Blue, you are right about D.C., of course. I am perpetually hosting foreign visitors, and showing them the sights (which, for me, mean the general residential and business areas, rather than the "official" tourist sites around the Mall). They ALWAYS ooh and aah over how beautiful DC is. (Granted, I don't take them to Anacostia.)
When I was a student at Georgetown University's Institute of Languages and Linguistics, years ago, Connecticut Avenue was even nicer, if less "modern" in appearance. In those days, the Institute was housed in three old brownstones just south of Dupont Circle. They -- and many other similar brownstones, including the one I lived in -- subsequently fell victim to "the march of the killer boxes" up the Avenue. But even the "killer boxes" have their charms, I'll admit.
And when I first got married, I lived in an apartment above a barber-shop just across from the Columbia Hospital for Women on Pennsylvania Avenue, and every day I took the trolley to get to work at the Library of Congress. The barbershop is gone; so is the trolley; and the neighborhood, now called "Foggy Bottom," is too ritzy for the likes of me. But the Library of Congress is still standing -- and it has air-conditioning these days! Hurray!
D.C. has handled change well, I would say...
Joan
P.S. If I bop out of my house in my nightie to pick up the Sunday paper, my neighbors will see me. But what is nice about my neighbors is that they won't give a damn. <g> |
