I remember when I first started living in DC. People would ask me “What’s it like living in DC? Near the monuments? Going to the Smithsonian on your lunch break!” Sadly, I missed Sen. Bob Dole and Ben Stein in the Watergate Safeway and went to the Smithsonian probably 6 times in the first 3 years in DC. And I remember one stretch of time my sophomore year when, living 6 five blocks from the White House, I didn’t leave the 6 city blocks on which the main campus was situated for, oh, probably 4 months. Literally. Even with the metro station on campus. On the bright side, it was also my most structured and productive period at GW.
Then I moved to Adams Morgan, the Morg, for grad school. It was like living in a whole new city. The cosmopolitan neighborhood of DC (which, coincidentally enough, a friend and I had walked through a few years prior saying “Oh, wouldn’t it be nice to live there?” Three years later…I was). But, if I wasn’t living amongst the office buildings of DC (in Foggy Bottom…where GW is located) or traveling through those parts to get to campus or work (which I did living in Adams Morgan), I could have been living in any old city. It was still DC, but not everyone’s vision of DC.
East Capitol Street has changed all of that. I can’t go outside without seeing the Capitol down the street (unless I turn to the right). My commute brings me past Union Station, many of the Smithsonians, the US Capitol, the Supreme Court, the old townhouses of Capitol Hill. This is what I imagine people had in mind when they asked about what life was like living in DC.
