re single-tracking on the weekend (which they always are), the train is all but unusable. The CVS doesn’t have what you want. Whole shelves are cleared out — haven’t been stocked in a week. The clerk behind the counter mumbles sheepishly that yeah, we’re out of DayQuil — no, no idea when we might get more.  There are a lot more products that are kept behind glass, under lock-and-key – so that people just order their laundry detergent through Amazon now rather than track down a clerk to try and buy it in the store.

The covid streeteries — little patio outcroppings for bars and restaurants in what used to be on-street parking spaces — are nearly three years old now, and they’re starting to show their age. Here in Adams Morgan, the cafe tables are insulated from the street traffic by haphazardly arranged jersey barriers — ugly, brutalist blocks of concrete that were surely meant to just be temporary at first, but now seem awfully permanent. The city is awash in e-scooters, but they, too, are mostly broken and tossed in a heap on the sidewalk at random places. There’s just a lot to the city that seems like it was undertaken relatively recently and with good intentions, but there was never any plan for follow through, and now, post-pandemic, everyone’s too busy or too tired to do anything but just accept the crumbling status quo. It’s like the ethos of the poorly-designed, grossly inefficient, and routinely mocked H Street Streetcar caught on and became the city’s whole aesthetic.

The AdMo streeteries are showing their age.

I don’t mean to be quite so harsh. It’s just that .. it took a few years, but now I feel like a tourist here when I visit. Too much has changed. There are new murals everywhere (this city has always had such great murals). The cool concerts are all at The Anthem now — in that weird, slick, newly-built part of town I never had a reason to visit when I lived here. There are all sorts of new places that have meaning to the people who live here, but they don’t mean anything to me, and so by extension I necessarily think that the people who live here are doing it all wrong. Bars and restaurants I used to be fond of are long gone and have been replaced by establishments I’ve never heard of. Or in the case of Cobalt, the bar is closed and the building’s been gutted and ripped down to the studs to make way for condos that then never materialized. The gay bars in particular have kind of all gone bust. The good ones are mostly gone or hanging by a thread. The new ones feel .. forced, somehow. Not quite right, too full of newcomers. That’s probably an unfair characterization, but even the lifelong DC gays who truly love this city will tell you it hasn’t been the same since Town closed.

Still, though. Now that I’ve moved away, the more authentic parts of the city that are uniquely DC are more apparent to me when I visit. Like go-go music. It’s honestly everywhere, and I’m surprised how much I kinda like it. Like.. I never really noticed much before. It was always just in the background — someone was playing it on the bus, or blasting it from the MetroPCS store at 7th & Florida. But now I’m back and I notice things. I see old men just standing on a random street corner, and they put down a boombox and hit play on a go-go beat, and you can hear it all the way down the block and they just bop in place and sorta nod their head, staying right there while the rest of the city heads off to work. The city is so crowded. The place is full of coffee shops where people are crammed in at the little tables having $7 lattes, and on the same block there are guys peeing in alleys or smoking weed or very obviously doing drug deals. It’s the city of George Pelecanos novels. Of Marion Barry and S Street Rising. That terrible Chinese restaurant in Chinatown that’s located in the house where John Wilkes Booth plotted Lincoln’s assassination is still hanging on. It’s the city that belongs to lifetime residents who still wear/display their old NFL team merch from before the name change.

On the left, trains that never come. On the right, DC's mural game is still great.

I can be nostalgic about all of this now, and sort of embrace the tourist mindset when I’m here. Isn’t it .. romantic?? It’s so international — like an American version of being in Vienna or Berlin. Rough and gritty but also like — classier and more sophisticated than I am in all my plain midwesternness. It’s people from PG County and diplomats from all over the world and people speaking Amharic and a dozen Ethiopian restaurants all mixed together. But that warm fuzzy only lasts for so long, because I also know what the feeling was to actually live here — and it was more like .. suffocation. The feeling of being ground down. The feeling of needing relentless patience just to avoid going crazy. I was a grown adult with a full time job, but I always felt a little bit like a college student who was just play-acting my way through the city as though I knew how adult life was supposed to work.

I live in Chicago now, and I’m just .. calmer. I’m more myself. In some ways, it’s not as exciting, and it doesn’t push me as hard. The grocery store just has what I need. There’s no need for weird hacks or tricks to try and seek out that ONE RiteAid that weirdly almost always has this particular thing that’s usually sold out everywhere else. If i need a hair appointment, I can get one tomorrow, not five weeks from now. My bike doesn’t get stolen every six to 18 months. I no longer wait for the once-a-year notice from my landlord that my monthly rent is going to go up by $200 or maybe by $500. I have a car and there are places in the city where I can actually get it serviced instead of literally taking the day off work to drive 45 minutes to the suburbs just to find a JiffyLube because I don’t feel like I know enough to take my car to some weird, sketchy-looking independent shop up on Georgia Avenue. 

In other words – mostly, the thing I continually need to remind myself about living in DC is that there’s always an expectation the thing you’re trying to do is going to be significantly harder than you expect, there will be some kind of bureaucratic roadblock or some piece of it will fall apart for reasons completely beyond your control, and you’re just going to have to deal with it. That’s all the time.  Maybe all I’m saying here is that it’s an East Coast city.  It requires more work and more sacrifice than living in Chicago or St. Louis or Indianapolis or wherever.  Probably not as much sacrifice as living in New York, but that’s more a point of pride for New Yorkers than it is anything else.

Of course.. the flip side of this constant struggle was always the weird sense of accomplishment that came from not being undone by all of it.  Proximity to the best DC had to offer was, itself, enough to justify all the aggravation and anxiety.  Keeping my head above water and just having an apartment, making rent each month, and doing my job and getting out the door to work each morning – all of that was exciting and worthy of a sense of accomplishment.  But it was also limiting.  I wasn’t going to ever really do more than just the day-to-day.  Chicago has provided me space to pursue friendships and interests and ideas that.. frankly, I just don’t think I would have had in a city that took 100% of what I could give, all just to keep my own internal trains running on time. 

Logan Circle. Still my favorite DC spot.

Anyway. I have conflicting thoughts on all of this, in case that wasn’t obvious. DC is the city where I really became an adult.  It’s the city where I came out.  It’s the city where I met my husband, and where we came back on a special trip in 2020 to get engaged.  I know it’s weird to think about your late 20s to mid-30s as being your “formative” years, but .. that time was just so distinct for me and where my life was. President Obama, and the iPhone 4 and 5, and the internet before it became toxic, and jumbo slice, and happy hour that lasted until 2am, and an A/C that barely worked in 100 degree heat, and Grindr before the straights knew what Grindr was — it all just kinda melds together in my mind as DC. How can I possibly let that go? I can’t. It’s an essential piece of how I got to where I am now. I miss it. I always will.