URBAN LIVING

Please understand that I have always loved city life. I grew up in a city — well, back in South Dakota in those days, we thought of Pierre as a city, though it didn’t have quite 10,000 people and sometimes in the winter the wind would sweep the snow off the plains like a broom and pile it against the houses in long, hard drifts that no one could clear away till spring. But anyway, it was a complete place that I grew up in. Not a suburb, not an artificial, parasitic, pseudolocale, but a real, free-standing entity. A genuine location. A city.

Here at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, I have friends who don’t just live in the suburbs. They believe in the suburbs. Their eyes take on the slightly mad glaze of acolytes at the Temple of ChemLawn as they gather in the office and talk about their cul-de-sacs and their sport-utility vehicles and an intricate commuting dispute I haven’t quite mastered involving I-66, light rail, the Dulles Airport access road, toll booths, and the merge onto the 14th Street Bridge.

But my wife and I both went to college in Washington, and we were married here in the city as well, in the chapel at Georgetown after graduation. And though our suburban friends looked at us with the suddenly strained smiles of people who’ve just heard their neighbor at the church picnic mention that he’s thinking about taking up Satan worship, we held firm in our declaration that we wanted real urban life when we moved back to Washington almost two years ago.

First we tried the Georgetown neighborhood. I think I thought it would make me feel young again to live near campus. Mostly it made me feel old. And then we tried Mt. Pleasant, up above Adams-Morgan, between 16th Street and Rock Creek, on a cross-street called Park Road.

You know Park Road, don’t you, Mr. Mayor? It’s one of the neighborhood streets that have been torn up for a year now. A year. Think about that. For a year, we’ve lived on a corner, in a major American metropolis, with dirt roads on both sides. The big trucks come out once a week to dump a load of gravel. Then the little trucks come to haul it away. Then the big trucks come again. Then the little trucks. Most of the rest of the time, nothing happens. It’s true that last month the workmen did show up to pour some concrete. But a week later they took the jackhammers and tore it up again.

Early this summer, we received a notice that our water would be shut off on a Wednesday to fix the water main. It wasn’t. But the next Tuesday it was. And then the workmen couldn’t get the pipe fixed, but that was okay because for a day or two, we were told, we could get our water from a green plastic hose running up out of the manhole, along the gutter, down the sidewalk, across the yard, into the outside garden-hose faucet, and up — backwards through our pipes — to the kitchen sink. So we did get our water this way. For four weeks. I won’t tell you what happened with the natural-gas line the bulldozer gashed open; it would only make you want to move out to the suburbs.

Does no one complain that the little, triangular park at Mt. Pleasant Street and Park Road has been torn up on all three sides for a year? The children in the neighborhood have a game they play. They take the gray wooden planks the workmen left in the park three months ago and lay them across the holes the workmen dug four months ago. Then they balance on the planks, swaying and laughing and sometimes falling in. The holes are three feet deep and filled with green rainwater, breeding the angry mosquitoes that swarm up in the evenings. The wind sweeps the red dust of the local clay against the houses in long, hard drifts that no one can clear away.

Please save me. I’m being driven out — out to the land of the endless conversations about sport-utility vehicles and county assessments. The tract homes and the cul-de-sacs. The housing developments named after the features of the landscape destroyed to build them: Orchard Estates, Rolling Hills Park, Shady Groves. The churches constructed at that moment in 1971 when Bauhaus modernism had staged a hostile takeover of cinder-block functionalism. The chemical lawns and the gas barbecues. The swimming pools. The swimming pool cleaning equipment. The lawn furniture. Please, Mr. Mayor. Please finish working on my street.
 
Sincerely yours,

J. BOTTUM