Posted on 11/01/2022 9:57:42 AM PDT by bitt
I returned to Washington D.C. for the first time since moving to Florida. What I saw just BLOCKS from the White House left me in Shock. You won't believe this..
That’s frightening.
It wasn’t the government that threw the garbage in the streets, but it was a result of them failing to enforce codes and require behavior.
That’s a great story. I lived in Arlington from 1956 - 1966. It was a great place to grow up. Government wasn’t as huge as it would become. Arlington had a large military presence due to the Pentagon and Fort Myer. It tended to be more conservative than the other side of the Potomac.
We used to take field trips to Arlington Cemetery in elementary school. We had just come back from one such trip when our janitor stopped some of us and said “Did you little kids see the mansion house at the cemetery? (Arlington House, the Custis-Lee mansion). “My momma was one of Mrs Lee’s maids when she was a young woman”. He was obviously proud of this, and I being a Civil War buff at the age of 8 was very impressed.
Streetcars were running in DC when we first arrived and I had the chance to ride one before they tore up the tracks. Whittaker Chambers wrote about helping to build the streetcar line which is kind of interesting.
DC still had a white population outside of Georgetown but most were in the process of moving out, an apparent response to the Brown v Board of Education decision. People were voting with their feet and the surrounding suburbs grew.
Nobody is forced to live in DC. And Anacostia has been a rough area probably since day one.
From what I can tell DC was better off before Home Rule, back when Congress was in charge of it. But there were still impoverished areas even then. I remember riding through DC and seeing that the back wall had collapsed on some old apartment building and you could see the furniture still in the rooms.
Little connections, and personal experiences of US history like this are so wonderful. Definitely, Washington DC is (was?) the place for it. I left DC in the late 80s and only returned for visits. One could, even then, still get brief glimpses of its original roots, and small-town, Southern Charm. I imagine is completely gone now.
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