When I visit Washington, D.C. I pay little attention to the monuments, memorials, and key government buildings. Having lived there for four years I am most interested in re-visiting the city's many neighborhoods. Each with their own history. Each often ignored by the tourists who are understandably in town to see the familiar sights.
The Metro - which many locals love to hate - I simply love. It has its own architecture. Its own story. It's the system that brings all the neighborhoods together and forces people who wouldn't normally have a reason to interact to see each other and acknowledge each other.
Like any city, Washington, D.C. has the out of the way places that are functional and largely ignored, but they make it all work.
The warehouse district in North East has slowly been transforming in recent years into a residential neighborhood that will change the character of the city for at least a generation. Here the old mixes with the new, but it seems the new will eventually take over, erasing the past, leaving only old signage to hint at what came before.
That hint of the past is important to a capital city that takes seriously its role as keeper of the nation's history.
Most of the Washington Americans are familiar with has been built up only in the last 150 years. Before it was a marble fortress it was an east coast city like any other with all the challenges present in an emerging nation.
Traces of that past are everywhere once you leave the part of town dominated by the National Mall, its museums, the Capitol and the White House. Beyond the monumental center the city continues to modernize in ways someone - some day - will look on as impossibly old fashioned.
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© Dean Pagani 2023
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© Dean Pagani 2023